Did COVID Groom Us to Be Loners?

Stop me if you’ve seen this one before: You’re out at restaurant. You look over to the table next to you. Instead of a family of four conversing, each person is an island to themselves, glued to their phones.

Did you know Americans spend less time socializing face-to-face than they do on Facebook? Reporter Shawn Boyer writes that, “…the average American spends three times more time on social media than on actually socializing with people.” Meanwhile, only 13% of Americans without children living at home have friends over on a weekly basis.

We are losing our human connections.

We are also losing our ability to talk dispassionately about critical topics. According to the Pew Institute, 35% of U.S. adults report that since the pandemic they avoid social gatherings and events. They no longer need “traveling and vacations” or “going out” for fun. It’s even worse for young people who will happily play Fortnite until their eyeballs fall out of their skulls.

While such developments may seem innocuous, they’re harbingers of a civilization in free-fall. After all, relational trust, good-will, and regular human interaction are the bedrock of community.

Not only that, but they also enable people to discuss emotionally-fraught topics, something ever more vital now that WWW III is right around the corner.

          Returning to the fake pandemic, it’s clear to anyone paying attention that

the powers-that-shouldn’t-be had multiple nefarious agendas. One involved destroying interpersonal relationships. Both the young and old—but especially the former—were groomed to survive without others. Remember when they told us we would be safer alone? Even our senior citizens?

Now, it seems many of us stayed stuck that way.

Of course, during lockdowns, our computers, TVs, and phones remained the only open portal to the outside world for many. Riots, social unrest, and government-sanctioned tyranny permeated our screens daily. Such phenomena came to us through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and other news feeds. But, according to the Washington Post, “[M]ore than 200 million U.S. Facebook users…consumed news in an ideologically segregated way.”

In other words, information was presented to us in a polarized fashion. As Boyer remarks, “Really smart engineers and designers are building their products to suck us in.”

It’s no secret these communication modalities fight for our eyeballs in the Attention Economy.

So, how do you get more eyeballs? Produce negative emotions: Outrage. Anger. Fear. The more polarized we are, the more isolated and the more emotional we get. And the more time we spend on social media platforms.

It’s a vicious, vicious cycle.

If money were the only aim, that would be one thing. But that’s not social media’s only purpose. Powerful forces are incentivized to control what we see, what we discuss, even what we think.

To this point, co-founder of CHT and computer scientist Tristan Harris writes, “…What this misses is that in the 1970s, when you were just gossiping on the telephone, there wasn’t [sic] a hundred engineers on the other side of the screen who knew exactly how your psychology worked and orchestrated you into a double bind with each other.”

Put simply, social media programmers create algorithms they know will create emotional upheaval, drawing you back to your device rather than the world outside of it. Which means less dinner conversations and less human interaction.

More insidiously, technology of the social media variety trains our emotional perceptions, nudging us to feel certain ways about certain people and/or events.

Once upon a time, the dinner table gave us more than just food. It gave us a disarming platform and practice for peaceable, important conversations.

Our constitutional republic rests on mutually respected discourse. But what happens when we no longer talk to each other face-to-face? What happens when we can’t even remember how?