My pet theory: the digital world is just real enough for us to inhabit without feeling alone, while removing a few crucially difficult elements of in-person interaction. Because we can't escape the reality of being social animals, we gravitate toward the easier social world - the digital one, and thus we end up checked out of the physical world way too much.
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.
If I may I would recommend the work of Sherry Turkle[1] from the MIT. There are several talks from here on youtube, and I particularly like her conversation on the good life project podcast[2].
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.