Different Forms of Loneliness?

Mathew Ingram asked if there was a contradiction in decrying social media for making people lonely while simultaneously celebrating the value of the solitary experience of reading books. In response, Mike Masnick said he felt the reasons for the difference in stances on the two were:

-         A generational thing: what Doughlas Adams called the “anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it” stance.

-         Snobbishness: social media is idle chatter whereas reading is educative.

Masnick then threw the question open to the (Internet) audience. Here are the comments I liked from that forum.

One guy said it was “because the intelligence level of books can pretty much always be appropriate to the person, social networking however almost always devolves into the lowest common denominator which is almost universally "idiot people doing idiot things".”

Another guy agreed: “Reading a book can mean spending a day inside the head of some of the greatest minds in human history. There's nothing solitary about that…(whereas) People on Facebook post pictures of what they had for dinner and complain about work.”.

This other guy decided to explain why the two differed so much in quality: “A book is, in general, something that has had to survive enough challenges to its worth to make someone think it would be worth a few bucks to read. The author put a lot of time and effort into writing it and the editor spent plenty of their own time doing quality control on it. Social media, on the other hand, is essentially a million monkeys banging on keyboards. Huge areas of it are nothing but the mental diarrhea of its users. There is no barrier to entry and no quality control of any kind. Yes, you'll find a few gems in social media but they're buried in a mountain of shit.”

The “books have quality” argument was countered by the guy who pointed out that “There is a common ancient horridly flawed assumption often afoot that if something is written in a book, it must be true or will become so. There is zero basis for that assumption. The first book supposedly ever mass-printed was a bible. Enough said.”

Me, I agree with the guy who wrote: “A good book is something that someone took a year to deliberate on, erase and rewrite, and research for. It is a work of art, and in no way comparable to a discussion on Facebook or a newspaper article. So saying that one is good while the other is good is utterly silly. Each fulfils its own function. It is like comparing singing in the shower to the Wiener Philharmoniker: both are fine and should not be confused.”