Some time ago, as I was reflecting on the effects of technology, I realized that the ability to work, learn, and spend leisure time without much of human interaction is not a recent phenomenon. Or, more precisely, it did not start with the digital age. Instead, the trend has been there since humans started to invent and use technology. Since the invention of the first tools (like a sharp stone to cut meat) or the first weapon (like a pointed stick to use as spear) humans discovered they could do things with less or no in-person interaction with fellow humans.
So, I started to write down the list of activities that needed less human in-person interaction and collaboration. Agriculture, transportation, recreation, entertainment, manufacturing, war, education, health care, socialization, and more. It is true, though, that not every invention pushed us apart – not right away at least. For example, agriculture, for millennia, drew people together to till the ground, sow it, and harvest the crops. But then two hundred years ago agricultural work started to become mechanized. Today, one person operating a combine can do work that before brought many farm workers together. Or take the invention of movies. It brought us into cinemas enjoying together the magic of the moving image. But then television came and later yet streaming. Now many cinemas have closed and others hardly survive. Technologies can bring us together but, as they advance, they eventually push us into silos of solitary life.
The invention of the internet, the smart phone, streaming, social media, and more came with the expectation that they would connect us on a global scale. Thomas Friedman captured the promises of this new wondrous potential in his book The World Is Flat. Twenty years later, we are finding that humanity is not coming together the way we would like. Instead, we are drifting away from each other. The social, psychological, and political effects are already documented in many books and essays. So, I was not surprised when I saw the feature article of the February 2025 issue of The Atlantic to be titled The Anti-Social Century.
Its author, Derek Thompson, cites a number of statistics that describe the dramatic changes in socialization. In-person socialization has declined 20% between 2003 and 2023. Among unmarried men and individuals below 25 it has decline 35%. Meetings among school-age boys and girls outside school fell by 50% between the 1990’s and 2010. Other more usual outlets of socialization, like church attendance, membership in civic societies or book clubs, and joining others in volunteer work are also down. What is worrisome to Thompson is that people, especially young men, deliberately seek solitude. But solitude can turn to loneliness which can negatively affect one’s health, physical and mental. In fact, the Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murphy, has declared the “epidemic of loneliness” as a major public health issue.
Robert Putnum, author of Bowling Alone and The Upswing, had documented this withdrawal from the social marketplace years ago and even before the advent of digital technology. He had estimated that socialization in general had declined 45% from the 1970’s to the 1990’s; and then it declined again another 32% as we moved into the 21st century. Obviously, whatever factors had triggered the pre-digital decline in socialization, they were turbocharged by digital technologies.
Innovations powered by Artificial Intelligence have the potential to push us further into solitude. Whether it is through software or physical robots, we will soon be able to have our own personal assistants. The more the algorithms in these assistants are trained with our personal data the more they will be able to interact with us as human-like creatures.
However, withdrawing ourselves from the “town square” and interacting through emails, texting, Facebook, Instagram, and other means we deprive ourselves the opportunity to experience the presence of others up-close. Thus, our guards against rudeness, aggressiveness, hostility, and disregard for truthfulness fade and so do our emotions of empathy and compassion, and our sense of respecting other people’s feelings. We all know that we display more restraint and thoughtfulness when we interact with others in person than digitally. Thompson warns that abandoning the social space of the “village” for that of a tribe is a dangerous development for our social fabric.
This on-going breakdown of social spaces into atomistic spaces reminded me of the concept of entropy. In plain terms, entropy rises when a very orderly and concentrated system (think of a box of matches) becomes disorderly and scuttered (like the matches strewn on the floor). Well, as I discovered, sociologists have used entropy to develop theories of social disintegration. Thus, societies that display this tendency, that is, moving from tight and concentrated relations to less concentrated and eventually entirely individualistic, are called entropic societies. So, another name for this century would be the socially entropic century.
Social entropy, however, differs from entropy in physics. In the universe entropy constantly increases and cannot be reversed. On the contrary, social entropy is reversible. But to reverse social entropy (i.e., disintegration) we need to apply energy. This means if I want to interact with others, I must pick up myself from the couch, make phone calls, and arrange venues and types of social interaction. This has a sobering implication. As new technologies facilitate non-human interactions and the more we fall into the mood of solitude, the more energy we need to return to socialization. As we saw in the aforementioned statistics, the trends do not bode well for reversing social entropy.
If that’s where we are, we should then ask how we can arrest our social drifting. One solution is to build up our social infrastructure. That means restoring the “town square” in our neighborhoods, that is, public libraries, pools, art venues, clubs and so on. Another response is to check technology. A social researcher has even proposed that we adopt the Amish approach toward the use of technology. As we know, the Amish have forsaken the use of modern technologies in order to maintain a traditional way of life commensurate with what was available in the 17th century.
We do not need, of course, to be as extreme. But if we value social cohesion and human interaction, we need to think hard how to balance economic efficiency and technological progress with the very human need for in-person cooperation and socialization. *
* A good example of how economic and technological efficiency can harm social interaction is the case of the huge retail chains. Each time a Home Depot or Target moves into an area, hundreds of mom-and-pop stores close down. Likewise, Amazon has mostly eliminated the neighborhood bookstore. All these local stores were the places where local people met neighbors and town folk. We have gained in price and delivery efficiency but we have drifted away from each other.
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