The Lonely Crowd
The Lonely Crowd is a 1950 sociological analysis by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney. Together with White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951), it is considered a landmark study of American character. )
Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
3people
2016–2021years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Very sorry for her loss as well.. and her pain in not knowing...
It's interesting from a social science perspective to have the expectation of the system / algorithms that it would have notified you of a friend's passing. This is an expectation that the model understands what is important to the user - something I doubt the model is optimized around completely.
Before Facebook, I think not knowing would be even more common than we realize - unless you had frequent contact with your friend. In a world disconnected, no email, no Internet, maybe only a telephone, or even further back, a telegram, or even less - it might be many, many times much less likely you would find such a thing out. Going back to the times of villages with no electronic technology at all, communication would have been only through immediate knowledge, written / recorded information or word of mouth.
I used to work for a website that tried to digitize obituaries, to serve as a replacement for the newspaper, way before that was really a "thing". It never really took off, because, the people who wanted to publish death notices in newspapers just kept doing that. Most people who wanted to read them preferred holding a newspaper than reading a website (although, it did help disseminate information quickly). Eventually, newspapers simply published the obituaries and death notices online themselves, and it all went to a big aggregator of obituary postings (or got indexed by Google), and then it was no longer much of a thing.
The most interesting thing, for me, having worked in this area, was seeing how users have taken to Facebook as a sort of memorial to those who have passed, help spread the news, etc. But with the conflux of marketing and so much personal news... I'm not surprised that this information slipped through the cracks.
I recall a book on this topic - "Bowling Alone"[1] published in 2001, before social networks. The excerpt from Amazon.com -
"Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work—but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change that Robert Putnam has identified in this brilliant volume, which The Economist hailed as 'a prodigious achievement.'
Drawing on vast new data that reveal Americans’ changing behavior, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from one another and how social structures—whether they be PTA, church, or political parties—have disintegrated. Until the publication of this groundbreaking work, no one had so deftly diagnosed the harm that these broken bonds have wreaked on our physical and civic health, nor had anyone exalted their fundamental power in creating a society that is happy, healthy, and safe.
Like defining works from the past, such as The Lonely Crowd and The Affluent Society, and like the works of C. Wright Mills and Betty Friedan, Putnam’s Bowling Alone has identified a central crisis at the heart of our society and suggests what we can do."
Even with Facebook/social media, I wonder if the same thing is still true, or if we have begun to heal the broken bonds of our disconnected nature the book identified.
[1] ISBN-10: 0743203046
- There's also Michel de Montaigne's essays from the 1500's On Solitude.[1]
More recently, there are books like The Lonely Crowd from the 1960's, [2] and Anthony Storr's Solitude, from the 1980's[3]
Of course, for thousands of years, spending time in solitude has been greatly valued for religious reasons, for "building character", for coming in touch with oneself, or for creative purposes. On the other hand, modern life, and more recently the media (even before social media) have been criticized for alienating people from themselves and from each other.
[1] - http://www.hermitary.com/solitude/montaigne.html
[2] - https://www.amazon.com/Lonely-Crowd-Changing-Character-Paper...
[3] - https://www.amazon.com/Solitude-Return-Self-Anthony-Storr/dp...
- Well as much as I can understand the author of this article wanting to get past Riesman’s ideas in “The Lonely Crowd” the time period his predictions occur is during the age of “incipient decline” which is definitely right now and hasn’t ended yet. I do think Riesman predicted the rise of social media in the context of other-directedness without directly describing social media itself. Riesman’s work is still relevant but sure- it’s time for new voices to be heard.
