Did invention damage our social society? (introvert, college, thoughts, generation)

[Coldjensens]

Peope are no longer social in the way they were even 50 or 60 years ago. We no longer live in houses oriented towards the outside world with front porches where we can sit and greet people walking by (who walks by anyway?). Instead we have inside oriented homes. Usually we just have a big garage door as the front of or houses. Working adults pull up to the electronically opening garage, pull in, and go from teh car seat to the couch. Other than mowing the lawn many people never go outside their house. (In many places they do not even mow their lawn - immigrants do it for them). People do not hang out and talk much, kids no longer engage in pick up sports games or just go hunt each other in the woods. Neighbors do not know each other at all, sometimes even next door neighbors have never met despite being neighbors for 20 years. What happened?

I think part of it is our wonderful inventions. Probably air conditioning and television are the primary cause. I have lived in places where the power went out on a hot day and people all moved outside and met many of their neighbors for the first time. Kids from across the street who had never said hello to us or to our kids asked if they could jump in our pool to cool off. People started grouping together, talking, barbequing Suddenly things were social. It was wonderful.

When the power came back on it all ended.

Are we just wired to stay away from each other and our inventions allow us to do what we prefer, or do our inventions some how cause us to remove ourselves from others when we would prefer to socialize?

[plmokn]

Originally Posted by Coldjensens

Are we just wired to stay away from each other and our inventions allow us to do what we prefer, or do our inventions some how cause us to remove ourselves from others when we would prefer to socialize?

Are we just wired to stay away from each other Probably not

inventions allow us to do what we prefer YES

do our inventions some how cause us to remove ourselves from others when we would prefer to socialize? Probably not

Also, people do socialize, on the internet, at work, at their kids' activities, at their own activities and yes, with neighbors.

[Billy_J]

I saw a new one the other day at the lake...

"Text or Swim"!

They could not decide if they wanted to text on their cell phone or swim in the water. And being as they could not take their cell phones into the water with them, they were forced to leave them behind if they wanted to swim!

Oh the humanity!

[cloven]

Our tools (inventive technology) and our selves are involved in an interdependent, interactive modification feedback mechanism.
We change our tools to suit us, then we use our tools which in turn change us, and so on, over & over, back & forth.

I found much worthwhile exploration of these issues in
Jennifer Michael Hecht's "The Happiness Myth: The Historical Antidote to What isn't Working Today" (2007)

Originally Posted by book excerpt

pg.163:
"Freedom from the midlevel won out. It was in the interests of democracy and capitalism. One's own nuclear family became a mini-utopia where one expected to live most of one's affective life, with a constant eye on the nation at large. Our liberators left us in the lurch. They did not know that without mandatory associations it would be hard to keep up any associations at all. The buzz of young democracy faded in the early nineteenth century as ad hoc task-oriented community projects ended and increasingly were not replaced."

Originally Posted by book excerpt

pg.165:
"For most people, throughout most of history, there was no real choice. In the second half of the twentieth century, for many people, staying at home became comfortable and sufficiently distracting. Many studies have shown that human beings do better when they have a lot of friends and family that they see a bunch of times a year. Yet when every family in town has a television and a computer, and perhaps even every person in every family has a television and a computer, people get isolated."

Originally Posted by book excerpt

pg.167
"Television, then, destroys community by giving people something else to do with their free time, but it also creates a specialized common subject matter for an extremely heterodox culture."

In other words, the things we treasure as freedoms also become our burdens, inadvertently & paradoxically.
For instance, TV isolates us-yet can provide a common experience for people to bond over "at the watercooler".

[Tracysherm]

I don't think technology is necessarily making us less social, but it changes who we can and do socialize with, so neighbors become less important.

I think people used to socialize more with neighbors because "they were there." You ended up socializing with the people you're geographically close to. Maybe you had friends from the office and you'd get together on weekends sometimes. But people with a need to socialize would naturally walk out their front door to find that contact. You might end up marrying the girl or boy down the street.

