THE NEW PSYCHO-SPHERE
Nor, for that matter, are all vicarious relationships to be despised. The issue is not simply vicariousness, but passivity and powerlessness. For a shy person or an invalid, unable to leave home or fearful about meeting people face to face, the emerging info-sphere will make possible interactive electronic contact with others who share similar interests—chess players, stamp collectors, poetry lovers, or sports fans—dialed up instantly from anywhere in the country.
Vicarious though they may be, such relationships can provide a far better antidote to loneliness than television as we know it today, in which the messages all flow one way and the passive receiver is powerless to interact with the flickering image on the screen.
Communications, selectively applied, can serve the goal of telecommunity.
In short, as we build a Third Wave civilization there are many things we can do to sustain and enrich, rather than destroy, community.
THE HEROIN STRUCTURE
The reconstruction of community, however, must be seen as only a small part of a larger process. For the collapse of Second Wave institutions also breaks down structure and meaning in our lives.
Individuals need life structure. A life lacking in comprehensible structure is an aimless wreck. The absence of structure breeds breakdown.
Structure provides the relatively fixed points of reference we need. That is why, for many people, a job is crucial psychologically, over and above the paycheck. By making clear demands on their time and energy, it provides an element of structure around which the rest of their lives can be organized. The absolute demands imposed on a parent by an infant, the responsibility to care for an invalid, the tightdiscipline demanded by membership in a church or, in some countries, a political party—all these may also impose a simple structure on life.
Faced with an absence of visible structure, some young people use drugs to create it. “Heroin addiction,” writes psychologist Rollo May, “gives a way of life to the young person.. Having suffered under perpetual purposelessness, his structure now consists of how to escape the cops, how to get the money he needs, where to get his next fix—all these give him a new web of energy in place of his previous structureless world.”
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