Murry Frymer
What goes around comes around. Even that little phrase keeps coming around.
But today I speak of a study of Internet
use, which says that "the nation's obsession with the Internet
is causing many Americans to spend less time shopping in stores
and 
more
time working at home after hours." And "the more hours
people use the Internet, the less time they spend with real human
beings."
When I was a wee mite, there was another
study, this one a book written by David Riesman with Nathan Glazer
and Reuel Denny which said that Americans were becoming "The
Lonely Crowd." The reason then (1950) was the mass media,
the growing population, the new work habits, etc. We were all
still going to work then, but "community" was a dying
concept.
Now we are lonelier than ever, sitting in front of our little
computer screens, doing our work, or looking for information,
or buying cars, or playing the stock market or sending e-mail.
Even sending e-mail is somehow distancing, because it comes at
the expense of human interconnection, according to the author
of the new study, Norman Nie, a professor of political science
at Stanford.
The Stanford study says that the Internet is leading us away from the mass media, away even from television, away from reading, away from friends and social contacts, away from family, away from most everything. In the New York Times, Mr. Nie says, "If I go home at 6:30 in the evening and spend the whole night sending e-mail and wake up the next morning, I still haven't talked to my wife or kids or friends. When you spend your time on the Internet, you don't hear a human voice and you never get a hug."
Which may be why some of the favorite sites on the Internet are porn sites, but even there you don't actually GET a hug, though you can watch others get them.
I was very moved when the original "Lonely Crowd" came out, since I happened to be a lonely guy, though I didn't know the mass media were to blame. I am moved again, though I don't know that the Internet is to blame.
When I was a columnist for a newspaper, the Internet offered up something I found rather comforting, a daily host of e-mail correspondents. Of course, these were words on a screen and not on the telephone, something I sort of preferred. In fact many a correspondent who did telephone was annoyed if I answered. They wanted to leave a "voice mail" message, they said, a way to communicate uninterrupted.
Since leaving the newspaper, I have filled in some of my time with e-mail correspondence, including a couple of old friends with whom I have not communicated for years. One old buddy (not so old) lives in Florida and we rarely saw each other over the years, would never think to write or call. But now we communicate on a fairly regular basis and I am sharing in some of the small details of his life just as if I were there. And vice versa. I find it wonderful.
Of course I am not saying that I do not miss the actual face-to-face involvement, but perhaps for me, a writer, the written word is often a better way to interrelate.
Indeed, I know there are computer nerds who simply prefer technology to what we call, condescendingly, "a life." But I am not sure these nerds would have been the life of the party without their computer involvement.
Modern life is segregating. "Anomie" is a modern syndrome. We do not walk the streets, meeting old friends. We drive the highways listening to CDs. We often see our movies at home to avoid the talkers behind us. Even in the office, socializing is minimal for many workers, alone in their cubicles. We are competitive, anxious, hurried, worried. Happiness may be a warm puppy, as the late Charles Schulz told us, but if it is ONLY a warm puppy, you are pretty much alone.
I am not going to blame the computer, as much as I would like to. I blame us. I blame our reticence to involve ourselves with others. I blame our suspicion of others. I can blame lots of things before I get to computers.
I remember the days with Mom and Dad when friends and neighbors used to drop in after dinner to chat. Nobody needed an invitation. But now I don't know that I really want my friends and neighbors dropping in that way. Better send an e-mail first.
© 2000 by Murry Frymer
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