Interconnectivity creates isolated people, nations

Massive interconnectivity in our era has ironically resulted in self-isolation, self-delusion and aggression — for individuals and nation-states alike. Did anyone predict that the perception of close proximity fostered by globalization and interconnectivity might lead to blowback?

Yes, in fact several scientists did.

In 1971, Charles Southwick wrote in the Ohio Journal of Science: “I think we could agree that the dramatic multimedia approach of our communications networks affects the sense of crowding and crisis that individuals and social groups perceive.”

Southwick theorized that increased social contact and irritation leads to more aggressive and violent behavior, as well as “abnormal clusterings of individuals.” In other words: self-isolation from all but a select few.

Experiments on rats by ethologist John Calhoun in the 1960s showed that some subjects drop out of social interaction altogether and go into a “spiral of deteriorating health” as a result of perceived overcrowding. Psychologist Jonathan Freedman later demonstrated that excessive social contacts and interaction (as opposed to physical overcrowding) were the primary cause of these deteriorations — which is the precise phenomenon exacerbated nowadays by the Internet and social media.

Consider, for example, the guy who doesn’t go out much, spends hour upon hour carefully crafting an image on Facebook or Twitter, gauging his success, popularity and self-worth on the number of “likes” from people with whom he has never had a real conversation.

This person would be devastated if anyone tapped him on the shoulder and burst his bubble of self-delusion by critiquing his lifestyle. After all, his entire life is now online. He may even lash out violently if his worldviews are challenged — the phenomenon of cruel Internet trolls fits perfectly with scientific theory on perceived social fatigue.

According to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data, there are 9 million unemployed Americans of working age. That fig- ure does not include the 2.2 million jobless Americans “marginally attached” to the labor force who want to work but hadn’t looked for work in four weeks at the time of the survey. Among the “marginally attached” group are 682,000 working-age Americans who have given up the search because they don’t believe there are any jobs available. It would be interesting to discover how many of these people have made a choice to self-isolate in this era of globalization.

What should really raise alarms is when we start seeing globalization lead to isolation and aggression from individual nations.

We’re witnessing the world being split back up into Eastern (led by Russia and China) and Western (led by the USA and Europe) bipolarity — and at a time when we’ve never been more interconnected. The worldwide information boom of recent years, with the vast global expansion of the Internet and social media, correlates with the re-emergence of the old Cold War bifurcation and aggression between the two spheres: verbal sparring, economic sanctions, cyberattacks, propaganda wars, etc.

This increased nation-state aggression at a time of unprecedented interconnectivity seems counterintuitive — except to the science that has long envisioned this precise outcome.