# Why do people use technology to avoid live contact when humans are by nature social animals? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [June 21, 2014, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-use-technology-to-avoid-live-contact-when-humans-are-by-nature-social-animals/691302 "2014-06-21T16:42:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 16
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2014, 11:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-use-technology-to-avoid-live-contact-when-humans-are-by-nature-social-animals/691302/16 "2014-06-21T23:14:30Z")
> [@Martian Bigfoot](#): > > For people walking around with their faces buried in their smartphones: **Artificial stimuli can be more powerful than natural ones, social contact included. Hook each person up to their personal opium pump, leave them to regulate their own dosage, and see how social they’ll be. Same thing.** I’m not sure if on-line “social” (if you can call it that) activity is more powerfully stimulating than IRL social activity. I kind of think the opposite, that it’s quite lame, _except_ that one can make up for that by spending endless hours doing it. That said, I also suspect that on-line “social” activity pings just enough of people’s “social needfulness receptors” that it sorta-kinda satisfies people’s social urges. Combine that with the relative physical ease of on-line “socializing”, vs the actual effort one must expend to physically get off one’s butt and get out there, along with the easy opportunity to spend endless hours at it – the result it, for a lot of people, that on-line “social” activity becomes the course of least resistance, and that’s what people end of doing. But I agree with **Martian Bigfoot** ’s analogy with drugs that bind to receptors and displace other more natural actions of those receptors, not always beneficially. [Here’s a post I wrote a while back](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=15214633&postcount=9) that I think is tangentially relevant; in particular, see the last paragraph there: > [@What religion or belief set is strong on symbols?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-religion-or-belief-set-is-strong-on-symbols/626489/9): > > There is evidence that other animals do this too, to a lesser extent. There have been all those animal-language experiments that taught some rudimentary language skills to chimps, gorillas, dolphins, sea lions, and parrots. There was one study I heard of with raccoons, who instinctively wash their food in rivers before eating. Some raccoons were taught to accept tokens for certain behaviors, which could later be exchanged for food. When they got the food, they washed it. But after a while, they began washing their tokens too. This is a non-human example of animals starting to treat their symbols like the real thing that those symbols stand for. (ETA: This came from a book called “How Animals Misbehave”, IIRC, but I don’t know the author off-hand. Maybe I can find it Real Soon Now.) --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-use-technology-to-avoid-live-contact-when-humans-are-by-nature-social-animals/691302)._