Although those are labeled as social community and many of us take part in them, they're nowhere close to the same as being social. They take place on our time schedule (we visit when we want to), they take place with people whom we more or less choose, and most importantly a lot of it isn't personal. Friends on Facebook may have some personal interaction, but for the large part HN, reddit, etc, are just impersonal blobs of text. I feel no personal connection to what I read here, and I don't consider it to be social interaction. The part of my social networking that will actually be social will take place later when I check updates on friends on Facebook later and say something that references some real-life connection I have with that friend.
Community-provided content isn't the same thing as social. Interacting with people itself isn't necessarily social. I consider reading HN to be about as social as calling customer support.
I've been pretty quite all my life and when I first got on the Internet in the early to mid 90s it was amazing for a shy person to interact in real-time with other real people. I'm not talking about a person thousands of kilometers away I mean 'a person'.
But still my job as a vending machine repair man was a solitary job I had done it since my teens. The Internet was amazing but it was no substitute for real face-to-face socializing that still terrified me, still does.
When I got a job at a casino I was forced to interact since I was in a contained busy noisy very social environment no longer driving the highways. I changed a lot but I'm still not much for social activities, I call work "acting" because if I am off work and go back I feel very exposed socially.
I think I'm like children who are locked up and lose the chance to develop verbal skills, I missed my social training and that part of my brain is dead.
Anyway, it's different.
" Introverts are easily overwhelmed by too much stimulation from social gatherings and engagement, introversion having even been defined by some in terms of a preference for a quiet, more minimally stimulating environment. "
That's why going out in to society seems like a job to you.
Incidentally, I didn't expect anybody would question that particular point. If anything, I'd have thought people would think it much less plausible that a computer programmer had been invited to a party. And that once there he had actually spoken to a girl.
The value that I derive from an email with an old friend is different than a phone call which is different still from a lunch.
Our social needs are deeply intertwined with our DNA. And the emotional value we can derive from interacting digitally does not meet the full extent that we derive from physical interaction.
Hence, I would argue that someone that lives on the web all day with thousands of people in mostly physical isolation will find less social fulfillment than someone that lives amongst a handful of humans with little connection to the outside world.
Even by using social media, you are still alone in front of your computer.
Just look around you. Look at all the people who are in real world physical social situations and still spend most of their time staring at their smartphone and the stream of social updates from Twitter, from Facebook, from Email...
Staring at those screens is compelling because they are so damn social now. It's not some mythical solitary activity like playing solitaire or reading a book.
An interesting question, then, is why, when talking online, do I focus on ideas rather than people? I think a major factor is simply that plaintext is a far less expressive medium, so it takes extra effort to convey complicated subtexts. When we talk offline we can show interest in people without having to consciously think about it; our expressions of caring are primarily subconscious and therefore don't transfer well to plaintext.
Don't get me wrong, communicating on the Internet is great. But for some types of personality (and pretty much all of us to some extent) face-to-face interaction is vital.
No, you're not. Your writing a message to an online "message forum", to people who could care less about who you are, don't know how you look, don't know or care what you do or how you feel, and only want to hear very specific things from you (e.g. not straying off topic of this thread).
>Look at all the people who are in real world physical social situations and still spend most of their time staring at their smartphone and the stream of social updates from Twitter, from Facebook, from Email...
You miss that they do it _in addition_ to actually being social. Doing just the "social updates in Twitter, FB etc" thing, would be no substitute.
Any other profession now have time in front of computers. But often for dull, administrative work. Teachers correct homeworks, police officers write reports, politicians review law proposals, etc. My time in front of the computer is fun, but ssshh don't tell that too much ;)
The resolution and latency differences between online social and IRL are really huge, making them really incomparable.
Humans generally require some degree of in-person social activity, some more than others.
For a lot of people this kind of "interacting with people" is not really the same as face to face interaction.
You type something into an text input box in Facebook and you get a reply back. Some interaction.
Regular people do that when they are BORED and constrained at home and want to be social, not when they JUST want to be social.
The success of such services is that due to overworking, living far away from friends etc, people a) have to use them, and b) are bored most of the time. They mostly replace TV, not social interaction.
I mean, you're doing it right now.
Today's web is an insanely social place. Compare with computers in 1985, yeah, you might have a point about social isolation. But today? Absolutely not, no way.