06-10-2015, 05:28 AM
I'm honestly worried about how disconnected so many people (especially in Western society) are becoming, in terms of actual face-to-face relationships with other people. As you say, it seems like more and more folks are seeing people solely in terms of labels/achetypes rather than treating that person as an individual entity.
Making this worse, of course, is there appear to be a lot of people who strive for 2-Dimensionality and WANT to become the embodiment of a label or archetype. And\or change that label's meaning to suit them specifically. Just look at all the guys who want to be Barney Stinson.
I think this has largely been driven by electronic media. (Says the Marshall McLuhan fan...) TV and the Internet bring people far more "knowledge" about other people than face-to-face interactions, at least in most cases. The problem, of course, is that TV and the Internet LOVE to reduce things to matters of Label vs Label. More or less, a lot of people simply don't get out enough to learn that real people in the real world often don't behave like people onscreen.
Even those who wish they could.
My hope is that technology may eventually solve this problem for itself, since the trends are constantly towards smaller and more portable devices. In, say, ten years when everyone has Internet-connected AR goggles and doesn't need to stay cooped up in a room all day, there's probably going to be a lot more public social interaction going on.
Making this worse, of course, is there appear to be a lot of people who strive for 2-Dimensionality and WANT to become the embodiment of a label or archetype. And\or change that label's meaning to suit them specifically. Just look at all the guys who want to be Barney Stinson.
I think this has largely been driven by electronic media. (Says the Marshall McLuhan fan...) TV and the Internet bring people far more "knowledge" about other people than face-to-face interactions, at least in most cases. The problem, of course, is that TV and the Internet LOVE to reduce things to matters of Label vs Label. More or less, a lot of people simply don't get out enough to learn that real people in the real world often don't behave like people onscreen.
Even those who wish they could.
My hope is that technology may eventually solve this problem for itself, since the trends are constantly towards smaller and more portable devices. In, say, ten years when everyone has Internet-connected AR goggles and doesn't need to stay cooped up in a room all day, there's probably going to be a lot more public social interaction going on.