fear, happiness and alienation

This page considers the notion of 'happiness' in digital environments, questioning some of the more simplistic claims that the net has reduced personal or social well-being.

It covers -

• introduction
• happiness
• fear and panics
• meaning
• relationships
• rats in a digital maze?

     introduction

It is common to encounter claims that digital technologies have drecreased the happiness of individuals or more broadly eroded the well-being of communities and societies. Such claims often centre on person to person communication via the net, characterised as fostering alienation and infidelity, and on access to erotic content (similarly criticised for alienation, break-up of marriages and commodification of people). Those claims are problematical.

Assertions that life for most people is now more dangerous or more empty (with greater alienation and greater recourse to palliatives such as alcohol, pharmaceuticals, the net and esoteric religions) are also problematical.

     happiness

It is unclear that, overall, people are unhappier now than they were 50 or 100 years ago, despite assertions by advocacy groups that hark back to an idyllic past that supposedly featured higher literacy, lower street crime, greater social cohesion and warmer family relationships.

Works such as Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Knopf 2006), Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (New York: Russell Sage 1999) edited by Daniel Kahneman, Ed Diener & Norbert Schwarz, Globalization & Well-Being (Vancouver: UBC Press 2001) by John Helliwell, Culture & Subjective Well Being (Cambridge: Mit Press 2003) by Ed Diener and Happiness & Economics: How the Economy and Institutions Affect Human Well-Being (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2001) by Bruno Frey & Alois Stutzer indicate well being in advanced economies has not shown a substantial decline since the appearance of the net, the latest bout of globalisation, cable television or suburbia.

As demonstrated by Nicholas White in A Brief History of Happiness (Oxford: Blackwell 2005), Darrin McMahon in The Pursuit of Happiness (London: Allen Lane 2006) and Arthur Imhof in Lost Worlds: How Our European Ancestors Coped With Everyday Life and Why Life Is So Hard Today (Charlottesville: Uni of Virginia Press 1996) most laments are deeply traditional, echoing past denunciations of new media and economic change. We have noted particular denunciations, such as Elizabeth Farrelly's Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness (Cambridge: MIT Press 2008), elsewhere on this site.

The printing press for example was claimed to produce indolent youth, subvert a social order ordained by heaven and erode the chastity of foolish girls. Plato polemicised against writing and used Socrates as a muthpiece for the claim that

children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannise their teachers.

The telegraph (and later the telephone) threatened the end of civilisation through opportunities for illicit romances and for commercial deception in a world where markets were somewhat bigger than a consumer/vendor's village and conmen thrived. Radio encouraged consumption and rural depopulation. Film glamourised violence or destroyed national cultures. Television sapped marriages and discouraged the reading of Allan Bloom, albeit disseminating the image of Billy Graham and Pat Robertson (Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson-lite). Comics resulted in juvenile delinquency, long hair and "violent and depraved crimes".

Unsurprisingly, contemporary doomsaying has provoked responses such as Why TV Is Good For Kids (Sydney: Pan Macmillan 2006) by Catharine Lumby & Duncan Fine, Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear (London: Virgin 2008) by Dan Gardner, Panicology (New York: Viking 2008) by Simon Briscoe & Hugh Aldersey-Williams or the pop Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (New York: Riverhead 2005) by Steven Johnson.

     fear

Has life become more dangerous, more risky, more uncertain?

For much of the world the answer appears to be no. People in advanced economies are substantially less likely to die from violence, poverty, accident, rabid dogs, defective heaters, botulism, childbirth or cancer than they were 50 or 100 years ago.

Perceptions of threat are often out of kilter with reality. The US Civil Aviation Authority for example notes that between 1950 and 1954 there was one passenger death for every 461,000 passengers. In 2002-2006 that figure was down to one death per 313 million passengers, with more people - particularly the aged - dying from falls in the bathroom.

Identification of danger is discussed in Barry Glassner's The Culture Of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid Of The Wrong Thing (New York: Perseus 2000), Joanna Bourke's Fear: A Cultural History (London: Virago 2005), Inventing Fear of Crime: Criminology and the Politics of Anxiety (Cullompton: Willan 2007) by Murray Lee, John Mueller's A False Sense of Insecurity? (PDF) and Corey Robin's Fear: The History of a Political Idea (New York: Oxford Uni Press 2004).

