Americans Are a Lonely Lot, and Young People Bear the Heaviest Burden
I had an interesting conversation earlier today.<p>Let&#x27;s say that we are in a small team, maybe five or six people. One person comes to work sad, upset.<p>Nothing has to be said. We stop what we&#x27;re doing and help, right? We&#x27;re not schmucks. We take time to listen, we reassure the person they&#x27;re important, we celebrate their being part of our group.<p>Now let&#x27;s expand the scale several orders of magnitude and change the medium. We are now part of some online system: Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, whatever. There are tens of millions of people all in one big virtual room.<p>Somebody mentions they are upset online. When we see something wrong or something we care about online, we type things in -- somewhere. We feel moved to act. Without something being said, the feelings don&#x27;t exist to us.<p>Does that really do what it&#x27;s supposed to be doing? I know our motivations are good, and in many cases there are fine words provided, but are we really helping and caring about people simply because we&#x27;re tweeting, retweeting, hashtagging, typing our personal stories in, and so forth?<p>Is a text message saying &quot;You are important to us&quot; the same as going over to somebody, giving them a hug, having them look around the room at people who care about them, and telling them same thing?<p>Assuming it is, there&#x27;s huge bunch of people involved. On any one day, a million people could be living out some horrible experience because of something in their lives. How could we know unless they type things in, and what kinds of things are those folks going to feel if they type things in and nobody responds?<p>I don&#x27;t know which is worse. Maybe this type of communication is effectively showing our feelings and makes a difference -- and some people are just going to be ignored. Or maybe it&#x27;s just so much self-stimulation, telling ourselves we&#x27;re somehow doing something of importance when in fact all we&#x27;re doing is making various people internet famous from day to day.<p>We tech folks keep assuming that human communication somehow all boils down to bits moving over a wire. That may be a terribly lossy way of looking at it.