That's meaningless. "never getting the chance to talk to anybody"? I'm talking to you, and everyone else who reads this web page, right now.
Just look around you. Look at all the people who are in real world physical social situations and still spend most of their time staring at their smartphone and the stream of social updates from Twitter, from Facebook, from Email...
Staring at those screens is compelling because they are so damn social now. It's not some mythical solitary activity like playing solitaire or reading a book.
No, I don't think that's the same thing. In my experience, real-life conversations have a much higher quantity of ... something. Affection? When I talk offline, most conversations have a subtext of 'You're a valuable human being; I like hanging out with you.' However, when I talk on Facebook or Hacker News or email, I'm much more likely to just deal with the direct topic of conversation. Talking online is about ideas; talking offline is about people. Of course this is a massive generalization, but it seems to fit my own experiences.
An interesting question, then, is why, when talking online, do I focus on ideas rather than people? I think a major factor is simply that plaintext is a far less expressive medium, so it takes extra effort to convey complicated subtexts. When we talk offline we can show interest in people without having to consciously think about it; our expressions of caring are primarily subconscious and therefore don't transfer well to plaintext.
It's interesting that you can't tell the difference. You are not talking to parent poster, you are typing text into a box while alone in room. You can't see his(?) facial expressions, change the subject, comment on things taking place around both of you. You just type into a box and sometime later you might see this reply.
Don't get me wrong, communicating on the Internet is great. But for some types of personality (and pretty much all of us to some extent) face-to-face interaction is vital.
I get your point, but i still think the girl the op talked about meant something different. My girlfriend thinks the same...sitting infront of a computer has nothing todo with social activity for her, even when she occasionally checks facebook, and she would go crazy if she had to be alone in front of a computer all day, while i enjoy it alot.
>That's meaningless. "never getting the chance to talk to anybody"? I'm talking to you, and everyone else who reads this web page, right now.
No, you're not. Your writing a message to an online "message forum", to people who could care less about who you are, don't know how you look, don't know or care what you do or how you feel, and only want to hear very specific things from you (e.g. not straying off topic of this thread).
>Look at all the people who are in real world physical social situations and still spend most of their time staring at their smartphone and the stream of social updates from Twitter, from Facebook, from Email...
You miss that they do it _in addition_ to actually being social. Doing just the "social updates in Twitter, FB etc" thing, would be no substitute.
Just look around you. Look at all the people who are in real world physical social situations and still spend most of their time staring at their smartphone and the stream of social updates from Twitter, from Facebook, from Email...
Staring at those screens is compelling because they are so damn social now. It's not some mythical solitary activity like playing solitaire or reading a book.