http://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/16/us/a-newer-lonelier-crowd-emerges-in-internet-study.html?pagewanted=1

In short, ''the more hours people use the Internet, the less time they spend with real human beings,'' said Norman Nie, a political scientist at Stanford University who was the principal investigator for the study.

Mr. Nie asserted that the Internet was creating a broad new wave of social isolation in the United States, raising the specter of an atomized world without human contact or emotion....


In the past Mr. Nie has been the author of studies on the decline of American involvement in political and community organizations. He said that while much of the public Internet debate had been focused on the invasion of privacy, little study had been done of the potential psychological and emotional impact of what he said would be more people ''home, alone and anonymous.''

Mr. Nie, a co-author of the study with Prof. Lutz Erbring of the Free University of Berlin, contended that there was no evidence that virtual communities would provide a substitute for traditional human relationships....


In August 1998 researchers at Carnegie Mellon University reported that people who spent even a few hours a week connected to the Internet experienced higher levels of depression and loneliness.

In contrast to the Carnegie Mellon study, which focused on psychological and emotional issues, the Stanford survey is an effort to provide a broad demographic picture of Internet use and its potential impact on society.

''No one is asking the obvious questions about what kind of world we are going to live in when the Internet becomes ubiquitous,'' Mr. Nie said.

''No one asked these questions with the advent of the automobile, which led to unplanned suburbanization, or with the rise of television, which led to the decline of our political parties.''

''We hope we can give society a chance to talk through some of these issues before the changes take place,'' he said....

''There are going to be millions of people with very minimal human interaction,'' he said. ''We're really in for some things that are potentially great freedoms but frightening in terms of long-term social interaction.''

...The internet could be the ultimate isolating technology that further reduces our participation in communities even more than did automobiles and television before it."

Email is like a slot machine:

...works on a principle of variable reinforcement schedule, which Tom Stafford, a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Sheffield, explained has been established as the way to train the strongest habits. "This means that rather than reward an action every time it is performed, you reward it sometimes, but not in a predictable way. So with email, , usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there's something wonderful-an invite out, or maybe some juicy gossip-and I get a reward."

..."When we log in to our email server," writes Richard DeGrandpre in Digitopia, "the expectation of finding new mail negates any possible excitement or surprise; if there's no new mail, we're disappointed," So we check it more and more. As the condition progresses, sufferers feel increasingly isolated from society, become argumentative, and fall into depression... Early sufferers, Block says, tended to be highly educated, socially awkward men, but now more and more they are middle-aged women who are either at home alone or wokring."

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Memory:

A group of twentysomethings were asked to sort a deck of cards-once in silence, a second time while listening to randomly selected sounds in search of specific tones. "The subjects' brains coped with the additional task by shifting responsibility from the hippocampus-which stores and recalls information-to the striatum," Kirn explained, "which takes care of rote, repetitive activities. Thanks to this switch, the subjects managed to sort the cards just as well with the musical distraction-but they had a much harder time remembering what, exactly, they'd been sorting once the experiment was over."

I multitask and I don't remember very well. The reason why people don't remember as well when they get older is that they're multitasking much more so. The multitasking they're doing is constantly remembering the farther past, thus not focusing on the present so much. It's necessary to do this to some extent. If you didn't, if the past is never remembered, what point was there in living it?

not only is it tremendously time consuming but perhaps not all that fulfilling....
In her coming book, "Alone Together"....
wasn't merely a distraction, but it was really confusing him about who he was....

"Alone Together". Post-industrial living. Awful. But people do still desire some aspects of how they once lived. A world where there was far more face to face interaction. Where your house wasn't a fortress and you didn't even know your neighbors. Where instead there was some meaningful connection and you interacted on a daily basis with the people whom live around you. A world where you felt connected to both nature and other people. Facebook and some other things online reveal this desire in people to have such a connection with others. But trying to get it there is like already being dead.

But, it's a good way to keep in touch with all the people that don't live close?

