The Arts in the University
Why We Need the Athenaeum
People are social animals. We thrive in communities; we need shared interests, convivial debates, and meaningful interactions. In their absence, we decline mentally, emotionally, even physically. Last April, the office of the U.S. Surgeon General published an eighty-page report titled Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. It detailed a worrying trend of Americans becoming more socially disconnected and lonely. While acknowledging that this trend is not entirely new, the report emphisized the exponential growth of loneliness and isolation, just as technology continues to provide new ways of easy virtual interaction.
The report also claimed that effectively everyone (96 to 99 percent of adults under 65) engages online at some level, while revealing that one in three adults are online “almost constantly”—twice the proportion just eight years earlier, in 2015. This growth of digital engagement is in directly inverse proportion to the mental, emotional, and physical well-being of Americans. Life online offers only a simulacrum of interpersonal engagement, without the benefits of genuine human connection. The sad, and inevitable, conclusion is that online contacts simply do not, and cannot, provide what people need. Even setting aside the egregious behaviors enabled by online anonymity, virtual social media interactions, bolstered by targeted algorithms, lead the participants away from nurturing open-minded discussions, and towards the acrimony of echo-chamber auto-confirmation and bizarrely biased environments.
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