At Salon, Toni Telfer has an article about the Internet and loneliness. Is the Internet a refuge for lonely people or does logging onto the computer take us away from other activities that would make us less lonely?
My philosophy about blogging and the Internet in general is Real Life First. I say yes to all social engagements or as many as possible. If I have to choose between a diner date with neighbors or participation in an online thread about gerrymandering, I choose the diner. If those priorities are kept in order, then the Internet is a great place to form a community.
When Ian first started having problems, I had to turn to the Internet for answers. When I was stuck at home and missing academic discussions, there was the Internet. In those cases, I had unique problems and unique interests, so I needed a larger sample size than my community to get answers.
In a few cases, online friends have become real friends, because we live close enough to meet for coffee. Some of my real life friends appear in the Apt. 11D comment section. The lines aren’t that clear anymore.
I think pretty much everybody here understands the “Real Life First” rule. This debate about virtual communities versus real communities was a bigger deal about ten years ago. Robert Putnam had some bits about this in his “Bowling Alone” book. It was funny to see this topic brought up at Salon again. I wonder if it is a real problem.
Apt. 11d 
I feel like I’ve got this under control, but I’m much less certain about my kids. My daughters are 11 and 13 and I regularly find myself in the car with them and their friends – and it’s completely silent. Everyone has their phone out looking at Instagram or iFunny. My daughters also talk about YouTube celebrities at the dinner table, as if they were personal friends. (God save me from Jenna Marbles!)
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I think that’s always been common (mutatis mutandis) among tweens and early teens: I used to go over to my best friend’s house and we would lie in the bunk beds and read Tom Swift books, and my wife tells me she used to call her best friend on the phone and they would read magazines together. So there was talk, but also long periods of silence.
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I need/needed that larger sample size to find others who share the same love for the arts (making and enjoying). We encourage each other, challenge each other, provide feedback, etc.
I find that social media has been wonderful for being able to expand my friendship pool beyond my geographic location. And many have become friends in real life. I’m in Seattle 3-4 times a year and see friends that I met online. There’s also a group of us who have known each other for 3 years now and plan trips together.
There definitely does need to be a balance but it’s a game changer. You are no longer limited to where you live to find your people.
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The internet saved my sanity in my early years of single motherhood, when I was alone with a very premature daughter; on-again-off-again employment due to a tanked economy with no ability to travel to find work (see: “very premature daughter); evenings taken up with physical therapy, speech therapy, occupational therapy and developmental therapy; living in a provincial city that is cold and unfriendly to those not born and raised here; working exclusively with men (which means friendships are limited to work hours), being out-of-step with the rest of the community on the timing of parenthood (totally accidental—-here, people have children in their early twenties, not early thirties)—so no finding parent friends at “family oriented” community stuff (which other single mothers don’t attend because they can’t afford it or don’t want to spend the gas money to get there), having had all my previous close friends move away to greener pastures….
Online, I found community, because for a time I had a really hard time finding it in real life. Once I was able to get back in the swing of things, I returned to spending most of my time in in-person socializing.
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I was similar to you in that I’m an older mom relative to the town that I live in and it’s also a city that’s hard to break into if you didn’t grow up here. For the west coast it’s actually quite conservative and insular – instead of small “c” conservative orthodoxy you have eco/liberal orthodoxy. Different “rules” but lots of them.
Did you find that you made friends more easily with others who came from away?
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The close friendships I’ve developed here have been exclusively with people who are from elsewhere. I have some warm, collegial friendships with guys from my Local who grew up here, but they aren’t what I consider close friendships; there is a barrier there because I’m a single woman. The social template for people who were born and raised here is that men and women can’t be friends without being “friends with benefits”. Married people here don’t socialize with single people, period.
But I have also heard from married couples who’ve relocated from elsewhere that it is very difficult to make friends here. There’s a real circle-the-wagons attitude, and I don’t know its source. I mean, there are portions of Chicago that are pretty insular, but even those neighborhoods and parishes welcome others of the same background. Here, naah. Strange.
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La Lubu, are you up in Minnesota now? Your description fits my experience of Minneapolis. Even though I’m from there, I saw that insularity in action all the time.
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I was going to guess Minnesota as well. As a woman who lives in Minnesota and who relates better to men, marriage and children have been very challenging for me socially. It is absolutely unacceptable for women (and I would say all women, married, attached, single) here to be friends with men once the men are married and so I’ve found it very difficult to make new friends that I connect with.
