To preface this, I’d like to point out that I woke up at 7am today. It’s Sunday. No one should ever have to, or worse, by choice, wake up on a Sunday at 7am. One of my main objections to organized Christianity is just that, they kill your Sundays.
As I look down my buddy list in iChat, with each person’s away message displayed out to the side of their names, I get really frustrated. I’m looking, and it’s nearly universal. Everyone’s away message is sad, depressing or refers to something that went wrong. Delving into their profiles only proves to be more disheartening. Hell, looking at my own profile or away message at times is pretty sad.
This brings up a good question. Why is everyone online so damned sad? Is it just the people I know? Is it something inherent about those who choose to be connected and jacked in all the time? Is there some effect that constant typing and mouse movement have on our psyches that drive us all to depression? Okay, so that wasn’t one good question, but rather a few.
I think I have the answer. It’s not just my friends. A random sampling of
Livejournals,
Myspace profiles, and various
other sundry online sites pretty much bears out that people who spend some large amount of time online are all sullen. I know emo is in, and cliched band lyrics are the theme of the day lately, but come on. I actually have grown to realize something. While the internet keeps increasing in age, the people on it keep decreasing in age. 13-17 year olds rule this space, with ample amounts of time and nigh-constant access between school and home. And at the age of 15, there are two fairly common things that happen. You are either depressed and listen to music to “soothe your soul,” or you aren’t depressed, but listen to depressing music anyway, because it’s angsty and everyone wants to be angsty at 15, right?
Well, in doing so, these folks have populated the ‘net with a large amount of sad, depressing away messages and images and blogs that all the rest of us have to see. But then why are all my twenty-something friends also depressed? Shouldn’t it just be the rare amount of youngsters I know that are sad?
Not if you know a bit about the way that human communication and interaction works. At a young age, you learn how to interact with others based on how others interact. If you have a family that is very open with their emotions, lots of hugs and whatnot, you’ll probably grow up to be very open yourself, sharing of yourself more readily than someone who grew up in a household where emotion was not number one, resulting in fewer expressions of feelings for each other. So, in this still fairly new arena, the dominant form of communication is through away messages containing song lyrics from the person’s favorite band, blogs containing the woes of someone’s life, and other such expressions of hopelessness and abandonment. Therefore, the way that we all have adapted to interact with each other is through this very network.
Bizarre, huh? In person, I know most of the people I talk to online are fairly happy, well adjusted folk. However, when looking at their away messages, I’d be asking them to dial up the
HOPE hotline. It’s bizarre to say the least. We have a form of communication that has become dominated in a certain way, one that I think is actually detrimental to those who use it. Craziness.
This isn’t to say that
all online communication is similarly depressive. Email, the myriad of forums, and community sites like
Slashdot and
Punknews aren’t oriented around this self loathing. It seems mostly to be based on those sites which are marketed towards this younger demographic, but are also fairly interesting for those of us just slightly older.
It’s all bizarre, and I know that I am pretty guilty of it myself. It’s lessened recently, because I got sick of seeing it on others’ sites and messages, but it’s still there. So never let it be said that I’m not willing to throw stones at myself.
justinª