this is an interesting question i’ve had banging around in my mind since well before Reddit’s implosion (and Discord’s enshittification), but which seems really worth asking now.
you can’t blame Reddit and Discord or their imitators entirely for these going out of style, but they’ve sure put the dagger in a lot of remaining ones, and i kind of wonder if they’re just in an irreversible and terminal decline a la USENET. i can only name two or three i even consider checking anymore, and i’m not sure how sustainable any of those are long-term.
Sorry for the late reply. Yes, I think that’s exactly right. Not my field but we are limited in the number of deep relationships we can have like you said. Of course, there are examples at both extremes; some can annoyingly have a near-multitude of deep friendships and others only one. Regardless, you are spot on, each deep relationship takes up a finite amount of time and eventually we run out of that time.
The shallower relationships that we have via memes are sometimes called “parasocial relationships”. It is usually a term reserved for one-way relationships, celebrities and their fans for example. Fans know an awful lot about their favourite celebrity and devote considerable time to the relationship. The celebrity will likely not even know that the fan exists. Still, people (the fan) can gain important benefits and I really don’t want to imply that these are somehow “bad” relationships, just that they are very different from what we normally think of as friendship.
Parasocial can extend to these sorts of meme-based simulations of a relationship you are talking about. I’m not up with this sort of literature but usually there are people who think these things can be useful shortcuts to “lubricate” interactions within large populations (where you literally cannot have deep relationships with everyone). Others might be a little crusty and say that they are not “real” relationships. Memes can also be ways of signifying being a member of a special “in” group and sociologists would pursue the idea of differentiation here - we are dividing ourselves into groups because it helps to avoid the endless complexity of individuals. This sort of research goes on a lot and is really interesting. My personal view is that it is all psychologically and socially important as a way of binding strangers together. The problem is that it often excludes and then may (not always, just may) lead to conflict between groups. So yeah, getting to know people deeply is a heck of a lot of work, just like what you and I are doing now. It’s likely far easier if I had posted a “that’s what she said” comment and you clicked the upvote button or maybe responded with a “boom!” comment. Which one is better? I don’t know, it’s up to your preference, mood, level of exhaustion after a long day, etc etc. :-) Hope that you are feeling rested.
This is something that I also connect to what I read a while ago, and it has to do with the social limitation I mentioned before.
Basically, we tend to personify something fictional. The first cities were city-states, most had their own patron god, often named after the city.
From then to now, not much has changed. Even supposedly monotheistic religions. Catholicism (especially here in South America) borrows a lot from polytheism. Saints are like minor gods, in principle. And I’ve known people who practiced folk Catholicism, where there are a myriad of unofficial, often local, saints. In a lot of cases, there’s a story behind the saint, a local person who for some reason or other died, and some “miracle” was performed at some point. People will go vast distances to get to a spot where this saint died, or you’ll see shrines along a road, where you can stop to place offerings and pray.
As our understanding of the world has evolved, religion loses “territory”, which means it stops keeping people united under a fiction.
And today we’re all scrambling to find a different fiction to keep us together.
Celebrities, politicians, brands, music genres, social media platforms, etc.
Anyway, boom! :P
I’m doing much better today. Weekends tend to exhaust me because I get visitors (family checking on me and helping me with stuff). The rest of the week is generally far better.
How are you doing?