Closed | Death Valley National Park, California | Feb 2009

Via Nicholas Carr, Never Alone: William Deresiewicz, The End of Solitude:

What does the contemporary self want? The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge — broadband tipping the Web from text to image, social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider — the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.

So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldn’t say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can.

The loss of solitude, the loss of wisdom, the loss of the independent self; all are romantic ideals I have touched on previously both online and offline.

To be clear: I’m not advocating a return to the past. Change happens and humans adapt, we must all deal with and accept our new realities. But woe to those that neglect the lessons of the past.

Read on for the rest of the essay…