just to put it out there, im 100% a part of the problem. The problem being that we nowadays spend so much time caring about random shit that is so far away from us. The “global village” is destroying your local one.

imagine if you had no internet, or TV, you wouldnt spend your free time staring into a wall. How much better would you know your neighbours?

Somewhat tangientally, how much do you know about your locations local history, compared to what people 100 years ago knew? Personally I know so much random shit about countries all over the earth but rarely do i talk with friends and family about what happened a generation or two ago in the places ive lived. I think its very sad.

  • poVoq
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    32 years ago

    Why not both? I don’t think those two things are dimetrally opposed and before internet and TV people read newspapers and books (or went to bed early because no lights).

    In the end people are usually just not very interested in what they see as their everyday boring surroundings.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      22 years ago

      Why not both? I don’t think those two things are dimetrally opposed and before internet and TV people read newspapers and books (or went to bed early because no lights).

      its true there were stuff to do, but certainly people are more willing to get to know their neighbours better without these distractions! in the past there was more work to do, so that stopped them, so its sad that now that we have a lot of technology to make things easier, we dont use our new time wisely but instead with distraction-based technologies

      In the end people are usually just not very interested in what they see as their everyday boring surroundings.

      isnt it a bad sad though? I think our surroundings get more boring exactly because people tend to rather consume more exciting realities, be it TV series or tik tok. While theyre more “exciting” than your surroundings, i dont see how they make your life more meaningful than touching grass

      • poVoq
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        62 years ago

        I think you are romatizising local neighborhood connections. I am old enough to remember time before smartphone and even internet in general, and people did not have deep meaningful relationships with their neighbors back then either.

        With rare exceptions people don’t chose their place of living based on common interests with their future neighbors, so usually such relationship were and are very shallow (drinking beer and doing barbeque or something centered around the kids).

        There are exceptions like communal housing with a common vision, but those are a different beast all together and internet rather helps establishing something like that.

        So I don’t think it is helpful to yearn for a past that never actually existed outside the rose tinted glasses of some elderly people that don’t like internet and smartphone 😉

  • @[email protected]
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    12 years ago

    If I think of it well, I probably have to agree with you.

    If I had no Internet, I would still not have the conficence and social energy that most people have, and I wouldn’t have more real-life friends or communicate better with them, in the traditional sense, because I don’t really know anyone really really like my in my area.

    But, this is because the people like me in my local comnunity, even if maybe not many, if they are like me, they don’t know me for the same reason I don’t know them: the way of being social.

    Let’s say that digital mass communication didn’t exist at all (at least at a consumer level), not only Internet but also older stuff like BBSes. I think because I am always myself, my passions would be the same, but surely they would need to be tackled differently.

    For example, I write programs at times. Nowadays who does this, including me, often uses the web to search for solutions to problems, and this only happens online because everyone does it online.

    If no one had the Internet or any equivalent, I probably would find people that also write software in places (not that there are many where I live) like idk, a public library? And I would meet them there, because they too don’t have any virtual place to go to, I would know them, and the rest is the standard business of interacting with people.

    TL,DR: The problem is bigger than all the single people who use the Internet.