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 agre