One of the upsides of growing up in a small town was that you knew everybody. One of the downsides of growing up in a small town was that everybody knew you.
When I was growing up, we had one telephone, like most everyone else. And that one phone was connected to a party line. Now a party line—for those of you born post 1960, or in the city—was not the point of view of the democrats or republicans. A party line was a telephone line shared by several parties…in our case, four different families. Secretly listening in to another party’s conversation was the way you knew who was getting married, having a baby, (sometimes in reverse order) who was getting a divorce plus other juicy gossip. While you had the dirt on who you were listening in on, they had the dirt on you when they listened to your calls.
Recently I read an Associated Press article about the findings of a study by the American Sociological Review. The study found that social isolation, the feeling of disconnectedness, is afflicting more and more of us. According to the study, we have fewer friends with whom we can confide. Many reported that they had no friends. In short we are becoming a land of lonely people. That loneliness is reflected in the increase of depression and other ailments.
Ah, but we are depressed over our isolation and our loneliness no more. Combining entrepreneurial vision with technological know-how, we are communicating, gossiping and connecting again. No, not over the garden wall communicating, or at the neighborhood soda shop connecting, but through inter-active web sites such as FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, and others. Our fingers are doing the talking as we text about everything in our lives. Combine our inter-connective web sites with our cell phones, IMs, and e-mail, and we are constantly connected. We are isolated and lonely no more. Or, are we truly lonely no more?
It seems to me that the more we are connected the more disconnected we feel. While we are seldom out of touch, we feel less in touch. I recently took down my FaceBook account because I was hearing from people who said they were my “friends” but I had no idea who they were—not to mention the time it takes to navigate the site and respond in a pithy way to someone who just told you they are baking cookies.
Yes, we knew everybody’s business and everybody knew our’s years ago. But at least we had a name—not a screen name or a handle—and we felt our existence mattered to someone other than ourselves.