I've been disturbed, above all, by the following dynamics that are missing from the digital world:
Social awkwardness is alleviated by asynchronicity, there's no such thing as awkward silence online, and you can carefully craft everything you put out there.
One can avoid various flavors of vulnerability and ennui. Hiding your face from others means no one can see your exhaustion, dissatisfaction, denial, boredom, etc. - and because you see yourself more clearly when reflected through the eyes of others, a lack of that reflection makes self-deception that much easier. And on the flip side, avoiding seeing these things on the faces of others allows us to escape the difficulty and obligation that empathy imposes on us.
This would all be great if we didn't need these and other hardships of the analog world to truly flourish, but we do. So existence in the digital-social world becomes akin to slow carbon monoxide poisoning. It fools your system just enough that you don't realise that you're actually suffocating - the ill effects pile up while the alarm systems (loneliness, need for intimacy) stay mum.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherry_Turkle [2] https://soundcloud.com/goodlifeproject/sherry-turkle
self obsessed, self absorbed, selfish-stick zombie society living through 4" screen.
The Internets form a global AI with humans as the neural nodes. The isolation from the "real world" that you observe in so many people is isomorphic to nerve tissue being isolated from environmental factors. The bulk of nerve cells in your body are transmitting and processing signals that originate far from their surrounding tissue.
Because it's all happening in real time to humanity as a whole it's hard to see the bigger picture of how we are changing. I think of it as probably being like how people responded to the invention of fire. It just made perfect sense and took over the world and happened to everyone together. Being present in the midst of this historical change is an opportunity to know something very deep about human beings, who we are.
The biggest thing about these changes from my perspective is that people are devolving into something that looks like a collective autism. Like they are obsessed with the fact that something is happening somewhere else at all times and the device has opened a window to seeing it. And yet when you look out that window into the collective digital consciousness of pictures and texts and advertising you see that there is actually nothing happening at all that isn't exactly what you would expect. People doing things. But always somewhere else.
The main thing I don't like is when I am walking downtown and people are literally just wandering mindlessly as a herd texting on their phones not even looking up at traffic as they cross the street. They navigate by being aware of other people's direction and path but oblivious to their own. For example, I will be crossing the street and another person who is texting will walk just a few steps behind me texting, looking at their phone, never looking up at traffic and trusting that if they follow my path they will end up on the other side of the street. I don't even know really how to describe that experience but I am sure everyone else has it too. It's like people have been reduced to herd animals walking collectively while immersed deeply in their devices... because there isn't possibly anything at all happening in this present moment that is worth paying attention to. And I am not talking about one or two people walking around in this way. It's practically everyone.
Honestly, am I the only person who notices this? I wonder.