Is there a book that talks about people getting easily attached to people they met online? Like, example they meet in online games or soc med apps then they happen to find the same interests then they start their friendship there, then one (or both of them) gets too attached to each other they find it had to let go?
A fictional book or some sort of a psychology or personality book will do. Thanks!!
by Suck_MyBrain
1 Comment
This is a really interesting topic! I don’t have a book to suggest, as of course one of the social corollaries to digital media has been the widespread decline of book-form reading generally, even among personalities who probably would have been “readers” if they were born as Boomers. Gen X (”the kill your tv!“ generation) are really the last who can even remember what social lives were like before the internet, which is where I think a lot of this widespread diagnosis of mental illness, gender dysphoria, ect. has come from, with Millennials as the now old vanguard experiment in what going through puberty in an easy-access largely “virtual“ environment results in.
I do find it fascinating the communication styles that have developed between people who have cheap access to indirect correspondence with others all over the world who may share their niche interests, but due usually to gender differences (evidence that human beings have by no means moved “beyond the binary”), compounded with most people being poorer than their parents were, ect. dashing hopes of meeting new friends in person (or making the stakes of meeting too high) driving people to depression. I don’t know that cutting off all ties is the healthiest approach for intellectual types who are probably also very introverted anyway, but there are a lot of people who I think who would be healthier if they just got offline and met some more of their neighbors. If these online friendships mattered more than as low-investment filler for the emotional component internet porn/prostitution typically lacks, long distance correspondence between friends is nothing new to human beings, and the practical physical challenges of friendship may not even be insurmountable if people could raise themselves out of the mire of whatever social media is rage-baiting them with.
Interested to see what if any suggestions you receive!