The internet is no cure for loneliness. People who spend more time online are less happy, but what are we to do when connecting with people online is our only option? With the abrupt arrival of the coronavirus, we’re being told that covering our mouths, washing our hands and avoiding other people is a matter of life or death—if not for ourselves, then possibly for someone we love.The internet can not save us from loneliness in a pandemic. Loneliness, in turn, is an actual hazard to our health. More dangerous than obesity and nearly as lethal as smoking.
Forced isolation only deepens the emptiness we often feel when communicating by screen.
It is important to occasionally get your team together in person to cement social bonds, build trust and brainstorm.
We can't do that at Uncle Willys Co-op, most coops in the Good Games Big Farm universe never meet each other in person.
But why these online-only connections don’t quite cut it remains something of a mystery to social scientists.
Anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell has asserted we are capable of 250,000 different facial expressions.
Research by body-language experts Allan and Barbara Pease indicates that 60% to 80% of the impact
of someone’s arguments in a negotiation is attributable to body language.
In 1956, sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl coined the phrase “parasocial interaction”. This “intimacy at a distance,” as they described it, was striking because, in all of human history until the invention of the gramophone and radio, hearing a human voice meant someone was present.
TV added a visual element, and the logic embedded deep in our fundamentally social brains—I hear a voice and see a face, therefore someone trustworthy is present and I feel safe—kicked in. The problem was that all these relationships were one-sided. Sitting around the house watching television, parasocializing with our favorite video game, news anchors or sitcom characters,didn’t confer the same benefits as socializing with real people. Communicating through the internet also necessitates the construction of a digital self, which is by nature incomplete and often false.
How we choose to live our days is how we will end them: hunched over a screen, pressing “refresh” until the very end or.....
The antidote to the slow poison of parasocialization is, of course, socialization. Just like our primate ancestors. Live and in the flesh, but the covid virus is hunting us. So, socialization, hahaha.
Unfortunately,millions of us are about to find out just how long we can survive without it.
Good luck, Bon Chance, and Bless you all here @ Uncle Willys Coop, other GGBF coops and all of you volunteers, mediators and employees. Special thanks to
[email protected].
Please contribute a simple 3 line Haiku to our Haiku thread in the Big Farm Forum and Uncle Willys Co-op is accepting new members now. Do not worry, Be Happy :-)
Sincerely Uncle Willy
AKA: Kim Wilson,
[email protected]
Please tell us how do you combat feelings of social isolation?
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and made art, made love, made music and learned new ways of being, and were still.
And the people healed.
the earth began to heal.
as they had been healed.
Kitty O'Meara
remixed, added and edited by Uncle Willy
https://the-daily-round.com/2020/03/16/in-the-time-of-pandemic/