There is a broader discussion of conspiracy culture - along with pointers to works such as Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics & Other Essays (New York: Knopf 1965), Marcus's Paranoia Within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 1999) and The Age of Anxiety: Conspiracy Theory & the Human Sciences (Oxford: Blackwell 2001) edited by Jane Parish elsewhere in this site.

Notions of 'moral panics' are explored here.

     relationships

Are relationships weaker in a digital era, with pervasive alienation and an erosion of civil society as people 'bowl alone'. Is that an artefact of digital technologies or instead reflective of broader economic and social changes, in which for the cost of living and notions of empowerment have unchained women from the hearth?

One response has been that what has variously been described as cyberfriendship, virtual friendship or online friendship is as meaningful as much offline interaction - and may indeed be richer because, like the telephone and the post, it is not restricted to face to face contact. In practice it is necessary to juxtapose images of the disfunctional geek and 'cyber-widow' or fakester and online lothario with those the stultifying boredom and surveillance identified by historians of rural culture and novelists such as Flaubert and Upton Sinclair.

Defences of online relationships include Danah Boyd's 2006 paper Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing Community into Being on Social Network Sites, Nancy Baym's Tune in, Log on: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (Thousand Oaks: Sage 2000), Rebecca Adams' 'The Demise of Territorial Determinism: Online Friendship' in Placing Friendship in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1998), Malcolm Parks' 1996 paper Making Friends in Cyberspace, John Campbell's Getting it Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality and Embodied Identity (Binghamton: Haworth 2004), Mary Chayko's Connecting: how we form social bonds and communities in the internet age (State Uni of New York Press 2002), Aaron Ben-Ze'ev's Love Online: Emotions on the Internet (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2004), 'Dating & Intimacy in the 21st Century: The Use of Online Dating Sites in Australia' by Millsom Henry-Waring & Jo Barraket in 6(1) International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society (2008) 14-33 and Remote Relationships in a Small World (New York: Lang 2008) edited by Samantha Holland.

Works such as Stacey Oliker's 'The Modernization of Friendship: Individualism, Intimacy and Gender in the Nineteenth Century' in Placing Friendship in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1998) edited by Rebecca Adams indicate that a deeper response might be that friendship is what people make of it: it is not necessarily enhanced or fundamentally degraded by being partly/fully conducted online, in the same way that during the past 500 years people have built and maintained relationships through letters.

     rats in a digital maze

The Synergy Myth: And Other Ailments of Business Today (New York: St Martin's Press 1997) by Harold Gennen & Brent Bowers fretted that

Let's not get carried away. The information superhighway is a tool, perhaps as revolutionary an innovation as the printing press or the telephone, but a tool nonetheless. A lot of it will be a guy in New Jersey sitting in his room talking to a guy in Iceland about the weather. It will also open up a huge opportunity to waste your time. You ought to go back to the beginning of the television era and read some of the claims people made for that new technological wonder.

One might thus question the enthusiasm for the (latest) 'new simplicity, evident in people profiled by Mary Grigsby in Buying Time and Getting By: The Voluntary Simplicity Movement (Albany: State Uni of New York Press 2004).

US writer William Whyte argued in The Organization Man (New York: Doubleday 1956) that bureaucracies alienated and effeminised men in a world of consumer gratification, in contrast to blue-collar workers whose activity was more authentic, virile and honest (anxieties about precious bodily essences satirised in Dr Strangelove).

Christopher Dummitt's perceptive The Manly Modern: Masculinity in Postwar Canada (Vancouver: Uni of British Columbia Press 2007) questions Whyte's pop sociology - and by extension that of dot-com romanticists such as Gilder - arguing that 'modernity' embodied distinctly traditional and 'masculine' virtues such as rationality, order, and self-discipline. To be modern was to embrace progress - digital or otherwise - and to control both oneself and the environment. "To be modern, in other words, was to be a man."





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