Nowadays, it much easier to "socialize" with people who aren't even geographically close. Sure, in the olden days you would still talk on the phone with a friend or relative who moved far away. Or we can now drive to socialize with friends or family who might live 20 minutes or an hour away. Cars and cheap fuel made that possible.

In the past, if you knew someone who lived far away, it was because they used to live close to you, and one of you moved away. Today, you can meet new people and become friends, and they could be hundreds, even thousands of miles away or even across the globe.

So people who feel a need for social contact can now have that contact with people they choose, even if very far away. Now you can be long distance friends with people with whom you have a lot in common. When we relied on geography, we were stuck socializing with people who might not have been our first choice (family and neighbors). You might have wanted a friend who shared your esoteric hobby or interest, but if none of your neighbors or relatives did, oh well.

So today if we're all so busy with work, etc, and we have maybe one or two hours in which to socialize, we might choose to communicate online with our buddy 500 miles away who has the same hobby, instead of going to visit the neighbor with whom we have nothing in common but a fence.

I think that those of us without much need for socializing (loners, introverts) are still not going to socialize very much. But the small amount of time we devote to socializing is better spent in "quality" communication about subjects we are very interested in. That's more likely to happen with people we've met who are far away and not down the block.

People who were social in the past will still be social today, but just through other means, not just in-person. People who didn't like to socialize much in the past still don't socialize much today.

I do think that the changes in technology have been good for us introverts--now it's not seen as "weird" when I stay in my house on weekends and I'm not out hanging out in the neighborhood. No one else is hanging out either. But then again, where my sister lives, all the neighbors hang out together all the time. They all have kids who play together and go to school together. So if a loner like me lived in that neighborhood, I'd probably still seem to be an oddball--who's that strange lady who doesn't answer her door and never seems to go out except for work?

[MOKAN]

Originally Posted by Coldjensens

Peope are no longer social in the way they were even 50 or 60 years ago. We no longer live in houses oriented towards the outside world with front porches where we can sit and greet people walking by (who walks by anyway?). Instead we have inside oriented homes. Usually we just have a big garage door as the front of or houses. Working adults pull up to the electronically opening garage, pull in, and go from teh car seat to the couch....when we would prefer to socialize?

I think inventions are part of it, but I think cultural differences are largely to blame. People are so transient nowadays and put less value on individual people or geography. Our population isn't as interested in building and being part of geographically-based communities, or being in community with others different from themselves. Instead, they create and are a part of very private circles of friends and acquaintances that don't have much to do with neighborhood-level geography. The "throwaway culture" isn't just limited to material things. The worst offenders can up and move themselves and their kids to other cities with the blink of an eye. It's said these folks have good social and interpersonal skills, and I think they do to an extent, hence how they can be so transient. However, I think they are spread thin at the expense of having relationships that are deep. It's like they can master social and interpersonal skills to a certain level and live with that, but they just lack the depth people who are more community-oriented have, like that used to be more widespread. This stuff may have always been more true for the cultural middle class, and I think our society has transitioned culturally from being working-class dominated to middle-class dominated, and I think that is what the difference ultimately boils down to. The movie "Sweet Home Alabama" kind of gives an example of extreme ends of the social style I'm trying to articulate. Another thing is so many people are going to college these days. Whereas people used to just go to high school, which is at the neghborhood level, they now go to college, which puts them in touch with a regional level, and think that plays a role in the differenece between today's society and that of yesterday's. I'm just throwing stuff out there though. I could be way off. But I think there's a cultural aspect to why things are the way they are, besides anything having to do with inventions.

[mordant]

Originally Posted by Coldjensens

We no longer live in houses oriented towards the outside world with front porches where we can sit and greet people walking by (who walks by anyway?).

