Is the issue that perhaps folks no longer have any conception of history because we are too bombarded with hyper-media and social media? My grandparents grew up on a farm in the great depression where it was common to have multiple siblings die of pneumonia, drowning or other maladies that are far less frequent. African Americans could not even vote until the 1960's in this country. For people to be so pessimistic today is fairly pathetic in my opinion. Humans have always evolved to adapt, work socially and creatively come up with solutions to huge problems from the last Ice age to the Nazis. People should move out of these horribly overpriced cities and get back to small, sustainable agriculture if they want to be happy. If you want a degree get one from a community college. Yeah we have huge problems to face today as many responders point out - specifically Climate Change, environmental destruction and income inequality. Remember in the 1940's we had to go face to face with the most evil empire the modern world has ever known along with our allies and most importantly Russia. I suggest folks toughen up a bit and know that things won't get any better without a steely resolve and working together.
There certainly is a crisis that social media and greedy online platforms (greedy for your time and ad dollars) prey upon. And yes the breakdown of social relationships with family, community and neighbors is certainly a big part of this. But consider historical factors in the USA. The breakdown of church - this was the de facto center of many communities for generations up until the post-vietnam era and the culture wars that have ensued. Combine this with the loss of farms - from more than 6 million in 1935 to roughly 2 million in 2012 - farms have gotten bigger. When agriculture dominated the rural economy having closer knit ties with neighbors was not so much a choice but a necessity. Also we are a country that embraced the idea of moving - be it from the city to the suburbs or the American South to the industrial American north. We have not done a very good job replacing those connections and it is breeding an epidemic of loneliness and addiction - not only to digital media but also to opiates. There is not an easy fix of course but folks should certainly consider the intrinsic value of these things before they decide to write off their family or community because of a difference of opinion or worldview. And another factor is that capital is increasingly accumulated at the top percent or 1/10th percent of earners. The folks in the middle and lower class find they have to work more to have a quality life than they did a generation or two ago. We are so busy working and driving to work and running our kids around that we barely have any time for friends and that is truly a shame.
You touch on an important factor: land-use and transportation policy. The lack of "walkability" in the typical suburban neighborhood is certainly not helping. I don't mean the ability to go out and take a walk for the exercise, I mean being in a place where walking is the best way to get to useful places and do things... the grocery, the doctor, the hardware store, and ideally, your job. Dense cities have this, to some degree. Rural areas don't, but they usually have a small town nearby with a main street (if Walmart hasn't decimated it). But in the suburbs you're generally inside a car to get anywhere at all, and how much incidental, accidental contact are you going to have with your neighbors from behind a glass pane at 25 MPH?
I used to live in some of the burbiest burbs imaginable. I lived a bit out of the way but many of my schoolmates were right in the thick of it: tract homes, manicured lawns, the whole bit.
Back then -- I don't know about today -- going to the store may have been a chore that required a car, but visiting your neighbors was easy. You were bound to see some of them as you went out to get the paper or water the lawn. Car traffic was so light that kids would play in the street -- basketball, hockey, frisbee, racing go-karts or RC cars, whatever. All the kids in a neighborhood all seemed to know one another really well.
There's a lot to dislike about suburbs, but by themselves they're not some sort of dark magic socially isolating force.
That was my experience as well. In the suburbs you generally knew your neighbors, at least more so than in the city. I live in a city now, and I run into my neighbors and chat with them, but that's about it.
Also, the suburbs tended to have more kids and generally be safer (not as much traffic). As a result, I spent most of my youth just hanging out with neighborhood kids. And my parents hung out with neighbors.
For me it's not just the walkability of the suburbs that's the problem, but the lack of places to go... other than stores, bars, and restaurants. It's a cultural wasteland. I'd just much rather stay inside, and often do.
Cities are not much better for me, as most of places there are to go and things to do tend to cater towards the lowest common denominator.
Most museums and galleries here are pretty awful. There are a handful of good ones, but there's only so often I can go to those.
Chess. I used to be really in to that, but have spent so much of my life playing chess, that I've weaned myself off of it and in to other pursuits.
Theaters tend to have the most trite, lowbrow plays imaginable. Most movie theaters are the same, and for the handful that aren't, they play somebody else's movie selections, not mine. I'd just rather choose my own movies and watch them at home, and save some money.
