futures grow from seeds of thought
A recent study using data from the 2004 “General Social Survey,” reports that
“Americans have one third fewer close friends and confidants than two decades ago, and the number of people who have none has more than doubled.”
Are Americans more disconnected now than they were twenty years ago? Have they retreated into their selves? (or their cells? (or their cell ph.s?)) Has the connection dwindled? We know people can and do form intense and authentic emotional bonds over digital media like IRC, the web and World of Warcrack. Have the close confidants of a large segment of the population (teens and younger, mostly) moved to a “virtual” category that didn’t have a bubble on the General Social Survey?
Probably.
While the data showed a drop in confidants who are friends or who are family members, there was a far greater drop-off in friends. So close friendships are dwindling — or is it consolidating? All we know is: networks of trust and kinship have grown more sparse.
What are the ramifications of such dramatic social change? Bradley Heinz suggests
We’re becoming more self-referential by relying more on family. In our growing isolation, I see a genetic analogy: our waning social exposure is like inbreeding…
To take the analogy further, fewer social contacts equal a reduced mutation rate of family belief and value systems. Children more closely resemble their parents sociologically. Back into the family fold.
But if the real reason for this anomaly in the GSS data is due to the rise of virtual confidantes, then the mutation rate might actually be on the rise due to globally expanded social exposure. Children raised from birth with internet access whisper secrets into ears thousands of miles away.
So where do you fall? Who and where are your confidants?
Tonight I attended what I consider to be an historic meeting of minds: several rockstars in the long, strange and entangled common history of 60s counterculture and commune life, mind-expanding chemicals, personal computing, virtual communities and Web 2.0.
Stewart Brand: founder of the Whole Earth Catalog — a series of books that single-handedly educated a generation of countercultural do-it-yerselfers — and the WELL — arguably the first virtual community.
Kevin Kelly: founding executive editor of Wired magazine and CoEvolution Quarterly, journalist and author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World — which told a better tale about emergence and complexity science than the Santa Fe Institute ever could.
Howard Rheingold: the great tech-culture journalist and “freelance instigator”, educator on participatory media in journalism and learning, author of Smart Mobs: the next social revolution, the Virtual Community, and several other works. Howard is also lately becoming my collaborator around the idea of using participatory media in the classroom.
Fred Turner: Stanford professor of Communications and Digital Media, one of my mentors, and now celebrated author of the superb work of scholarship and story-telling that brought all these free-thinking intellectuals together tonight: From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.
I have much to share with you about what these folks shared with me tonight, but it’s 4:42am and will have to wait.