I wonder if the age of "first online" has an impact. I'm 30 now. I got into local BBSes in high school (mostly with other high schoolers, so there was still a strong real-life social component), and only got on the internet in a big way in college.
I don't recognize myself in very much of what Aaron wrote. Oh, a little with the distraction thing, but at least for me it's just the easy availability of distractions. TV, video games, even books can still do that to me too.
I also wonder is just how much people are different. I sometimes describe myself as asocial; not antisocial, asocial, in that I need very little social contact to survive or be happy, and I top out pretty fast.
(BTW, I'm not fishing for pity and you might get the wrong impression from "asocial"; I'm happily married, have a kid with another coming up, and so on. I need more than 0 and I know that, it's just I have lower needs than most people seem to.)
Guess I don't really have a point, except: This sort of thing should be taken seriously. The internet is a truly new social phenomenon, and while I believe the positive outweighs the negatives (at least for most people), the negatives are real, and we should figure out, both personally and collectively, how to ameliorate the very-real negatives.
(andreyf's post highlights one thing I get from the internet: I am interested in tech and politics, but I vastly prefer online discussion, with its tools, over real-life discussion of those topics. It also keeps my wife and friends happy since they have little interest. On the other hand, I don't smear wife-and-friends all over the Internet; I eschew Facebook, and still haven't mentioned my soon-to-be-1-year-old son on my blog yet. I also wonder if perhaps this sort of strong partition is a good idea.)
For myself, I definitely fall into the introvert category - I get fatigued fairly quickly after fairly common social interactions.
The problem is I think for a lot of us, our default mode of "chilling out" is spending time online browsing sites, checking email, reading the latest news. All of those activities provide the illusion of taking a break from the "real world" but I don't think they provide the respite we believe.
It's really easy to get agitated online about some silly flame war, techcrunch linkbait, or some offhand comment someone made about your project on twitter.
So I can see how a life offline, or the compromise of spending less time online, can certainly be beneficial.
I must have missed that one. Yeah, that's me. I coined "asocial" because "introverted" picked up a lot of wrong connotations (I'm not socially awkward, misanthropic, etc.), but that is definitely it.
I don't recognize myself in very much of what Aaron wrote. Oh, a little with the distraction thing, but at least for me it's just the easy availability of distractions. TV, video games, even books can still do that to me too.
I also wonder is just how much people are different. I sometimes describe myself as asocial; not antisocial, asocial, in that I need very little social contact to survive or be happy, and I top out pretty fast.
(BTW, I'm not fishing for pity and you might get the wrong impression from "asocial"; I'm happily married, have a kid with another coming up, and so on. I need more than 0 and I know that, it's just I have lower needs than most people seem to.)
Guess I don't really have a point, except: This sort of thing should be taken seriously. The internet is a truly new social phenomenon, and while I believe the positive outweighs the negatives (at least for most people), the negatives are real, and we should figure out, both personally and collectively, how to ameliorate the very-real negatives.
(andreyf's post highlights one thing I get from the internet: I am interested in tech and politics, but I vastly prefer online discussion, with its tools, over real-life discussion of those topics. It also keeps my wife and friends happy since they have little interest. On the other hand, I don't smear wife-and-friends all over the Internet; I eschew Facebook, and still haven't mentioned my soon-to-be-1-year-old son on my blog yet. I also wonder if perhaps this sort of strong partition is a good idea.)