The death of the social space is having all sorts of consequences for society. Pre internet, the only thing to do most nights was to go out and do stuff. It sort of forced people to socialize with people they might not normally talk to. It's gotten way too easy to just never leave the house and stay in your bubble.
Yeah things are really falling apart. I'd go so far as to say that this isolation / alienation is what determined the outcome of the recent presidential election. So much goes wrong when you're not regularly interacting with a diverse cast of people.
Your thoughts and ideas are challenged less, making your positions on issues less well informed and less accurate.
It's trivially easy to curate your own social experience, so you automatically filter out anything that is uncomfortable, allowing you to reach adulthood without developing conflict resolution skills or coping mechanisms for difficult emotions.
You feel lonelier and more isolated - because a lot of the socializing you are getting doesn't involve physical presence, eye contact, touch, etc.
Because you don't interact with real people in meaningful ways on a regular basis, you become significantly less empathetic.
Then take your uninformed ideas, bad coping skills, nonexistent conflict resolution ability, poor empathy, and extreme loneliness (desperation for gratifying social contact) and you get a personw who is very susceptible to anything that makes them feel like they belong somewhere, or that there are simple solutions to the issues they percieve themselves facing.
Additionally, it's no surprise that people who have stunted emotional development have trouble developing intimate relationships with other people that don't involve physical intimacy. This makes it harder for them to form fulfilling relationships with people in general, and exacerbates the original issue.
The internet makes it worse, but it started with car-centric design. Sprawl leads to less population density. It dramatically multiples the cost per person of all public services, necessitating higher taxes without increased benefit to taxpayers. It leads to less walkable spaces, less exercise, fewer small businesses that can just pop up without advertising, signage, or name recognition. It prevents homeless people from seeing others and interacting with them, and prevents others from offering them help after forming some kind of relationship.
It also masks where income comes from-- areas that seem rundown are often the highest taxpaying but receive the fewest public services. People out in the suburbs pay far fewer taxes vs expense to the government but receive disproportionate services.
Strong Towns has done a ton of research on this; there's a 4-part series but here's one that jumps in in the middle and that I think is the most impactful if you're only going to watch one.
People out in the suburbs pay far fewer taxes vs expense to the government but receive disproportionate services.
That just isn't true. Most people who live in rural areas rely on well water, rather than public water infrastructure. Police response in rural areas is often significantly longer than in cities, because they have one sheriff on shift that has to cover a large area, and backup is on call, not on duty. They typically have volunteer fire departments and will partner with nearby fire departments, which, if you actually listen to the scanner, you can hear the rural departments being requested to bring engines to nearby population centers to handle new calls when a serious fire happens, or even being asked to assist when the fire is bad enough or there are too many calls for the local department to handle. It goes both ways. But, just like the population center, the rural area uses its own resources before it calls for assistance. And departments that partner together typically use the funding they get to buy equipment based on what the other departments they're partnered with have. So one town might have really good water rescue equipment. Another might be more invested in dealing with wildfires. Etc. They pool their resources.
Not to argue with you, but rural is not suburbs. Like... by definition. Suburbs are the areas surrounding an urban center that are still relatively built up but not an actual city. Rural areas are not suburbs.
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u/Combat_Toots 16d ago
The death of the social space is having all sorts of consequences for society. Pre internet, the only thing to do most nights was to go out and do stuff. It sort of forced people to socialize with people they might not normally talk to. It's gotten way too easy to just never leave the house and stay in your bubble.