I just built a new home in a community where all the single family homes have front porches; in fact, they are Victorian-style, with those driveways consisting of two concrete tire tracks with grass between them. The garage is detached and in back. So take heart, there are still communities, even new ones, with front porches ;-)

These homes were built to match the rest of the nearby community which is older, so a lot of them have front porches as well. I notice however that many of them are screened in and/or the lot is fronted by privacy bushes / trees. People's homes have always been their refuges and a place of privacy. I also note that many people who walk by simply carry a personal zone of privacy with them, by being lost in their thoughts or jacked into an iPod -- and that's fine, walking is many people's meditation practice whether they think of it that way or not.

I believe that much of the neighborhood cohesiveness of yesteryear was enabled by the homogenous nature or society. As society became more diverse, social cohesion moved from the neighborhood to the workplace and churches; then at least partly to the Internet -- all of these are real or virtual places where one can hang out in bubbles of "right thinking" people who belong to "our" group. But I think now it's coming full circle, as society becomes more truly inclusive and egalitarian, it's not discomfiting to know your neighbors, even if they might be different colors, sexual orientations, or political persuasions ... and we might start those neighborhood conversations up again.

Originally Posted by ATTC

Are we just wired to stay away from each other and our inventions allow us to do what we prefer, or do our inventions some how cause us to remove ourselves from others when we would prefer to socialize?

Inventions don't succeed unless there's a market for them. I think that people follow the path of least resistance.

The real problem in the US I think is that we live to work rather than the other way around. We come home exhausted and what little life-force we have left must go to our families and whatever other impositions we can't escape, like volunteering at church. Everything else evolves to hold the world at bay so we can have our daily five minutes to ourselves.

We are definitely social creatures but we have come to treat socializing as a reward for hard work well executed, rather than hard work well executed as a means to sustain our social lives as something inherently central and important. We confuse leisure with idleness and are suspicious of people enjoying life too much. Part of that is our rugged individualist, puritanical mindset.

When we quit making life something we need to escape from, we'll quit hiding from it.

[el_marto]

technology created it in the first place.

[thunderkat59]

I have had this conversation with people many times.
I have a long boring version of it, but for the sake of sanity, I will just give the short boring version . . .
I believe becoming an autocentric society has hurt us tremendously. I believe those ramifications manifest themselves in areas we might not think they do, but over time, they have been many and wide spread. Recently, it's the internet and oxymoronically named "social networking". Both have their own specific sets of issues, but the one that is common between them is the anonymity they both allow for an individual to be hostile at will for any reason ~ sort of bypassing the human element. Seems harmless, cursing at someone from a car, or calling them a name on the internet, but when people do this en masse, repeatedly, thereby becoming a norm of sorts, there is an insidious negative devaluation of our society. What qualified as "mean" a generation ago is status quo, today. So yes, there is a human cost for the conveniences we have come to enjoy and expect

[cloven]

Originally Posted by thunderkat59

Recently, it's the internet and oxymoronically named "social networking". Both have their own specific sets of issues, but the one that is common between them is the anonymity they both allow for an individual to be hostile at will for any reason ~ sort of bypassing the human element. Seems harmless, cursing at someone from a car, or calling them a name on the internet, but when people do this en masse, repeatedly, thereby becoming a norm of sorts, there is an insidious negative devaluation of our society. What qualified as "mean" a generation ago is status quo, today. So yes, there is a human cost for the conveniences we have come to enjoy and expect

Agree with what you're saying^, it makes me think of these lines from a book I just finished reading,
“Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other” by Sherry Turkle (2011):

Originally Posted by book excerpts

“And by detaching words from the person uttering them, it can encourage a coarsening of response.”
“These days, on social networks, we see fights that escalate for no apparent reason except that there is no physical presence to exert a modulating force.”
“Freed from the face-to-face, some people develop an Internet-specific road rage.”

The freedom & technology to converse with strangers via the internet, with such ease & visibility, is a double-edged sword.