A Connection Is Not the Same Thing As a Bond
In the '90s, I remember the internet as a place where I met people full of possibilities. From the first blinking cursor on a black screen of my friend's dad's computer (he was a rocket scientist and had early access to the internet) to a guy whose screen name was Neuromancer78, to AOL chat rooms that led to meetings with a nice Chinese American boy named Hai at Six Flags after high school. We won't even talk about the failed double date with Ronnie and Lonnie at Red Lobster (oh, AOL...). It was a place of love letters, a place of console, a place of comfort—but my point is that it was not the only place. When I talked to people on the internet, I knew they were real people and I often ended up meeting them in real life.
The internet has now become a substitute for real life, and by extension internet-on-the-phone. What I find somewhat hilarious about this is that I once hated talking to people on the phone. It made me grit my teeth. I also would much rather have a text conversation. But after years and years of texting and emails, I would take a phone call over typing almost any day. I have grown tired of possible miscommunications and weighed and measured speech.
You may have seen this article from last month that starts out talking about Yvette Vickers, a former Playboy playmate whose body lay in her home for almost a year, mummified by a still-running heater. It's one of those real-life tragedies that begs to become a warning told to children by their protective mothers. The mummified woman who only talked to online people. Whose death went unnoticed in the absence of living, breathing, in-person people. People not made out of pictures and typed words.
Overconsumption of the online world breeds loneliness, and not just in our minds:
JOHN CACIOPPO, THE director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, is the world’s leading expert on loneliness. In his landmark book, Loneliness, released in 2008, he revealed just how profoundly the epidemic of loneliness is affecting the basic functions of human physiology. He found higher levels of epinephrine, the stress hormone, in the morning urine of lonely people. Loneliness burrows deep: “When we drew blood from our older adults and analyzed their white cells,” he writes, “we found that loneliness somehow penetrated the deepest recesses of the cell to alter the way genes were being expressed.” Loneliness affects not only the brain, then, but the basic process of DNA transcription. When you are lonely, your whole body is lonely.
I've long looked at the internet as a place of exposure, a place to find interesting stories, information, and people. But I've tried to treat it as a jumping-off point to further engagement, or a deepening of relationships. Since I got off facebook, I've mostly gotten two reactions from people: "Good for you. I wish I could get off of it," or "You know, you could just not go to the site as often. You don't have to leave completely." Which is true of course, in theory. I'm someone prone to distraction and procrastination. So it's prime opportunity for me when there are other things that need doing.
So how do we keep the online world as a jumping-off point? My brother met his wife on a social-networking site, before facebook was big. One of my good friends is a person I met during the madness of MFA applications on a blog where people came to vent about the process and exchange information about schools and manuscripts. My friend Joanna had been talking to a guy for seven years online before they met in person and started dating. Now they're married and have a kid. We are all still real, behind these pages and pictures. Everyone in need of validation, whether it's from a Like, a text, or a voice on the other end of the line. How quickly we've ended up in this place where we'd rather press Send than drive. Post to a "wall" rather than walk down a street together. Just think how many walls there are. Shouldn't we be scaling them?