Every so often we collaborate with partners on articles and today is one of those occasions. Here is a piece about the modern day world and how the internet plays an important part in our lives. It kinda hits home. I hope you enjoy…
I’m not the most social of people, let’s get that one out of the way. While I enjoy the company of others, I’m most certainly not averse to my own company – and without the internet, I must admit, I might have gotten all to used to my own company.
It is my lifeline to friends, the framework for me to work closer to understanding exactly what I want in life, and the canvas on which this blog sits; it is an incredibly important part of my life, as it is with everyone’s, but why? What has changed since the internet came into being, in people, that made it so instrumentally important? I think it’s largely to do with sociability.
Studies such as the one linked above suggest that people are becoming, in some cases, less sociable as a result of the internet. I counter this, with the thought that maybe what it means to be sociable has changed. Let’s have a look at what the internet offers in these terms.
The obvious candidates for increased sociability are the Facebooks, WhatsApps and skypes of the world, that reach over oceans and country borders, giving voices to millions of people who might not have had it before. The reach is outstanding. But these we know about. What about other kinds of interactivity?
The ever-increasing, exponential popularity of online, interactive games is a particularly illuminating facet of this new-social phenomenon. With the arrival of online gaming sites such as www.casinosagafans.com, social consciousness makes a very deliberate move from the literal world to this internet world, taking part in a shared interactive experience and ultimately socially benefiting from it, without tangible communication! There is a community, and you are voicelessly interacting within that community, sharing experiences not with language or communication but by a sort of interweb-osmosis.
What I mean to say is that with the advent of the internet and this new kind of social interactivity, the way we go about sociability in the first place is fundamentally altered. In some cases dsciability is mapped closer to the act of watching a film in a cinema than the conversations before or after: shared experience without necessary communication! Of course, this is a small drop in a big ocean of ultra-tangible communication, and not the complete and utter truth – indeed the world would be a lot sadder if it was the absolute case. But the mistake made when discussing our relationship with the internet, beyond our extended communicative reach to friends and family around the world thanks to Skype and Facebook, is the assumption that we are becoming more lonely, more introverted. And it couldn’t be further from the truth.
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