Scary and sad. I mean though, is loneliness better than these imagined friendships with technology? It's not so black and white but a very gray area. I do use Facebook to connect to my family and I do have many real friends there, so I don't look at it that way at all but I completely understand that a lot of people do. There's money to be made everywhere so why not take advantage of the ones you can, right?
Zuckerberg maybe many things but a fool is clearly not one of them. I won't be signing on for a personal chat bot, but social media most certainly works for me. Xo
Incredibly well said. Real, human friendship can be full of friction and rather fraught, but it is well worth fighting for.
I wrote about male friendship in particular: “Friendship is a quirky, idiosyncratic thing.
Though understood by all, it is hard to describe, pin down, neatly bucket—you just know it when you see it.
It contains multitudes: it is fun, fickle, funny, fundamental.
It seems simple, but a lot of work goes into it.
Like the ocean, it is both shallow and deep, smooth and tempestuous, pure and polluted, refreshing and salty, at times placid and dangerous.
Like a career, it often follows a long, meandering path—looking backwards, it all makes sense, but seldom does in the moment or just up ahead.
Like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, it happens “gradually and then suddenly.””
More: https://www.whitenoise.email/p/from-boys-to-men-to-friends
Scary and sad. I mean though, is loneliness better than these imagined friendships with technology? It's not so black and white but a very gray area. I do use Facebook to connect to my family and I do have many real friends there, so I don't look at it that way at all but I completely understand that a lot of people do. There's money to be made everywhere so why not take advantage of the ones you can, right?
Zuckerberg maybe many things but a fool is clearly not one of them. I won't be signing on for a personal chat bot, but social media most certainly works for me. Xo
It's over 2 centuries since ETA Hoffmann's automata, and yet they seem more relevant than ever.