I don't think the author's main problem is that communication is shifting to the digital, but rather some of the side-effects of that.
1. We live in "meatspace" to an extent no matter what, so it's unfortunate that we have a less fulfilling experience when we're there.
2. More importantly, the web gives us a great way to find people like us. In a lot of ways our digital communities are much more uniform than our physical communities, and there are serious downsides to this. (This is not explicitly brought up in the article, but is I think underlying several of his concerns.)
Also:
> Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem. Anything you can experience in "the real world" can be reproduced at arbitrarily-fine resolution in a sufficiently advanced digital system.
This is an extreme misapplication of technical mathematics to pop psychology.
> We live in "meatspace" to an extent no matter what, so it's unfortunate that we have a less fulfilling experience when we're there.
The distinction is an artifact of our tech still being pretty immature. There's no reason you couldn't experience remote and physically-present people simultaneously on even footing. We keep our digital world locked behind screens, but only for now.
> In a lot of ways our digital communities are much more uniform than our physical communities,
That generalizes even further: the more freedom and choice you give people, the more they sort themselves. I understand why that freaks some people out, but I find it hard to get worked up over more people getting more of what they want. There are better ways to keep the peace between disparate groups than by forcing them share close quarters.
> This is an extreme misapplication of technical mathematics to pop psychology.
I think it's pretty uncontroversial. Short of proposing a soul or some weird quantum-based source of consciousness, we all just process inputs, and we can't tell the difference between the original signal and once that's been digitally sampled at sufficiently high frequency and reconstructed.
So you're predicating most of your argument on extremely good VR. I'll give you that, but I think VR at that level is quite a ways off.
Specifically in response to
> That generalizes even further: the more freedom and choice you give people, the more they sort themselves. I understand why that freaks some people out, but I find it hard to get worked up over more people getting more of what they want. There are better ways to keep the peace between disparate groups than by forcing them share close quarters.
You've hit my concern on the head. You may be right that this won't create big problems. I'm quite worried that it will, but I admit my confidence in that assessment is low.
That generalizes even further: the more freedom and choice you give people, the more they sort themselves. I understand why that freaks some people out, but I find it hard to get worked up over more people getting more of what they want. There are better ways to keep the peace between disparate groups than by forcing them share close quarters.
Is there evidence that is the case? Things like "gamergate" - which could almost be summarised as technology-mediated crowdsourced rudeness - seem to indicate the vulnerability online communities have to uncivil behaviours.
The vulnerability of the community is inversely proportional to the invulnerability of the individuals? This almost sounds like it should be a social law (up there with Goodwin's etc)
1. We live in "meatspace" to an extent no matter what, so it's unfortunate that we have a less fulfilling experience when we're there.
2. More importantly, the web gives us a great way to find people like us. In a lot of ways our digital communities are much more uniform than our physical communities, and there are serious downsides to this. (This is not explicitly brought up in the article, but is I think underlying several of his concerns.)
Also:
> Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem. Anything you can experience in "the real world" can be reproduced at arbitrarily-fine resolution in a sufficiently advanced digital system.
This is an extreme misapplication of technical mathematics to pop psychology.