Giving Up What’s Real For The Meaningless

We are losing touch with one another. We are immersing ourselves in an electronic, remote world, leaving behind the intimate world that nurtures family, friendships, and our communities.
“Before smart phones and social media, we experienced the intimate world separately from the remote world,” Arnold Kling, who has a doctoral degree in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology writes. “The intimate world is your family, friends, and coworkers. The remote world is celebrities, politicians, and other famous people.”
It is also a world of acquaintances, one of obsessive entertainment and meaningless fleeting interactions.
When Kling was growing up, he says his contacts “with the remote world was through television and magazines. These media gave us the sense that famous people lived apart from the rest of us.”
People in our “intimate world live with us and were like us,” Kling writes. “They were not on display. The smartphone and social media have changed that. On our little screens, celebrities act like our friends, and our friends act like celebrities.” We create fictitious portraits of ourselves online with none of our contacts knowing us and without us knowing them.
“Online connectivity enables individuals to forge tribes with ideological allies across the world while paradoxically spending more time in solitude,” he writes. People become distant from friends, family, and their community. Their commitment to these real-world connections becomes weaker.
 “Social media has become our primary point of social contact. Status is now acquired in digital popularity – likes, retweets and followers. And even if others dislike my tweets, my actual behavior remains invisible,” Kling writes.
He says this decline in “face-to-face interaction has ruptured both local and national boundaries.”
“During recent human history, ideological persuasion has operated at two levels. Within villages, social conformity was maintained through local surveillance - we sought the approval of neighbors and relatives who monitored our conduct,” Kling writes.
Our sources of information, news from a relatively few TV stations, through newspapers, radio, and magazines, were common and, for the most part, created a world, society, and government that we all felt some connection to in our shared lives.
This social conformity created a check on behavior that encouraged people to be civil with one another. It encouraged civility in public settings. It motivated them to think about maintaining their property out of concern for what their neighborhoods might think of them if their yard had junk spread around and vehicles parked on it.
The internet destroyed that shared sense of reality, our common bonds, our empathy and compassion for one another, and respect for our neighbors.
Today, we “attach ourselves to an online community, where we escape from having an identity and obligations that might otherwise come from the world of our friends, family, and coworkers,” Dr Alice Evans is a social scientist at King’s College London.
Considering how polarizing, angry, and intolerant our society is becoming, we must find ways to nurture in-person contact for us to be physically, socially, and mentally healthy – and restore that sense of identity and obligation to a greater good.
“In the physical world, we remain present even when we’re quiet,” Kling writes. “In the virtual world, we don’t. To shut up, even briefly, is to disappear. To confirm our existence, we have to keep posting. We have to keep repeating Here I am!” And that addiction to keep posting separates us from family, friends, and society.
There is a depth in sharing quiet times. Sitting silently with your thoughts but next to a loved one or friend.  It is a true test of acceptance and comfort with one another. There is shared presence that builds depth. It is shattered and weakened when those two people sit on their phones, minds distracted, the relationship ignored, and the connection severed.
“We communicate best when we communicate thoughtfully and judiciously, when we pause to listen when we don’t rush to make snap judgments or to react with an imprudent message,” Kling writes. Online life is fast, and we react, at times, without consideration.
“If we’re going to temper the ill effects of social media, we’re going to have to back away from the screen and reacquaint ourselves with the intimate art of real conversation. We’re going to need to spend less time broadcasting and more time talking,” he says.
As we immerse ourselves in the remote world, Kling says a disturbing trend takes root in our society. People seek to work from home rather than with coworkers. They stop attending church services. They participate less in community events. They ignore social responsibilities. Marriage rates fall. There are fewer families and more individuals.
People are living lonelier lives, finding it more difficult to find that person who makes them happy and fulfilled – because we become resistant to those who are a little different from us or don’t give us as many “likes” as our ego requires. They intrude on our insecure individuality.
Our society is becoming more brittle, he writes. Fears strengthen animosities. We become less tolerant when we don’t participate in our community with those different from us.
Kling offers a recommendation that fits right in with the strengths of our rural communities.
“I believe we need to find ways to regenerate the intimate world. If we look around, the healthiest, happiest people tend to be connected with another as families, neighbors, and religious adherents,” he says.
People who participate in community events, attend high school sports events and musical concerts, and join groups working together for a common purpose in the community have the most rewarding lives.
“Society is formed and sustained through acts of communication — through people talking with each other — and that simple fact has led us to see communication as a powerful moral force in human affairs,” author Nicholas Carr writes. We are losing our ability to communicate with one another.