We interact with people just as much as we always did. (Unless you’re the Unabomer, in which case you aren’t reading this.) We just don’t interact with people in immediate physical proximity the way we used to, and we don’t interact using the same tools as we formerly did – i.e., face to face.
Some will decry this, labeling it a “collapse of values” or a “deterioration of humanity” or whatever, as I gather you are, flood. I hesitate to buy into this, though, because I feel the human animal has enormous resiliency to change. Paradoxically, of course, the human animal, taken collectively, has a great fear of change; name any advance, any step forward in progress without an obvious downside, and you’ll have people lining up against it, merely because it’s different, and different is scary.
That said, I do think mass communication is having an impact on us. Consider our relationship to celebrities. We’ve always had well-known people and cults of fame; remember the fans lining up on the docks of New York to get the latest Dickens installment? Remember the old newspaper column, “What Babe Ruth Did Today”?
However, in today’s world, it’s slightly different, I think. Consider how concerned we all are about the Affleck/Lopez merger – I mean, marriage. Practically speaking, who gives a shit? And yet, these are people whose faces are writ large before us on the movie screen, or whose personalities are injected into our living rooms on a nightly basis. I believe this triggers some underlying bit of our software, recognition and familiarity or something, to the degree that, counter to rationality, we actually feel like we know these people. And not just facts (birthday, city of residence, etc.). No, their media appearance, I think, simulates the sort of interaction we get with people in our actual lives, and we are therefore deceived on a deep level.
But most of us, consciously, recognize we don’t really know these people. Just because we know about David Letterman’s troubles with Connecticut highway patrolmen doesn’t mean we’re going to be invited to his birthday party. A small number of people can’t make this distinction, which is where stalkers come from, but in general I don’t think it’s out of bounds to assert that at least some of our need for personal interaction can be supplanted and satisfied by this simulated version.
But I’ll go back to what Derleth said: The Internet provides a very different form of interaction, in that, even though these are just words on a screen, you know there’s an actual person behind them. You have no idea what I look like, or where I might have been when I wrote them (or as you read them now), but it’s an actual person with actual opinions and emotions and needs and everything else. It’s a two-way street, truly interactive, which is vastly different than the one-way flow of sludge that is everything you know about Larry King’s revolving marital door.
I’m also not saying, by the way, that there’s no possibility that this won’t have a negative impact in the long term. Certainly that chance exists. All I’m really saying is that I don’t fear change on the mere basis that it’s different, and that, as yet, I don’t see the collapse of civilization so many people are squawking about. It’s worth keeping an eye on, but there’s absolutely no reason to send everybody to battle stations, either.
