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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: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @05:26PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @05:26PM (#1010109)

    I'd argue that is a "fad" but a rather unique one. There's one factor that's going to be reshaping our future far more than any other one, yet nobody ever talks about it: fertility.

    The internet is fucking up people in all sorts of way. It's destroying their physical condition, their psychological condition, and much more. But none of this ultimately matters in contrast to the one simple thing it directly affects: fertility. Take all the online people you know. How many kids do they have on average? A fair clip more than 2 is the bare minimum for this group's population not to decrease. I don't think I need to await your response to know it's *way* lower, regardless of your age.

    It's evolution baby! [youtube.com]

    If adoption of the internet negatively affects fertility then those groups that choose to abstain from such will come to rule the world at a rate way faster than most realize. Imagine we have one group with a fertility of 1 and another group with a fertility of 3. Not exactly a hypothetical scenario. What that means is that each generation the first group's population will decrease by 50% at the exact same time that the second group's population increases by 50%. Start with equal populations, after only 3 generations the higher fertility group now makes up 97% of society. Seriously! I'll show the math in a minute because it's just stupidly counter intuitive, but such is the nature of fertility. But the point of this is that fertility will decide the future - and that future is not going to be kind to the internet or the various social values that are like arsenic to fertility.
    ---

    Fertility example. Group A has a fertility of 1, group B has a fertility of 3. Fertility of 1 is equivalent to 1 child per couple, so an effective scalar of 0.5 on a population. A fertility of 3 is similarly equivalent to a scalar of 1.5.

    Generation 0: A:100 B:100
    Generation 1: A:50 B:150
    Generation 2: A:25 B:225
    Generation 3: A:12 C:338

    C's share of the population = 338/(338+12) = 97%.

    I mean again let emphasize that is THREE GENERATIONS. That is no time at all, and the low fertility group becomes defacto extinct by the end. It's just insane how big of a role fertility plays in the future. Indeed, the future will be decided almost exclusively by fertility. So, no - anything that negatively affects fertility will ultimately be a fad. Might wanna start brushing up on your Arabic.

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