I was watching This Is England from 2006, and it reminded me of the olden days of yore, in the fabled before-times, where people would just bunch up together every Friday in someone’s flat, get drunk, blast music, and talk without distractions.
I can barely remember it now.
Anyway, get off my synthetic lawn.
They also don’t know what it’s like for someone to move away and you just never see them again.
You can still do that now.
Source: I am appalling at keeping in touch with people I don’t directly see face-to-face.
But it’s an option for you to find people.
Back in the day, if someone changed their address and phone number, you’d have to work hard to find them.
My best friend in high school joined the navy and disappeared. I worked for decades to track him down. Then one day he was just on Facebook. We have nothing in common any more and nothing to talk about. But damn do I have some great memories of us hanging out.
Sure. That too. But honestly that’s a tradeoff I’d be willing to do in a heartbeat.
Absolutely. Same here. When we’re 50-100 years away from this social media is going to be discussed in the same conversation as prescribing heroin for a headache.
I think the better metaphor will be the printing press. That also caught society completely offguard. We went from a world where knowledge dissemination and speech was tightly controlled by religious and political elites to one where any crank with a press could share their fringe views far and wide. While this had its benefits, it also had its drawbacks. The printing press gave us the Protestant Reformation, but it also gave us the witch burning craze.