> last week I've probably spent 50 hours with people front different parts of the word on screen
You've spent time with a simulation of those people, their voices lossily compressed with a biased frequency response, their images projected through a non-eye lens on a 2D surface, their heads bigger and closer than you would have in real life, while rest of their bodies hidden, with hundreds of milliseconds delay between interactions. Don't get me wrong, it is a very convincing and useful simulation for many purposes, but it is a simulation nonetheless.
We might have overlooked this previously, but we will slowly be gaining an understanding of the effects of sole social interaction coming through videochat. I know for some, no matter how many zoom calls they do a day, it doesn't come close to creating the same relational satiety.
Speaking personally, most of my good friendships growing up (and even now) were with people online and they feel perfectly fulfilling and real to me. I've been really surprised to hear people (who seem to have been forced into interacting with folks online because of covid) start popping up claiming that online interactions aren't real and are somehow invalid or inferior, as your post seems to imply. I would have thought the presumably largely computer geek HN crowd would be full of folks with similar experience.
That is the whole point of a simulation. Hyper-palatable food, cocaine, porn etc. they also feel good and even hyper-real in our nervous systems in the short term, but that’s not a good way to judge if they pose long term complications. Though, I’m not saying video chat is necessarily a hyperstimulus, we don’t know yet.
> claiming that online interactions aren't real and are somehow wrong
I’m not saying it is wrong, and in the absence of real thing it is the rational thing to do. But thinking that it is the real thing is kidding ourselves and to the extent it replaces real life interactions, it could have long term harm. I know this is not an exact comparison, but we have already seen this with uni-directional audio-visual entertainment replacing real relationship time. We feel like our favorite youtubers, podcasters, netflix protagonists etc are our friends, or at least relationally worth investing time in (otherwise we wouldn’t consume them). Same might go with the 50 people around the world we videochat.
I've been dating someone online for the last two months and I agree there is something missing, perhaps something chemical, that can't be transmitted over a screen and a speaker. But your viewpoint seems a bit too myopic. Humans are exceptional at adapting, and our brains are brilliant at filling in the blanks. I have no doubt that people can have deep and meaningful interpersonal communication without being face to face. I know I have many times, and I have certainly experienced intense emotion with people remotely, and built trust, and felt my social needs sated (if not my physical needs, specifically sex).
Maybe reconsider the idea that it is a problematic simulation, because it's really no more a simulation that how our brains translate vibrations and light waves into sounds and pictures in the first place. If video chat is an illusion, then so is face to face communication, as neither one is an unfiltered experience. The filter of standing two feet from someone is only marginally different than the filter of a video chat. The real filter, the one doing the heavy lifting in both cases, is our brains translating the raw data of the physical world into our lived experience.
> Humans are exceptional at adapting, and our brains are brilliant at filling in the blanks
This is exactly the problem. Our adaptive machinery can adapt to the wrong stimulus and get stuck in that. This is called "reciprocal narrowing" and is the mechanism that sustains addiction. I'm not saying videochat is necessarily the wrong stimulus or has an addictive potential, but being able to adapt doesn't mean it is the right thing for us in the long term.
> felt my social needs sated (if not my physical needs, specifically sex). ... because it's really no more a simulation that how our brains translate vibrations and light waves into sounds and pictures in the first place
This sounds like a reductionistic, cartesian model of what is going on. It assumes something like "Stimulus gets in through my senses, interpreted through my consciousness in my mind and I get what I need" or "my relational needs and my physical needs are mutually separable". Cognitive science experiments show us existence of phenomena like "blindsight", in which there is stimulus processing without possibility of conscious awareness; "implicit learning", in which there is learning without conscious awareness. In other words, our conscious awareness of what is going in is not necessarily a good indicator of what is actually going on, nor if our long term needs being actually met. We don't know if we can delineate relational and physical needs (here by physical I mean physical presence, not necessarily tactile stimulus) or to what extent we can reduce relationality to vibrations and light waves going through our auditory and visual systems.
I want to make it clear, I am not saying videochat is bad, I've spent my whole week videochatting and feel like I've met certain relational needs. But it is nonetheless a simulation, and I actually can feel tired and lonely even after a day full of videochat. I don't intend to equate both, and I want to be careful not to displace the real thing with its simulation when the opportunity arises to be present in person. Just like I need to be careful about diet coke and hyperpalatable fast food not confusing the hell out of me to the point of replacing real, long-term sustainable nutrition.
If you've been reading Baudrillard, you might like the blog The Last Psychiatrist, which is a less-rigorous, more ironic take on a lot of similar ideas about hyperreality.
For example, last week I've probably spent 50 hours with people front different parts of the word on screen.
Helping them turn waste plastic into 3D printing filament:
https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-ho...