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posted by martyb on Friday June 19 2020, @09:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the only-the-lonely-can-play-♫♫ dept.

Tech and social media are making us feel lonelier than ever:

You've had a social day. Two hundred Facebook friends posted birthday messages, your video of Mr. Meow shredding the toilet paper stash got dozens of retweets, and all the compliments on your latest Instagram selfie have you strutting with an extra swagger. Still, you can't help but notice an ache that can only be described as loneliness.

That we feel this way even when hyperconnected might seem like a contradiction. But the facts are clear: Constant virtual connections can often amplify the feeling of loneliness.

"Internet-related technologies are great at giving us the perception of connectedness," says Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, a Stanford University psychiatrist who's written about the intersection of psychology and tech. The truth, he says, is the time and energy spent on social media's countless connections may be happening at the expense of more rooted, genuinely supportive and truly close relationships.

If virtual socializing cannot substitute for the real thing, will social media prove out to be nothing more than a fad of the late 20th and early 21st centuries?


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  • (Score: 3, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @02:23PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @02:23PM (#1010052)

    Two things here.

    1) That seems improbable. Have you seen the Amazon/African tribes that still exist? Women work til the day that baby pops out and then they're right back on it again. The elderly also tend to take on productive roles on various sorts.

    2) Local vs at scale. While I think you're off on the specifics, there's no doubt that tribal groups did (and do) provide for one another in a way much more cooperatively than we do for ourselves in the developed world. But on a small scale there is also implied (if not enforced) social responsibility. People who aren't doing their part will come under major pressure, and worse. Yet now in America take a random sample of people that have been on let's say SNAP for more than 1 year. What will their net contribution be to society? It's going to be substantially negative on average. They take and never give. It's this scale where this sort of antisocial behavior begins to kick in, and where social programs begin to fail.

    I think this is why even when you look at the successful 'democratic socialist' nations (which are really 100% capitalist, but meh - the label's stuck so who I am to argue) they tend to be both small and mostly ideologically homogeneous. Norway/Finland/Denmark all only have around 5 million people each and, until very recently, those people were all damn near ideologically homogeneous. This is actually a testable hypothesis because of Sweden. Sweden is not only much larger than these nations but is also now far from homogeneous. And what we're seeing is groups like the Swedish Democrats [wikipedia.org] rapidly rising to power (they're expected to become the largest party in Sweden in the next election). And all of that social harmony is starting to collapse with just the slightest bit of diversity and multiculturalism. It could be that in a decade or two they'll get over the growing pains and things will be back to normal, but I think it's more likely that within a decade or two people will no longer be using Sweden as one of those countries they aspire to.

    ---

    Basically what I'm getting at is that you can't expect what applies on a small homogeneous scale to work on a large heterogeneous scale. And this goes all the way up. Imagine we were as large as India or China. Do you think our political system could work with 400%+ more people? I mean we see to be headed towards a collapse with a fraction of their populations, and things get exponentially harder with more people.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @05:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @05:55PM (#1010120)

    SNAP fosters dependency because there is no escape route. Minimum wage and near minimum wage jobs don't cover a single person apartment, transportation, and food in most of the country. Dependence upon SNAP is a symptom, not the disease.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @02:36AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @02:36AM (#1010231)

    Yet now in America take a random sample of people that have been on let's say SNAP for more than 1 year. What will their net contribution be to society? It's going to be substantially negative on average.

    You seem to be blaming the poor for their poverty. Claiming that folks getting SNAP (food stamps, if you're unfamiliar with the acronym) are just lazy and don't want to work is completely false. It's also incredibly nasty and cruel.

    When the largest employers in the US pay their employees so little that they're forced to utilize SNAP, Medicaid and other programs just to be able to live paycheck to paycheck, your argument takes on the sheen of falsehood.

    The income cutoffs for SNAP [eligibility.com] (which gives you credit to purchase food items) are quite low:

    The maximum gross monthly income is 130 percent of the federal poverty level, and the maximum net monthly income is 100 percent of the federal poverty level. For instance, if your household only consists of one person, then the gross monthly income to be eligible for SNAP is $1,287 (net $990). For two people, gross is $1,726, net is $1,335. The net income is determined by subtracting all acceptable deductions from your gross income.

    And those that do qualify get a pittance to make sure they don't starve.

    That you surely know this, makes it clear you want to punish those who have the least. That makes your mendacity both deliberate and cruel.

    For shame!

