Urban loneliness, Urban alienation

Urban loneliness, Urban alienation

“I am so lonely because I have not done any proper conversation for so long time!” Giving and receiving information is not proper conversation as people do text, call and talk with their spouse, lover, friends and family such as “I did shopping, I had dinner, I will be late etc.”.

Rates of Loneliness
There are several estimates and indicators of loneliness. It has been estimated that approximately 60 million people in the United States, or 20% of the total population, feel lonely.[2] Another study found that 12% of Americans have no one to spend free time with or discuss important matters.[14] Other research suggests that this rate has been increasing over time. The General Social Survey found that between 1985 and 2004, the number of people the average American discusses important matters with decreased from three to two. Additionally, the rate of Americans with no one to discuss important matters with tripled.[15]

Loneliness in Modern Society
Loneliness frequently occurs in heavily populated cities; in these cities many people feel utterly alone and cut off, even when surrounded by millions of other people, experiencing a loss of identifiable community in an anonymous crowd. It is unclear whether loneliness is a condition aggravated by high population density itself, or simply part of the human condition brought on by this social setting. While loneliness also occurs in societies with much smaller populations, the sheer number of people that one comes into contact with daily in a city, even if only briefly, may raise barriers to actually interacting more deeply with them, and thereby increase the feeling of being cut off and alone. Quantity of contact does not translate into quality of contact.[16]
Loneliness appears to have become particularly prevalent in modern times. At the beginning of the 20th century, particularly in the western world, families were typically larger and more stable, divorce was rarer, and relatively few people lived alone. In 1900 in the United States only 5% of households were single-person households; by 1995, 24 million Americans lived alone, and by 2010, it was estimated that that number would have increased to around 31 million.[17]
A 2006 study in the American Sociological Review found that Americans on average had only two close friends in which to confide, which was down from an average of three in 1985. The percentage of people who noted having no such confidant rose from 10% to almost 25%, and an additional 19% said they had only a single confidant, often their spouse, thus raising the risk of serious loneliness if the relationship ended.[18]
Loneliness has also shown a strong correlation with internet usage,[19] with many people suffering from loneliness tending to visit various websites to help deal with their condition, as seen in phenomena such as the "I am lonely will anyone speak to me" thread

Attachment Theory
Attachment theory describes the dynamics of long-term relationships between humans especially as within families and between life-long friends. Its most important tenet is that an infant needs to develop a relationship with at least one primary caregiver for social and emotional development to occur normally, and that further relationships build on the patterns developed in the first relationships.


Key is story

We should provid more stories to our lovers who we would like to communicate to make a conversation so that we can empathize each other better just like watching films and reading novels we can empathize.

The relationship researcher Arthur Aron has pointed out that new experiences, rather than repeated favorites, are the best way to keep romantic feelings alive in a marriage, based on a series of six studies of hundreds of couples.
http://nymag.com/news/features/52450/

crucial modern society problems- Alienation. Desensitization. Devaluation of the individual in favor of an unintelligent "hive-mind" mentality. Lack of meaning in our daily activities. Capitalization...

social alienation theories

Marx's theory of alienation
Marx's Theory of Alienation is based upon his observation that in emerging industrial production under capitalism, workers inevitably lose control of their lives and selves, in not having any control of their work. Workers never become autonomous, self-realized human beings in any significant sense, except the way the bourgeois want the worker to be realized. Alienation in capitalist societies occurs because in work each contributes to the common wealth, but can only express this fundamentally social aspect of individuality through a production system that is not publicly social, but privately owned, for which each individual functions as an instrument, not as a social being.

in existentialism and phenomenology, alienation describes the inadequacy of human being or mind in relation to the world. The human mind, as the subject of perception, relates to the world as an object of its perception, and so is distanced from the world rather than living within it. -Søren Kierkegaard, who examined the emotions and feelings of individuals when faced with life choices

Jean-Paul Sartre argued that when a person tries to gain knowledge of the "Other" (meaning beings or objects that are not the self), their self consciousness has a "masochistic desire" to be limited.

Melvin Seeman was part of the surge in alienation research prominent in the middle of the 20th century when he published his paper, On the Meaning of Alienation, in the American Sociological Review in 1959 (Senekal, 2010b: 7-8). Seeman used the insights of Marx, Durkheim and others to construct what is often considered a model of alienation consisting of five aspects: powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, social isolation, and self-estrangement. Seeman later added a sixth element, cultural estrangement, although this element does not feature prominently in later discussions of Seeman's work


“A person suffers from alienation in the form of ‘powerlessness’ when she is conscious of the gap between what she would like to do and what she feels capable of doing”. Powerlessness is therefore the perception that the individual does not have the means to achieve his goals.

Meaninglessness

Normlessness or what Durkheim referred to as anomie “denotes the situation in which the social norms regulating individual conduct have broken down or are no longer effective as rules for behaviour”. The anomic situation [...] may be defined as one in which there is a high expectancy that socially unapproved behaviours are required to achieve given goals”.

Social isolation refers to “The feeling of being segregated from one’s community” (Kalekin-Fishman, 1996: 97). Neal & Collas (2000: 114) emphasize the centrality of social isolation in the modern world, “While social isolation is typically experienced as a form of personal stress, its sources are deeply embedded in the social organization of the modern world. With increased isolation and atomization , much of our daily interactions are with those who are strangers to us and with whom we lack any ongoing social relationships.”


Self-estrangement is “the psychological state of denying one’s own interests – of seeking out extrinsically satisfying, rather than intrinsically satisfying, activities


For R.D. Laing, alienation is characterized by neglect and distance from an individual's self-experience and self-identity, and by a lack of autonomy in interpersonal relations (see heteronomy). He argues that people who are diagnosed with disorders such as ADHD and schizophrenia are often suffering from a more sociological condition - ontological insecurity. Ontological insecurity has four elements: "engulfment" (the fear that others are trying to take away or absorb one's identity), "implosion" (the feeling of emptiness the correlates with the feeling that concrete reality itself is a threat to one's identity), "petrification" (terror leading to and dread of turning into a thing or object, see reification), and "depersonalization" (lack of responsiveness to others, as to oneself). All of these can result in the development of mental and behavioural disorders which may be healthy responses to unhealthy circumstances.[



urban alienation , social isolation in modern world
in literature
no exit(Jean-Paul Sartre), nausia(Sartre), the waste land(T.S Eliot)... ‘Of Mice and Men’(John Steinbeck), One flew over the Cuckoo’s nest(Ken Kesey), ‘The Heart is a lonely hunter (Carson McCuller)

in films
cyberpunk films..
Lost in Translation

in fine art
bacon, georgo segal, dada, neo dada movement...

in technology and design output
web, ..

personal simptoms
depression-> drug and alchol use