Alone Again, Naturally

Spending time alone?  Or avoiding loneliness?

Really?

The idea was to see how our views of boredom, loneliness, selfhood, and community have evolved over time, and how technologies have sparked those evolutions. And what they found was striking: We don’t merely develop new devices for expressing our emotions — our devices actually alter what emotions we express.

Our emotions are altered by the decline of pen and paper, and the rise of keyboards and screens?  What, pray tell, were our emotions like when we were almost universally illiterate?  Or do our emotions have to do with culture, with philosophy and even theology?  The very idea that our emotions are discernible by the technology available to us is, shall we say, suspect.

Or should we just cut to the chase and call it baseless?  Because to the man with the hammer:

The idea was to see how our views of boredom, loneliness, selfhood, and community have evolved over time, and how technologies have sparked those evolutions. 

The whole world is a nail.  And here we go:

Very different things. The word “boredom” didn’t even exist until the mid-19th century. When people experienced empty moments, they described them as dull or monotonous or tedious. Boredom wasn’t a category of experience yet.

People expected feelings of empty time and accepted them as part and parcel of being human. It doesn’t mean they enjoyed dull moments by any stretch of the imagination, but they weren’t surprised by empty times. And in fact many thought that’s how God had laid out the world.

Just as 19th-century Americans accepted monotony as inevitable, they also accepted loneliness — or as they called it, “lonesomeness” — as part of the order of things; they thought it was unpleasant but not unexpected and that everybody was going to experience aloneness in their lives.

Start with that first paragraph.  There is enough there to keep Wittgenstien and a whole host of French philosophers busy for another century (it kept them busy enough in the last century); not to mention the Desert Fathers who identified acedie in the fourth century, so I kind of doubt "boredom wasn't a category of experience yet" in the 19th century.  And speaking of the hammer and the nail:

Sure: the radio. We found many people in the 1920s and 1930s thinking the radio was transforming their lives and times, often voicing the sentiment, “Thanks to the radio, I don’t have to sit in solitude in my house.” We found evidence of that in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s.

It's an interesting observation; but it raises the question:  why did people feel the solitude of their homes was oppressive?  Because radio relieved it?  Or because modern life was so dehumanizing?  Consider Eliot's version:

"Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ..."

That's from 1915, and technology has certainly changed the way people live already by that time.  All the "lonely men," like the narrator, "leaning out of windows,"  each in his own apartment but as separate as if they were hermits alone in the desert.  And is that because of the radio, or in spite of it; or does the radio have nothing to do with it at all?  Are they not lonely because they don't have radios yet?  Or are they lonely and isolated because of technology?  Maybe it has to do with philosophies of how human live should be lived, and what it is lived for?  Technology there certainly has to do with why people would live that way, rather than in the extended family units familiar in human history for centuries (and shattering in England already by the time of Grey's "Elegy"); but technology is not introducing ideas like boredom and isolation, it is creating those realities because of the way human being shift their standards of what life is and how and why it is lived.

I agree we are giving up something essential when we give up the ability to be alone with our thoughts.  But I'm old enough to remember knowing people scared of precisely that (and those of us who liked our solitude were both "weird" and "anti-social," with the latter meant as a clinical description), long before the personal computer was even a glimmer in the eye of Woz.  Humans have always been gregarious social animals; the "loner" is the odd ball, the "lone wolf" (a metaphor meant to underline the strangeness, as wolves are pack animals).  Technology didn't change that.  Still, there's something here:

I think there are lots of things that people are giving up when they lose the ability to be alone. Unfilled moments, moments where you don’t have entertainment, or moments where you don’t have companionship, may actually spawn creativity. Certainly a lot of 19th-century romantics thought that.

Being still with yourself can give access to all sorts of ideas and musings that wouldn’t otherwise occur. So perhaps in our quest to end boredom our creativity is being stunted, and we’re actually becoming more boring.

Maybe; or maybe we weren't all that interesting before the internet.  I don't remember us being all that fascinating or more self-actualized.  And yeah, just like the idea of "self-actualization" comes from the 19th century Romantics, so does the fact the mass of men thought that handful of Romantics to be a bit crazy or self-indulgent.  Indeed, I think there's a direct line from the worst excesses of Romanticism to the present day, and it doesn't necessarily run through smart phones:

We certainly found that, among the people we interviewed today, they talked about how they felt new and growing pressure to express, celebrate, and brand themselves.

Technology makes it accessible, but culture makes it seem that's the only expression possible.  Cell phones might well be an inevitable result of the scientific revolution, but the "growing pressure to express, celebrate, and brand themselves" is straight outta Wordsworth and Byron, bay-bee.  Or Whitman, if you want to be American about it.  Whaddya think the hippies and college students were doing in the '60's, when the only technology of mass media was TV studio cameras?

Get back to me when you've thought about this a bit more.  Seems more than a little half-baked right now.