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The Internet Might Not Be So Depressing
generic-man writes "In a follow-up to a controversial 1998 study linking Internet use to worsened depression and social difficulties, Carnegie Mellon University professor Robert Kraut now says that the symptoms of depression started to recede after a while. The New York Times (free registration required) has the story in today's Circuits section." We covered this way back in the day as well.
Then you find out what your fellow humans actually think. Wow. Scary. Depression and anger are a natural outcome of this process.
I'm reminded of the alien race from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who were telepathic, but couldn't stand being able to hear the thoughts of their neighbors. The aliens became avid fans of mind-crushingly loud rock music in order to drown out the thoughts of others.
It's certainly possible that, in 1998, the internet (or, more specifically, online conversation) was depressing, because so many of the people were new to it. Imagine: you are in a society where there are millions of people around, and you haven't met anyone yet. Many of them seem to know each other already. None of the people you know from elsewhere are around. If you were the only person in your state to have a phone, and you spent your time dialing random numbers, you'd probably be depressed.
Three years later, everyone you know from real life is online, you've met a bunch of people online and interacted with them enough to become friends. Now the internet is convenient and social, and not depressing.
"Wearily on I go, pain and misery my only companions. And vast intelligence, of course. And infinite sorrow. I despise you all."
Ahhh... now I see... Marvin was just an AOL user.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
The internet used to be a medium where anyone could (and did) post their thoughts, mulling over the minutiae of their daily lives. Nowadays, people just bitch and complain about every little thing.
Yes, it's so refreshing to finally move out of a state of general depression, and into a state of general anger.
I find the internet more depressing all the time...
It's more likely that people with mood disorders obsess over the internet, rather than the net itself making them depressed. Take IRC (not just aol chat rooms) for example: those who spend inordinate amounts of time chatting (idling/plotting world domination/etc) probably suffer from some kind of mental idiosyncracy (ie. depression). Instead of taking mental illness seriously (and doing something about it?) it's likely that many out there are looking to make excuses instead (and spend lots of cash on trying to prove silly things).
Joseph Kalange, Boise, ID, USA
In police departments, especially large cities, often police officers are rotated out of criminal investigations units on a regular basis. They get transfered to a lighter duty unit, like traffic, or something, so that they have contact with real poeple, and get to have a chance to unwind from dealing with criminal types all the time.
I am sure that the psychs have the same issue. Their view gets tainted, and they see evidence of mental disease all around them, even when it is not true. This also tends to be self re-enforcing, because it is good for business.
You could even speculate about something like the prevalence of mental illness in the mental health profession. You could have something like a "paranoid hypochondriac", which would be someone with the illness of seeing illnesses all the time in everyone else. Instead of worrying about themselves being sick all the time, they would worry all the time about other people being sick. A paranoid version of hypochondria. This would naturally fit in well in the medical and mental health community.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It certainly wasn't depressing for this guy.
It took them three years to find that out? Now that's depressing.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
A few years back I could search for, say, "thai food" and without much additional effort find a kewl recipie from someone in Thailand with an html editor. Back then, I might be inclined to write the author a short note, thanking them for their help (and maybe suggesting kicking up the hot pepper a little). I would say things like that contributed a lot to the attraction of millions of new users onto the internet.
More recently, due to factors like the IPO bubble and paid placements in searchengines, doing that would be a lot more likely to point me to a site maintained by a dotcom operation, with lots and lots of ads and product tieins and some semi-obvious goo-goo doing whatever method of persuasion they can think of to get me to enter an email address [yeah, right]
Ignoring marketing crap like that has become almost subconscious, like slamming shut a popup window before the graphics even begin to load, but even so I think there's a cumulative effect that comes from having to deal with hucksters and panhandlers online on a daily basis, and it isn't uplifting. Knowing that our internet, not to mention our society and culture, is like this (for the time being anyway - a lot of these places are folding as their funds run out) is just simply sad.
One minor point of sublime satisfaction: With Linux i can kill the netscape thread and restart my browser without rebooting when it locks up from some bad m$java, or activeX, or Flash, or whatever those jokers uploaded to do stuff clandestinely to their customers. Incidentally, when I'm talking to Windows users about Linux this fact, along with added security, goes over real well.
I suppose having said all that I should disclaim that I'm not at all an antimaterialist, and that I do when necessary like to purchase online often. The merchants I buy from respect me as a customer and I in turn don't begrudge them the money.
Different businesses have different methods of operation, and deeply different values. The good guys and the others are all equally capitalistic, but the marketplace is and will continue to favor one attitude over the opposite as long as the playing field remains level. The ultimate destination of this process isn't depressing at all, but the present noise level while all this is taking place can be in itself a little annoying to listen to at length without a break.
give me a
This applies to lonely people in the aol chat rooms. It has nothing to do with most of us. I get pretty damn excited more often than not at 2 am while on page 312 of hacking exposed.
-Manic Depression, searches my soul, what I want, I just dont know.
Ain't you depressed when you learn you have been fragged 214 times in a row by a 12 year old living 6000 miles from you, so you can't even spank him for not showing the respect he should have had for your elderly fingers and cracking reflexes ?!?
8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker