---
date: 2017-05-06
modified_at: 2019-05-20
tags: [philosophy, social-media]
description: A philosophical exploration of how the internet paradoxically brings distant people together while driving physically close people apart, contributing to rising individualism and weaker community ties globally.
---
# Internet connects the unconnected, but disconnects the connected

The internet has the potential to share anything with anyone.
Intuitively this would mean that it brings us closer together. Yeah? Does it?

The point is that the internet is location-independent and time-independent.
This means that it brings people closer together without regarding location and
time. Consequently, people that are physically close to each other grow apart
because people's beliefs grow towards other places and times. The problem with
this is that people that are physically close to each other become different
from each other.

In the end, it will all stabilize, as we slowly get used to the internet, but we
should now focus on the problems this gives us: People that are close to each
other don’t understand each other anymore. Families are in the same place, but
their minds are all somewhere else: On the internet, all we see is echo chambers
of our own thoughts through the confirmation bias.

People must have a balance between talking to the internet and talking to their
relatives and friends. When this balance goes too much towards the internet,
relatives and friends will stop communicating because they are now so different
and relationships will fall apart. When this balance goes too much towards
relatives and friends, you won’t become smarter than the rest.

Recently I had a conversation with Will Bennis, a cultural psychologist, and
cognitive anthropologist, running a very nice co-working space called Locus
http://en.locusworkspace.cz/ in Prague.

> "In recent centuries we've become more individualistic. There's a lot of
research suggesting that in Eastern cultures, people have a stronger community
orientation than in Western countries, but this trend toward stronger
individualism--and weaker community ties--is happening all over the planet as
cities and countries around the world become more industrialized and wealthy." -
Will Bennis


We talked about the rise of technology and internet, and how this would apply to
this (and how it could have influenced it). What do you think? Technology and
the internet make us more mobile, but being more mobile makes us less connected
to the people around us, thus more individualistic. And being on the internet is
in some sense the ultimate mobility, as you can be everywhere, instantly...
Well, not physically, but mentally.

The internet is more powerful than most people think
The internet isn't limited to disconnecting the connected and connecting the
disconnected. As I wrote in these two posts, it also [scatters attention and
focus](/2017/smartphone-attention-pollution), makes us
[notification-zombies](/2017/notification-zombies) and does many
more things. The mediums we use for communication decide how we think and how we
behave. Read more about it in this fascinating book: The Shallows: What the
Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393339750/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0393339750&linkCode=as2&tag=travellifemov-20&linkId=09604923080a9248b0e603dd6e52f6cd

Mark Zuckerberg recently
https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/22/15855202/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-new-mission-statement-groups 
made up a new mission statement for his company: "To give people the power to
build community and bring the world closer together." I think this is a great
mission and this also is what I wish to do with my company Travel Life Movement
https://travellifemovement.com/. It is nice to create ways for technology to
bring us back together. It would be nice if the same internet that drove
connected people apart can also be used to bring them back together.

Why not? With technology, almost everything is possible. We just have to decide
what we want to do with it!