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Welcome to The Age of the Web Hermit
tyroneking writes "Phil Hartup on bit-tech.net has captured the Zeitgeist of the web-aware generation: The
Age of the Web Hermit describes how some lucky souls can live their lives, earn money, buy necessities and even find love on the Internet. 'Is there anything that we really need good old fashioned Real Life for any more?'; not me!"
Speaking as an abstainer in a country where socializing equates to "getting very, very drunk", I can safely say that reading Slashdot trumps socializing every single time.
May the Maths Be with you!
... then you're probably pretty much connected to the Real World. Running water, power, fancy new video boards... someone in the real world is providing those items.
I don't think this is any more isolation than a serious resident of the library used to be 50 years ago. And when people in NY figured out (decades ago) that they could, say, write books for a living and have Chinese delivered at 3:00AM... it's scarecely different. In fact, I'd argue that a lot people who used to be hermits (or would have been if they were born 20 years earlier) are probalby more connected to the real world because the internet exists.
Unless, as I suspect, I'm currently typing this text into a big, scalable, and very flawed Turing test machine. If a response is posted to this, its non-sequitor-ness will prove my suspicions. Go!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
There have always been shut-ins. The net just gives them more to do behind their drawn curtains and locked doors. Some people may see this as cool, but in the long run we look as such people as kooky. We all need to interact with others, that is just our nature. We are social creatures whether we like it or not. Some more so than others to be sure, but still.
Can you live locked in a basement having evrything shipped to you and slid under the door? Sure, but to me that sounds very much like prison.
No thanks.
The japanese hikkomori syndrome. ( http://www.jref.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-909. html )
When people start substituting real life with a digitall one it usually doesn't end to well.
Humans are by nature social beings, if the "old" ways fail one starts to look for an alternative.
Besides, real life interaction (think of sex ) will allways beat the "cyber" equivalent.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
From the article: "...we have to ask ourselves -- is there anything that we really need good old fashioned Real Life for any more? Is a life of doing things and meeting people as our primitive ancestors in the late 20th Century knew it becoming redundant?"
Let's assume that a billion people on Earth have the money and time to be online regularly. (this is probably more than the real number) That leaves more than five billion without such a thing. There are significant percentages of people in rural parts of the world (from Africa to America and everywhere in between) who don't even have electricity, telephones, or real plumbing. And let's not even talk about food and medicine.
The upshot? If you have the capacity for living most of your life online, and you can take all that real-life survival stuff for granted, you are enjoying a life of luxury. And the best part is that, online, you will almost never encounter those poor starving folks, so you can safely ignore their existence (just like you do on your way to Starbucks). Enjoy!
Quick check: in terms of income, how do you rank globally?
(Go ahead, mod me as a troll... I've got karma to burn.)
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
I confess, I'm a hermit. I'm probably one of the very few people who goes to college and spends all his time in his room. I'm not a full-hermit, though, since I do go out to buy groceries and things like that, but my social life is basically non-existent. I don't even have friends in college, and I have maybe a total of 5 people I talk to through IM. Being a hermit isn't that bad, but most importantly, it's my choice. Some people may prefer to hermit themselves due to social anxieties or phobias. At least the Internet makes hermitting more entertaining. The biggest draw-back is probably the lack of physical contact. I haven't received a hug in years. I don't miss talking out-loud much though. As a matter of fact, since I haven't talked in so long, when I talk out-loud my throat gets sore. Ouch.
You've got that reversed. It's not that the drunk people don't want to hang out with sober people, it's that sober people don't want to hang out with drunk people. I'll have some wine or hard lemonade every now and then, but I'm over the stage where I enjoyed getting plastered, and now people just look like idiots to me when they're drunk, and not in an entertaining way.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
Moral of the story? If you are a modern day hermit, atleast take the time to introduce yourself to the pizza man incase your stalkers find you out and erase your IDENTITY.
Alternatively, when being chased by phychopaths who want your data, remember to back it up on a trusty floppy disk. NOTHING can hurt those!
Alternatively, always choose Macintosh, the only laptop that effieciently upload viruses to alien space crafts and save the planet.
Alternatively, if you are as hot as Sandra Bullock and are also a modern day hermit, I would like you to have my ICQ#, I'm here to help ANY WAY I CAN.
I hate people that are just smother you, wanting to hang on you all the time...but, I guess it just is some people's nature to be one way or the other.
I've actually never understood people who just HAVE to be around other people...or they get lonely. I've seen it with guys...like they HAVE to be married, or they don't function right...never understood that. I've seen friends come out of bad marriages...and they just cannot seem to have fun being single...going home alone at night at times just seems to really bother them I guess. They'd be single for a bit, and get right back into marriage, often in bad ones again, they were so desperate to not be alone, they'd jump on the first piece of trim they hit and get married.....
I prefer the single life...because at some point...they or myself...goes HOME.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
College and grad school were great for socializing in person. There were people all around me who were interested in intellectual things, and it was even pretty easy to find people who were interested in the same intellectual things I was interested in. We were at the same stage in our lives, and although it seemed like we were working our butts off in school, the truth was that we had a lot of free time, because we didn't have kids, or pets, or lawns to mow.
The real world is a whole different deal. Nothing against my neighbors, they're nice people and I enjoy shooting the breeze with them now and then, but we just have nothing in common. Parenthood, work, and living in suburbia just aren't very conducive to making contact with people who care about books, or jazz, or free information.
Internet relationships tend to be shallow and temporary, but if I didn't have e-mail, usenet, and (I admit) slashdot, my opportunities to have any kind of an intellectual life outside my own head would be extremely limited.
My family and I just spent three weeks in Greece and England, and it was an amazing contrast with the kind of alienating suburban environment I live in here in the U.S. In Athens, extended families go out together for dinner in sidewalk cafes at 10 in the evening. In little farming villages in Greece, the older men hang out in coffee shops and talk. In England, people hang out and talk in pubs. The U.S. is just pathetic, especially where I live (Orange County, CA), in terms of giving people spaces where they can interact with the rest of society. Everybody just drives places in their air-conditioned SUV's. Maybe shopping malls are the closest equivalent we have, but I just don't enjoy them as places to hang out, people-watch, or run into friends.
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