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You know, there are a few interesting points in this piece, but they're completely drowned out by the OMG EVIL TECHNOLOGY!! nonsense, not to mention the reeking hypocrisy. (Seriously: You're going to use a video hosting site and Skype interviewing to try to make a point about how mediated communication is dehumanizing us?)
For the record, there is one truth in the hand-wringing about technology and human interaction: Many of us have less physical contact with other people these days, and that does make a difference. Skin-to-skin contact has major physiological benefits, and it's important for us to get a lot of it. Long-distance contact, regardless of whether that happens through old-fashioned snail-mail letters or more-modern means of communicating with people who aren't in the same room, is not enough on its own.
That aside, it's absolutely preposterous to suggest that people are somehow dehumanizing others merely because we have more-efficient means of communicating than we have before. In fact, I'd argue that the reverse is true.
( Geography != Community )
People who are bound to the idea that DNA or zip code is not just enough of a social commonality in itself, but a preferable one have told me that there's something wrong with me because I don't socialize with my relatives and don't really know my neighbors, and yet spend a great deal of time communicating online with people who live across the country or on the other side of the equator or Prime Meridian. Me? I wonder what's wrong with people who are so afraid of interacting with people unlike themselves that they're terrified to venture into online socialization.
Don't get me wrong: I'm a big fan of in-person socialization. Hell, I'm an enormous cuddle slut. And I do lament that time, distance and scheduling make it difficult to go hug the people I love regularly. There are times I wish I could teleport my entire flist into my living room so I can glomph them for real instead of just with words. But there's no way I'd give up the opportunity to have known these people at all just because I was busy trying to make connections with locals with whom I otherwise have nothing in common.
For the record, there is one truth in the hand-wringing about technology and human interaction: Many of us have less physical contact with other people these days, and that does make a difference. Skin-to-skin contact has major physiological benefits, and it's important for us to get a lot of it. Long-distance contact, regardless of whether that happens through old-fashioned snail-mail letters or more-modern means of communicating with people who aren't in the same room, is not enough on its own.
That aside, it's absolutely preposterous to suggest that people are somehow dehumanizing others merely because we have more-efficient means of communicating than we have before. In fact, I'd argue that the reverse is true.
( Geography != Community )
People who are bound to the idea that DNA or zip code is not just enough of a social commonality in itself, but a preferable one have told me that there's something wrong with me because I don't socialize with my relatives and don't really know my neighbors, and yet spend a great deal of time communicating online with people who live across the country or on the other side of the equator or Prime Meridian. Me? I wonder what's wrong with people who are so afraid of interacting with people unlike themselves that they're terrified to venture into online socialization.
Don't get me wrong: I'm a big fan of in-person socialization. Hell, I'm an enormous cuddle slut. And I do lament that time, distance and scheduling make it difficult to go hug the people I love regularly. There are times I wish I could teleport my entire flist into my living room so I can glomph them for real instead of just with words. But there's no way I'd give up the opportunity to have known these people at all just because I was busy trying to make connections with locals with whom I otherwise have nothing in common.
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