CONCLUSION
THE NEW PSYCHO-SPHERE
A new civilization is forming. But where do we fit into it? Don’t today’s technological changes and social upheavals mean the end of friendship, love, commitment, community, and caring? Won’t tomorrow’s electronic marvels make human relationships even more vacuous and vicarious than they are today?
These are legitimate questions. They arise from reasonable fears, and only a naive technocrat would brush them lightly aside. For if we look around us we find widespread evidence of psychological breakdown. It is as though a bomb had gone off in our communal “psycho-sphere.” We are, in fact, experiencing not merely the breakup of the Second Wave techno-sphere, info-sphere, or socio-sphere but the crack-up of its psycho-sphere as well.
Throughout the affluent nations the litany is all too familiar: rising rates of juvenile suicide, dizzyingly high levels of alcoholism, widespread psychological depression, vandalism, and crime. In the United States, emergency rooms are crowded with “potheads,” “speed freaks” and “Quaalude kids,” “coke sniffers” and “heroin junkies,” not to mention people having “nervous breakdowns.”
Social work and mental health industries are booming everywhere. In Washington a President’s Commission on Mental Health announces that fully one fourth of all citizens hi Ihe United States suffer from some form of severe emotional stress. And a National Institute of Mental Health psychologist, charging that almost no family is free of some form of mental disorder, declares that “psychological turbulence . . . is rampant in an American society that is confused, divided and concerned about its future.”
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