A discussion in Janiece’s blog yesterday on meeting online friends brought to mind a classic SF novel.
The Naked Sun, by Isaac Asimov, postulates a world, Solaria, where face-to-face human contact has become a thing of the past. Residents live singly on huge estates, surrounded by technology and thousands of robots, and interact with their fellow humans only via telepresence.
The story is a murder mystery, solved by a human detective partnered with a humanoid robot. The taboo against face-to-face contact is so strong that one of the characters commits suicide rather than have a forced physical encounter with another human (who, ironically, is the humanoid robot).
It made me think – there are some science fiction visions of the future that are within the realm of possibility, given our environment today. (Isn’t that the nature of SF – creating plausible futures?) But some seem more probable, even start to seem eerily similar, as our culture changes and grows.
Gregariousness and technology adoption are both broad spectrums. Some folks spend all their time at busy brick-and-mortar workplaces, out and about with friends and family, involved in athletics, living in the real world. Others work at home in virtual offices, order their food & clothing online and have it delivered, work out at home, and for them, getting out is a rare occasion. It’s a generalization, but the folks at the out-and-about end of the spectrum tend to not spend a lot of time online; the folks at the other end spend a great deal of time online, and their computer screen becomes a window to their work, their daily practical logistics and their social life.
As a virtual office worker, I’ve become more reclusive, tending toward that latter end of the spectrum. I can see how it would be easy for a technologically oriented society to continue the trend toward isolation with a virtual interface to the world.
While I believe that online activities and friendships are valuable and rewarding, I really don’t want to become a geek-hermit. I need to get out of the house, do hands-on activities, and spend time with real-life friends and family more often.
I don’t think I want to visit Solaria, even as a tourist.