Macleans has a very interesting article this month entitled "The End Of Neighbours".
Do you know your neighbours? I don't. Now, granted, for me on both sides those neighbours change every four months with the school term. But the only time I ever think of them is on those rare occasions when the concrete wall that separates our side of the semi from theirs isn't enough to muffle their party. (Why do people turn music up so loud they have to shout over it to be heard? Never understood that.)
I've lived in upwards of twenty different places--whenever I try to count them all, I can't help but think I've missed one or two, but they're a different one or two each time. And I'd have to go back all the way to the first home I ever had to find neighbours we were on close terms with...and then, only on one side. Martha Culver babysat me for a few years and I spent enough time with that family that I still remember...wow, all of them. John and Lilian, Mark, Martha and Faith. Never noticed until just now how Christian those kids' names are. Not surprising. The Culvers also gave me my first and last experience of Sunday school. Church for them was an unshakeable obligation.
Since I moved from Bramalea in 1980, I've lived in apartment buildings, townhouses, semi-detached homes and bungalows. I've lived in dorms and in the basements and second floors of homes and rarely have I known anything more than the first name of any given neighbour. Usually not even that. A man's home is his castle, the saying goes, and I like mine equipped with moat, thank you.
In this I know I'm not alone. According to this article, fewer than half of people surveyed could pick their neighbours out of a police lineup. I've never even seen mine, on either side. How sad is that? Even sadder that I recognize how sad it is and still don't want to do anything about it. For all I rationalize that they'll be gone by next term, most relationships in life have expiry dates. Some of them last mere seconds. They can still be important.
"No man is an island", wrote John Donne in 1624, but that was 1624. We moderns are ever more insular (insular: Latin from 'insula' - "island") and proud of it. For once the Internet isn't to blame here. The Net is merely the latest coping strategy we've created to sanitize our social lives. This is actually the inevitable byproduct of cheap oil, which is the only reason suburbia exists in the first place...and which, incidentally, will be gone within the lifetime of my younger readers, if not sooner. It's bad enough that most of the skills we're going to need in the centuries ahead were lost with our great-grandparents. Even worse, we certainly don't have their social skill, and that will be even more necessary for survival.
Think of the clubs that used to be an integral part of life in the small towns where most of our distant ancestors lived and died. The Grange, 4-H, the Rotary Club, and so on. At one point in the 1800s there were dozens, even scores, of them. Now think of the churches we've abandoned and their emphasis on community and service. Most of us claim we don't have time for any of that any more in our harried modern lives, even as we sit on our butts and watch screens for hours at a time. We say we don't need those connections because they're all online now--and yet online connections are tenuous and they don't replace actual face to face contact.
As the article linked above notes, online relationships not buttressed by real-life contact tend to peter out, many of them in as little as a year and a half. (Whereas online relationships that include face-to-face contact grow stronger over time).
I've always liked the Internet because many times it has given me a step up at the beginning of a relationship. People have been forced to look at me without looking at me...in other words, the way I look at them. That's all well and good--it's worked, as I say, several times. But of my closest friends and loves
--I met exactly one of them online
--not a single one of them is strictly an online relationship (although damnit I don't see you people near as often as I'd like)
and of course it's very telling that Eva and I have never had an online component to our relationship at all.
I find it deeply ironic that I, a person who has lived all his life with varying degrees of social anxiety, would be so passionate about preferring to see people in the flesh rather than on a screen. Failing that, I'd like to talk to you and hear your voice--but even that's taboo now: they're still called "smartphones" but the "phone" component is all but forgotten. Seeing you, though...I can talk faster than I can type. We can sit and chat about everything and nothing. We can actually laugh out loud and marvel at the depth of shared feeling that creates, so much deeper than looking at "LOL" on a screen. We can even be completely silent, if we're that comfortable, and let the silence speak our words for us. And of course, no combination of keystrokes can ever come close to duplicating a human hug.
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We now have amorphous social groups, centered primarily online, that span the globe. This is wonderful insofar as it allows for instant, free communication and it can have a powerful positive effect. But it also produces, again as the article notes, a kind of echo chamber. We tend to stay in the "safe" areas even online...places where we know we're unlikely to be disagreed with. There was a time, and it really wasn't that long ago, when we had enough actual social contact with people that invariably some of them would think differently from us. This is called "diversity", and it's now a concept we pay extraordinary amounts of lip service to while making damn sure we don't actually have to interact with it in any meaningful way.
This has polarized the electorate in both Canada and the United States. Neither side understands the other, nor has any wish to: they're all barbarians, stupid, even evil. It's only by meeting people face to face that you can begin to break that barrier down and really appreciate there are different ways of seeing the world and value in each other's perspectives. And we won't meet these people if we stay locked within our four walls thinking our social network can replace a social network.
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