Community, technology, work

An interesting take on how our culture messed with intimacy long before digital tech came along. Some excerpts:

What Broadbent recorded was that the explosion in communications technologies are instead restoring a little bit of what was simply part of life 150 years ago—constant contact with your intimates during your work day. If you’re over 30, you’ve probably marveled at how much the work day has changed because of this, and as Broadbent notes, it’s extremely different from the era when even personal phone calls were not part of life at work. (And still aren’t in many blue collar jobs.) It used to be that once you were in the office, the outside world simply didn’t exist. Huge news events could happen and you wouldn’t find out, and you were mostly ignorant about what your friends and relatives were up to during the day. Now, between text messaging, cell phones, IM, and social networking, we spend huge portions of our days keeping lines of communication with our intimates open.

In any case, I think it is the physical distance we have placed between ourselves and our neighbors, families, and friends that has contributed most to our atomization, and which has led directly to the more psychological and spiritual distances we see forming – as our children are raised either in single-parent homes or without any real connections to their grandparents, aunts and uncles, and communities in general. In some sense, then, the communication technologies we have developed allow us to compensate for this distance. Rather than blaming social networking or other communications technology for our increased atomization, perhaps we should view them as a subconscious attempt to remedy something we, as a culture, barely understand about ourselves – as an attempt to bridge the distances between one another.