A side effect of people spending more time online is that many of our interactions with each other are looped back again through ourselves. By reading what other people say through text, or engaging one another indirectly through likes and shares, we're extrapolating fine details of socializing with others as they pass through our own internal filters. The result is that, in a way, we're alone with ourselves even as we engage with others. You can be alone holding a phone, while texting to another person. They're there. Your'e there too. But really, you're alone with them, without them being there. You have to make up for them not being there in real life. And you make up for that by being there for them in your own mind... Like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, we fill in the genetic code of their absence with our own genome. Hence, perceptual bias/greater reflection is required to communicate correctly in their absence. We have to evolve ourselves to stay connected to each other.
Our internal state of mind factors into the way in which we see what other people communicate. And so the context of their words can very easily be confused. This is a blockade of reflection as much as communication. This is a limitation of us all. The manner in which we're communicating online requires a greater sense of self and conscientiousness of others. We don't communicate well enough to communicate right now. So we graft to memes or the person who wrote the best blog about something. Our identity therefore is a compiled plethora of externalized reflection shared openly with the world. But, even then... we're alone. Sharing is being openly shared in private, and then publicly liked in solitude, only to be discussed secluded by ourselves, with one another.
Talking on the phone was different. You could hear people--get a sense of their feeling without interpreting that feeling through yourself. Face to face, you're looking right at them--they're right there.. But this?... constantly engaging with people indirectly... We're alone with each other. And it's pushing us together as much as it's pulling us apart. The only way forward is to adapt. Not only how we communicate with each other. But who we are as individuals those rare moments nowadays when we really are alone with ourselves.
Our internal state of mind factors into the way in which we see what other people communicate. And so the context of their words can very easily be confused. This is a blockade of reflection as much as communication. This is a limitation of us all. The manner in which we're communicating online requires a greater sense of self and conscientiousness of others. We don't communicate well enough to communicate right now. So we graft to memes or the person who wrote the best blog about something. Our identity therefore is a compiled plethora of externalized reflection shared openly with the world. But, even then... we're alone. Sharing is being openly shared in private, and then publicly liked in solitude, only to be discussed secluded by ourselves, with one another.
Talking on the phone was different. You could hear people--get a sense of their feeling without interpreting that feeling through yourself. Face to face, you're looking right at them--they're right there.. But this?... constantly engaging with people indirectly... We're alone with each other. And it's pushing us together as much as it's pulling us apart. The only way forward is to adapt. Not only how we communicate with each other. But who we are as individuals those rare moments nowadays when we really are alone with ourselves.