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I’m still in downstate Illinois. So…scratch Minnesota off my list of possible places to relocate! *smile*
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Hmmm, I’m in MN too. And finding friends here is indeed challenging even after 15 years.
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I too worry about the kids, but haven’t 40+ year olds done that forever? My kids don’t live life online, though I see it in some of their friends (with the boys, it’s the gaming communities, with girls, it’s instagram/youtube/tumblr). My daughter has started to use Facebook, to connect with friends she met at summer camp. In general that has been a good experience (expanded her interactions beyond a more provincial world, including internationally).
I’ve had a community that expanded beyond my real life (in the sense of people that I can actually see), because spouse and I spent 3 years apart during our school years (email would have been a delight) and then had friends met in the larger international scientific community just as email/internet started taking off. So for me, it’s a natural transition.
I am a fairly extreme introvert, though, so I’d worry about myself if I didn’t have a family, who are a real life interaction.
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It’s very isolating when you’re an extreme caretaker. Ian started developing all sorts of issues precisely when we moved to a new suburb. I couldn’t do the things that people normally do to meet people when they move to a new place.
I remember one time I took him into TJ Maxx and he had some sort of sensory meltdown in the middle of the store. People stared. I couldn’t shop. We had to leave immediately. Nobody invited us over for playdates. He was booted out of a couple of pre-schools. My only friend for a year was an early intervention speech therapist who was obligated by law to come to our house two times per week. Steve had terrible work hours. That was the worst year of my entire life.
Some people are in those positions for longer than that, so thank god for the Internet. On the Internet, nobody knows that your kid is screaming on the top of his lungs.
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I am also curious were Sandra and Lubiddo live. I’ve heard the same thing about Cincinnati and a number of southern cities, but I also think it’s hard anywhere for a single woman to be friends with married men, unless it’s within a specific community or organization.
Laura, that takes me back and makes me shudder – our second year of ABA therapy was in a new, unfriendly town and before the internet and it was the worst year of my life, too. I never found much of an autism community online, though.
I have a bunch of wonderful friends IRL and see them a lot (if not enough) but the internet scratches a different itch entirely for me. I’ve spent my whole life wondering what people were thinking and I’m more likely to be able to access that online. It’s in addition to RL friends, not instead of.
There are a number of people in my online community, though, who have less of a RL social life and I’m never sure what their lives would look like without the internet. I tend to think our fast-paced disconnected society causes loneliness. The internet is just where we talk about it.
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I’m in Vancouver, Canada. Grew up in the prairies which are super friendly. I’m surprised Minnesota is not so friendly.
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Minnesotans aren’t unfriendly per se. They are however not given to big displays of any emotion. Also the vast majority of people living in Minnesota grew up there and has a lot of family and very old friends around. The result is a group of people who already have a very full dance card, and are not disposed to chatting up strangers anyway. It looks standoffish from the outside. These same people can be very thoughtful and sweet if you break through; they usually don’t realize how it looks.
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See, I would not have assumed that of Minnesota. My experience of Minnesotans in the IBEW is that they’re friendly, outgoing party animals. (Seriously, do not try to keep up with them at the bar. The next morning, you—and by “you” I mean “me”–will feel like you’ve been hit by a truck. Plus, your intestinal tract will hate you. They, of course, will look and feel like a million bucks.)
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lubiddu,
I suspect that drunk Minnesotans are to sober Minnesotans as drunk Russians are to sober Russians. I don’t know about Minnesotans and alcohol, but I know for a fact that with Russians, a great deal of the attraction of alcohol traditionally is that it allows them to escape the buttoned-up restrictions of normal life–it functions as a sort of hall pass. When you’re drinking, you can express your feelings. When you’re not, you can’t.
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I’ve heard tell, in a stereotypic, biased way, that’s it’s the Swedish connection. Seattle also has a reputation for being closed to outsiders, and here, folks blame it on the Scandinavian influence.
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Yep, it’s the Scandinavian connection. Extreme reserve except when drunk. I’ve never lived in Minnesota but I know lots of Minnesotans, and I expect that if you’re not part of the ethnic in-group or at least willing to join the institutions, it’s much harder to break in.* I would say at least some part of that is do to cultural miscommunication. You think the people are cold and aloof; they think you’re loud, vaguely inappropriate, and ignoring their friendship signals (which to you are beyond subtle). I grew up both embedded in a Norwegian/Norwegian-American community and also around people of other races and backgrounds, so I learned how to code-switch at an early age and how to make, say, friendly chitchat on the bus. But even so, I’ve learned that when I think I’ve dialed it up to 11, it translates as about a 2 to an Italian.
