And More Meatballs

On my last post, Mum (hi mum!) left the following comment:

How much of this relational retardation is due to a generation of people where interactions are primarily "virtual"? Do interactions then take on an air of discomfort because ones have not learned to be genuine when dealing with "real" people? The rules of virtual communities are very different and are much more self focused than in-the-flesh interactions ever could be.

I was going to reply in the comments, but as I was writing, it kept getting longer and longer, so I just decided to make a full post about it.

Two of the group were definitely in their late 30s, which is, even at this point, too old to have their social norms set by virtual interaction. I agree that virtual interaction tends to be more anonymous and requires an entirely different set of social skills and cues than real-life interaction, but I also know at least two people that I have never met in real life with which I still manage to have a "deep" relationship (as deep as my friendship with Bob/Mark/Michael/etc).

After a weekend to reflect on this post, I think the issue is that our only culture now is mass culture (which isn't exactly a revelation). In the past, people cared about their neighbors, the events in their town/church/school, the history and cultural significance of things in their state or region. Now our only shared community seems to be mass culture, like hit songs, hit TV shows, hit movies, and professional (televised) sports. (A really excellent book on this phenomenon is called Bowling Alone.) I don't think people have lost the ability to interact on a deeper level, they simply have a narrowed range of topics for discussion. The old 'deeper' subjects still exist, but they require slightly more effort to broach than last night's Idol episode. Why would people that barely know each other dig for commonality when they have the obvious commonality of mass culture to fall back on?

I notice this creeps in even with my parents. I currently don't have television service. I supposed if I wanted to fish out some rabbit ears I could at least have the local channels, but I don't bother. Despite this, my mom still asks during idle conversation whether I have seen some new show or funny commercial. She isn't asking because we don't know how to interact socially, but these things are easy subjects when a 'deeper' subject isn't being pursued.

I think I only notice how pervasive mass culture references are now because of my varied attempts to not keep up with them. I don't have TV, I don't listen to the radio, and my time on the internet is confined to Hacker News and Slashdot. My only real connection to current events is the Economist, which isn't exactly trendy (thankfully, as I find the sparse dribble in more mainstream weeklies like Time and Newsweek to be rather repetitive and narrow), and NPR, which isn't either. I notice the references because I no longer get them. Maybe this whole tirade was just me feeling left out.