FORT WAYNE, IN—Upon realizing his most meaningful social interactions now took place among people he had never actually encountered in the flesh, local man Andrew Riley confided to reporters Wednesday that he was horrified to find himself seeking community online. Riley, a 33-year-old account manager who last summer joined an internet forum for wristwatch enthusiasts, […]
Human communication is far more than just the words themselves. In face to face communication, there’s whole layers of tone, facial expressions and body language included along with the words themselves. Whether you consciously know it or not, you interpret these non-verbal reactions in real time while talking to someone. Then there’s the simple fact of the time delay inherent to online communication that doesn’t exist in face to face communication.
All told, online social media does not even come close to replicating actual in person socializing, let alone replacing it.
I love improv and blackbox theater, I understand this intimately. I will never argue for entirely replacing in person interaction, of course in person interaction has the highest immediate potential for saturating your senses with social information.
However you are making a basic thinking error here that environments with a higher saturation of simultaneous social signals are superiro to more focused or abstracted ones.
I have had many intimate conversations on a phone with someone that may never have quite happened the same way, or the words would not have found a way out perhaps if the conversation had happened in a different context and in person. This isn’t about being afraid to say something in person, it is rather that the medium of a phone conversation allows a unique form of intimacy that is different but not better than in person interaction. The same thing with writing a letter, or even a heartfelt text.
Don’t reduce the quality of my argument by suggesting I think social media replaces in person interaction, that is not what I am arguing in the slightest.
I also think it is extremely reductive to call digital spaces inhuman simply because humans cannot physically/literally fit inside the digital spaces. What it means to be human and have human conversations is way more nuanced and harder to pin down than just “are two human bodies making noises at one another in same room”.
One example of this nuance is that for many people the capacity to explore removed, abstracted identities online at different parts of their life was crucial to them finding themselves more wholistically. Social interaction and the fulfilment of our social nature isn’t just a raw calculation of time physically spent in the same room as other humans.
To put it succintly, you are essentially arguing color photography is inherently better than black and white photography because more information always is better and more meaningful/impactful. That is NOT how we are wired which isn’t to say that color isn’t important in our lives.