Industrialized society again. Always moving. And walled away in your fortress. TV, internet, car, no one you work with even lives anywhere near you.

What reason is there for me to speak to anyone ever?

Go to work. Slap on a smile. Go home. I don't exist.

...Van Gogh's unoccupired chairs pay respect to a tendency to avoid represtentation of the human figure. Gauguin is there, seated in his armchair, even if we cannot see him - according to this formula.

The breat in the two artists' friendship had become inevitable. When Gauguin decided to leave, he left the ruins of van Gogh's dreams of an artists' community in the South behind. "As you know, I have always considered it idiotic that painters live alone. It is always a loss if one is left to one's own devices", van Gogh had written to his brother, describing his longing for solidarity amongst painters.

"....sooner there will be nothing left... but empty chairs."

"In the 19th century there was an altogether new type of suffering artist: the lonely, lost, despairing artist on the brink of insanity...

"The 19th century was the inhuman century par excellence; the triumph of technology mechanized our lives totally, rendering us stupid; the worship of Mammon has irredemably impoverished mankind, without exception; and a world without God is not only the least moral but als othe least comfortable that can be conceived. As he enters the Present, modern man reaches the inmost circle of hell along his absurd and necessary path of suffering."- Egon Friedell

From R.D. Laing's Knots. Something along the lines of because the person can't respect themselves, they can't respect anyone else who treats them with respect....

Anyone who's unhappy in this society I imagine may in some way not respect themselves... Eventually anyway, because they will reach the point where as opposed to believing it's others fault, that it's the inherent insanity of how the whole society is structured, they will start blaming themselves at least to some extent. Eventually seeing the fault as being their own, and thus feeling themselves to be failures. And then quickly on to not respecting themselves. And thus anyone who rants and raves about all the negative aspects of this society is likely to end up looking like a massive hypocrite. In that if you reach out to them, give them something other than more of the massive indifference which is the norm, they most likely won't be able to give anything at all in return.

Because you respect them and they don't respect themselves and thus they don't respect you... And because to actually break free of such social norms takes strength. And I don't know really. Truthfully it's beyond me. It's not a way I'd act.

More truthfully: In face to face interactions no one really dares to be so honest about the depth of the negative feelings they have, with respect to what this world is doing to them. A ton take prozac, etc. Which strongly indicates their negative feelings run deep. But in face to face such things certainly remain hidden. Short of it being someone you're having sex with.

On the internet a very few here and there will attempt more honesty about such negative feelings.

But, this honesty I guess is more than made up for by all that is lost in this medium. So much that would otherwise be imparted to get the whole picture is lost. And without that which is lost, it is perhaps hopeless and futile to even attempt to understand what in the world really is going on with any individual person.

Someone said the internet isn't real. Well, in face to face interactions no one is real either. The internet was hopefully a way to uncover the parts hidden in the endless banal and pointless face to face interactions where people are doing nothing more than having ritualistic conversations the goals of which are highly crude. Not much more than sniffing each other's ass. The smile to say I'm not a threat, etc.

In face to face interactions you get 10% of the truth. On the internet the hope is that some part of the other 90% will peek through.

That's been my hope anyway.

And it certainly has peeked through at times.

And what has mostly peeked through is incredibly ugly.

But still what we have in online interactions amounts to about 3% of the truth as opposed to 10% generally speaking in face to face where you still can get an idea about all that the person is withholding...

Maybe some of that 3% is different from what is received in a face to face. (Of course such percentages varying widely.) But more and more, this isn't even the case. And less and less is there any reason to bother with the internet. And more and more it seems that the main thing being revealed is that some people are so full of fear that they're afraid to interact by more traditional means...

I'm not trying to call anyone out. This is just how it seems based on a decade of experience. Because of this, among other reasons, I'm reticent to be online. Even this bit of typing, I would have much prefered to be reading a book with the little bit of time I have before work.

Now I've only got 30 minutes to read. And I still have to go make my daily attempt at a one arm chinup, etc.