    Have you no feeling at all for your fellow humans? Is that sociopathic "fuck you, Jack! I'm all right." attitude the extent of your intellectual and emotional capacity?

    Ugh!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @10:46AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @10:46AM (#1010318)

      Read his post again, he's a racist who wants a return to segregation. He has the feeling that his fellow men aren't men at all, so he desires to treat then worse than animals.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @06:18PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @06:18PM (#1010440)

        Isn't it funny how you people are such absurd racists? You probably don't even realize it due to echo chamber stuff. When you look at things like SNAP, the majority (plurality technically) of folks that are on it are white. Doesn't change the scenario in the least. I couldn't care less whether somebody who is working hard and doing good things is white, black, brown, blue, or green. And similarly I couldn't care less about whether a person who's let himself become dependent on others is white, black, brown, blue, or green.

        The issue of unsustainable dependent underclasses is something that's becoming a recurring theme in many nations. It invariably happens when systems end up becoming abused - which is something that can occur from the bottom or the top, often from both simultaneously. But by shouting 'omg race' anytime anybody discusses this isssue, it helps perpetuate the problem which, in turn, is politically beneficial to the DNC. You might notice that even blacks who escape poverty and are able to look at things more objectively often tend to become somewhat more cool towards the DNC. Poor folks loyal the DNC staying poor is hugely beneficial to the DNC which creates a very perverse system of motivations.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @08:18PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @08:18PM (#1010460)

          It's possible the top level DNC has an evil masterplan to create a permanent dependent group of voters. But the bigger problem is that the bottom 40% of jobs for unskilled and low skilled workers in the 1950s paid far better, relative to inflation, than they did in the 1980s or since. In order to stop using SNAP you need a path out. That path was taken away, and that's more a credit to the attacks on labor unions and minimum wage by the RNC.

          I've brought up this story before, but in the early 1970s my father worked in a car battery factory stacking batteries making 6 times minimum wage. I worked the same job in the same factory 25 years later, and I made 1.3 times minimum wage. If someone living in that town today is on SNAP, who is to blame - the Democrats for promoting SNAP, or the Republicans (or both parties) for shifting the job market so that any time a job that pays so much as $12 an hour opens, you have 250 people apply for it?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @05:52PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @05:52PM (#1010434)

      The modern social programs, including SNAP, were first envisioned in the mid sixties. They were not widely implemented til the early mid 70s. Do you think people were just starving to deaths in massive numbers before the mid 70s?

      These programs were envisioned and intially executed by LBJ. This [snopes.com] inquiry into an alleged quote of his emphasizes the sort of person he was. Snopes does not affirm the initial quote but the evidence provided for what he is, without doubt, known to have said is just as informative. For instance he was also the president when MLK was assassinated after the FBI had been trying to force him to commit suicide. [wikipedia.org] By the time these programs were starting poverty had already been on major decline for decades due to economic and technological development.

      These programs are not about helping people, but about forcing people into a dependency relationship to ensure they are coerced into voting for such relationship to continue. It was an extremely clever, extremely unethical, and extremely effective ploy. However, yes you also have to understand that letting yourself get into a dependency relationship is also, in part, your fault. I grew up urban poor, like many do. And also got out of it, like many do. It was even relatively easy. In spite of an almost entirely absent parent I did well in school, was able to get some scholarships in large part thanks to my shit circumstance, went to college, took on a real degree, and it was gg poverty from there.

      I think you'll find something quite frequent is that people who have no clue what it's like to live in poverty are those making all of these ignorant comments such as yourself. It's people that who have actually lived through this stuff that realize that these sort of programs are not helping anybody. It's all about political power and exploitation. I don't think you can get much worse off than I grew up, drive-by shootings on the reg, yellow tape a regular adornment at my apartments, single parent who was -at best- neglectful, and living primarily off a diet of ramen + iceberg lettuce (which is actually quite delicious). Doesn't really matter. Was still relatively easy to get out.

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @08:05PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @08:05PM (#1010456)

        Was still relatively easy to get out.

        Bullshit. If you're too sick, you're not getting out (can't hold down a job). If you're otherwise healthy but get sick at the wrong time, you're not getting out (you had a good job, but you were sick for two weeks and got fired). If there are no good employers near you, you can't find a good job and you can't save up enough to move somewhere with better job options. Maybe you could if you were friends with someone living near a better job - but that's not a 'relatively easy' thing, either. If none of your childhood role models were good people, able to impress upon you the value of education and hard work, you wouldn't even understand what you can do to get out.