Technology, Loneliness and Culture
There are many, many posts and articles about why we feel lonelier in an age where we can connect with so many people in so many places at any time. Most, if not all, focus on various psychological aspects. They’re not wrong. They just focus on one thing. That is, you. or perhaps, me. The singular. Perhaps because most of the articles we see are being written by professionals in WEIRD countries. So that means more of a focus on the singular. That’s okay. It’s valid. But what we might also consider is a singular word with a plurality of meaning that is also part of why we feel lonely in a hyper-connected world. Culture.
Let’s start at the macro level of cultural types in our world today; type 1 and 2 cultures. A Type 1 culture is very much about “me” and a type 2 culture is all about “we”. America is, and not to be stereotypical, the alpha of the type 1 culture and Asian, Nordic, African and Latin American and some European are type 2. Both macro-cultures adopt, and adapt to, technologies in different ways through different preferences. Neither is wrong or right. It’s just the way they are.
Also, culture is the knowledge we use to navigate our daily lives. Culture is the survival mechanism humans chose many thousands of years ago. Other animals chose genetics. Such as growing thicker fir in colder climates. We just took their fur and then taught others in our groups to do the same.
Culture enables us to work together. Language is a technology of culture. It was and is, crucial to our species survival. We’ve always been innovating on methods of communication. Language, writing, music, printing press, radio, telephone and then we started combining them, making them digital. And connecting the world. It’s a bit ironic that this is something we feel we need to do and we’ve advanced it to where it is today.
But the very same technologies that enable us to connect take us away from our cultures, not just one another. By this I mean the cultural activities by which we navigate our world; weddings, funerals, the quinceañera in Mexican culture, Bar Mitzvah in Judaism, Seijin-no-Hi in Japan, holidays like Christmas and Eid al-Fitr, traditional clothing. It is these wonderful cultural elements that builds kinship bonds with family, friends and community.
Key to these various cultural activities is coming together, touching, seeing expressions on faces, hearing the sounds that accompany these activities. This is hard to replicate in a digital world. It is a limitation of Virtual Reality as what ever happens in a VR world, our brains know, inherently, that it is all just a simulation. Over 90% of human communication is non-verbal.
When we participate in various cultural activities in the culture in which we’ve grown up in, or come to adopt and live in, they reinforce our connections and bonds with one another through experience. It is the totality of that real-world experience that is impossible in a digital world. It cannot even be replicated in a metaverse.
Perhaps the greatest evidence of how we need real-world connections, not just one-on-one, but as groups, was the pandemic. We all spent a lot of time in the digital world. Every chance we had to come together, we did it with ferocious abandon. As we slip off our masks, shake hands and hug again, we do it with much deeper meaning. None of this can be replicated in a digital world, in Virtual Reality.
I’ve been studying online communities and cultures for well over a decade, for marketing research and public policy. Even as social media companies have tried to manipulate our behaviours to spend more time online and have groups engage more, they are always limited. Online groups a very amorphous and rarely stable.
Check any Reddit forum or other forums. One of the reasons moderators are needed, beyond abusive behaviour monitoring, is keeping people on topic. In every online forum, there is always a channel set up for “general discussion.” This is a reflection of what we do as humans when we come together. A common social behaviour, part of almost all cultures in both Type 1 and 2, is socializing and catching up before the meeting/activity gets underway. We check in with one another.
The psychological reasons for feeling lonely within the digital world, I believe, stem from our basic survival mechanism of culture. Eventually, decades from now, perhaps centuries, we may adapt to living in two worlds simultaneously and not feel as much loneliness. But such adaptations mean messing with the hard coding in our brains. We have evolved as social beings, it is the genetic part of our adaptation.