I just don't like musicals or parades. I sometimes go out dancing at clubs, but almost none of them play music I like, and anyway do cater mostly towards what's really popular.. which around here seems to be house, EDM, and drum and bass.. none of which I like.
Then there are bars. I'm just not a bar person. Haven't had much luck in making connections with random people I meet there, and am anyway almost always way too shy to even try. Other than that, I don't want to go somewhere to just sit and pay for overpriced drinks.
I've gone to a bunch of events organized on meetup.com, and way too many of those are poorly attended moneymaking operations trying to get you to pay money for classes or events. Most of the rest I just don't find even remotely interesting. Despite that, I've gone to a bunch of events that seemed kind of remotely interesting, and those have been largely disappointing.
I sometimes go to lectures at the local university, but most of the ones they have are pretty uninteresting too.
Overall, I guess there are options, but most of them just aren't for me, for one reason or another. Also, it takes effort to seek out things to do, and for me the payoff is so low that usually I don't even bother.
I haven't completely given up, and I still force myself to go out anyway, but mostly it's a chore and not worth it. Usually, I'd rather just stay home and read a book, make some music, paint or draw something, surf the web, or maybe go to the library. All solitary pursuits that I usually enjoy much more than the various "event" options in the city.
I think part of the problem is the event nature of those things. Currently social people seem to be incredibly event oriented.
For me the places that form friendships are places where people go out of habit. The living room of my student corridor, weekly boyscout meetings and this "club house" at university where people just went to sit on a sofa, drink coffee and talk about mechanical engineering.
It matters lot less then if you're little bit shy. And any given occasion doesn't feel as much like wasted effort even if it's fruitless. But for some reason people are not into stuff like this if you suggest it. While same people might cling to their weekly pointless meetups once it's established.
It sounds like most of this stuff has more to do with you than the place/city/town you're referring to, which is fine, but would seem to indicate the criticism of place is misdirected.
Don't let the other two replies get you down; city life just isn't the right thing for some people. It can be difficult to find the right niche of activities (I sure haven't), and people who blame you for not liking what they like don't exactly help. Anyway, keep at it, whatever "it" is.
Exactly--Sherry Turkle made the interesting point that while it is concerning teens spend so much time on their phones texting, it's because they can't drive yet and go see their friends. Tech is a band-aid for a spatial problem.
Perhaps the correct question to posit is the following - is making people more dependent on the government ever going to truly empower people and their communities or will it eventually lead to disenfranchisement? Look at what happened with all the government sanctioned urban renewal projects in the 1970's. You had the government claim land by eminent domain in many inner cities with the idea that they would renew that area and folks would be able to move back to their homes. Instead you had large numbers of those folks who had been living with very little government assistance for generations move into housing projects en masse. Those projects are now hotbeds for drugs and crime, the residents never got to move back to their houses and it has created generational dependance on welfare. Don't trust that company scrip in other words - especially when the company is the government
For the most part the poor in the USA already can get access to food stamps, medicaid, section 8 and a number of other programs that provide a safety net - especially if there are dependents in the household. For the middle class a reduced income tax rate would be much more effective than a UBI when it comes to saving money and having more for personal spending. The idea of giving a UBI to the rich strikes me as a bit of a stretch. Again paying people not to work while the rich continue to amass more wealth due to technology and capitalization seems to me a great way to create a permanent under class. The idea that government printing money to "take care of its people" strikes me as a naive experiment in socialism that is bound to fail.
Javascript is important because it runs on billions of devices - more devices can process javascript than any other language. Being the most used programming language in the world makes it an important development platform by default.
While it may be true that JavaScript has had a large installed base for many years, that installed environment was only capable of operating within the context of a single page load, as long as the browser was open and active, and really was only useful for manipulating the DOM (and JavaScript was a sorry platform even within that ultra-narrow scope).
Node.js changed things by making the platform available on the backend, allowing programs to live longer, but the notion that JS was "important" as a general development solution is incorrect. It certainly was not the "native" or obvious solution for anything beyond manipulating page UI, and this remains the case for the overwhelming majority of the "billions" of devices with JS execution environments. It is still harder to configure Node.js for use on a server than something like PHP.
When I say an "important development platform", I mean that from the perspective of practical use of the technologist, in the sense that the platform is can be expected to host projects that are recognized as clear leaders within a generally applicable space, strongly motivating adoption of the underlying development platform if not already adopted.