*The flip side is if I meet a Minnesotan of the same ethnic background, it turns out we will know people in common.
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@BI, yes to the Lutheran Mafia. It’s true that if you’re from Minnesota and part of this scene, you probably are two degrees of connection to much of the state (or any Lutheran church).
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To bring the conversation back around (and because I can’t resist) I can see where online life gets important to people from Minnesota. Because on the Internet no one knows you’re Lutheran.
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Ha. Lutheran Mafia. But anyways, I am in my current relationship because of a cultural miscommunication. I knew Italian men were known for being flirty, but when I when I met my current SO, I was finally over a failed marriage and really ready to meet someone new, so when I was at a dept event, and he was standing too close, touching my arm when we talked, and giving all the signals of interest, I decided he must be into me. I decided to go all out in my flirting, rather than be my normal subtle self. I decided to wear my sexiest clothes and throw myself at this guy. I “ran into” him on campus, invited him out to coffee, and flirted very seriously with him (e.g. touching his knee with my knee). It worked, and after about 2 weeks, were were couple. Then I asked him about it all, and he was like, “what flirting?” turns out, he didn’t remember talking to me from the first event at all, and he hadn’t noticed I was hitting on him in any way whatsoever (nor did he think my outfits were sexy). He thought I was just being garden variety friendly, and he hadn’t thought he had been flirting with me either. When I got over my humiliation, I realized had I been my normal flirtatious self, our relationship never would have happened because he would have thought I slightly disliked him. 😀
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In past centuries, people “corresponded”. You all know examples of literary figures who maintained relationships via correspondence before email and social media came along, as well as the less literary concept of the “penfriend”. Friendships which have sprung from blog writing and morph into Facebook friendships are similar, I’m thinking. And as the child of academics I was always used to my parents maintaining relationships with people they hardly ever saw.
There are some internet support groups or forums (illnesses, adultery, etc) where one can witter on as much as one likes without worrying about boring ones’ usual friendship group and driving them away, as well as gaining a lot of information which the normal circle wouldn’t have. That is valuable, I think.
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(… And having seen Fargo, both the movie and the series, I’m staying well away from Minnesota, myself. Yah, yah!)
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RL socializing is way more difficult than internet socializing. Between Autistic Youngest, pets and working opposite shifts to my partner’s, we have few local friends with whom we can spend time. We live in a isolated northern city far removed from all of our relatives and friends from our younger days. I tried to be part of a knitting group and then my partner got hired for a weekday evening job that killed that dream deader than a doornail.
Honestly, If it weren’t for the internet making close connections possible with people far distant, I’d have been in therapy decades ago. I despise all of those snide columns and stories that dismiss internet social connections as inherently false or shallow. Many online friendships I’ve made are still going strong twenty years on. These other women and men are people whom I’d love to be able to sit down to dinner with or invite to hang out at my house but we can’t bridge that very real distance and juggle our responsibilities to meet in person. So thank goodness for the internet – it’s helped so many of us!
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The thing about the internet is that it makes it easier to figure out what you have in common with somebody else or what is unique about them.
One of the unfortunate facts about real-life conversation with new people is that there’s a small pool of chit chat subjects and it takes a while to figure out what is interesting or special about any particular individual. It isn’t immediately obvious who the good prospects are because one just doesn’t get a big enough sample normally and (with just sheer chance meetings) one isn’t going to get a big enough sample. (There was one woman that I sat through many, many weeks of ballet with before discovering that she was a missionary recently returned from South Sudan. Or there’s another mom I know that (thanks to other sources), I know is heavily involved in outreach to strippers, but it didn’t come up when we were just waiting around.)
This is also an argument for online dating–it’s easier to put the important information right out there than it is in natural social situations out in the wild.
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Definitely! I joke with some friends that it’d be soooo great to have a sign on each of us at pick up/drop off at school saying what we do/are interested in. In our circles it’s a way of finding other creatives. So one would have “poet”, another “photographer”, the next one “artist” – you get the idea.
I’m MUCH more introverted than I used to be and that chit chat can be so painful for me. I can do it but I’d much rather talk about something that means something. Not that everyone has to reveal their white underbelly…
And that’s what is great about social media – you can get right to what interests you and find those who share those values/interests. People who you’d might have discounted or walked right by in the school pick up line.
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