The End of Solitude [must read]

via txtmsg.blogtog.com

Got an extraordinary kick in the pants from William Deresiewicz’s article in The Chronicle titled “The End of Solitude: As everyone seeks more and broader connectivity, the still, small voice speaks only in silence.” He writes of how text messaging, myspace, facebook, and twitter have eliminated idleness, personal time, and self-reflection. We have forgotten how to be alone:

But we no longer live in the modernist city, and our great fear is not submersion by the mass but isolation from the herd. Urbanization gave way to suburbanization, and with it the universal threat of loneliness. What technologies of transportation exacerbated — we could live farther and farther apart — technologies of communication redressed — we could bring ourselves closer and closer together. Or at least, so we have imagined. The first of these technologies, the first simulacrum of proximity, was the telephone. “Reach out and touch someone.” But through the 70s and 80s, our isolation grew. Suburbs, sprawling ever farther, became exurbs. Families grew smaller or splintered apart, mothers left the home to work. The electronic hearth became the television in every room. Even in childhood, certainly in adolescence, we were each trapped inside our own cocoon. Soaring crime rates, and even more sharply escalating rates of moral panic, pulled children off the streets. The idea that you could go outside and run around the neighborhood with your friends, once unquestionable, has now become unthinkable. The child who grew up between the world wars as part of an extended family within a tight-knit urban community became the grandparent of a kid who sat alone in front of a big television, in a big house, on a big lot. We were lost in space.

Link to article

It’s part anecdotal, part philsophical, and 100 percent dead on.

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