Planner Reads

Some time back, I wrote a very frustrated post on how experts from the field of psychology make sweeping generalizations of what it means to use online services like twitter, facebook and other social networking sites.

As someone who once pursued an academic career, I found it shocking to see how careless these claims where – random ‘opinions’ completely unsupported by any evidence, but yesterday, my faith in the academic field was restored when “28″ (our nickname for Anjali) and I went to see Prof. John Cacioppo’s presentation “Connected Minds: Loneliness, Social Brains and the Need for Community”, hosted by the RSA.

“An individual’s complete involvement in a thriving, engaged and altruistic community is more than spiritually beneficial. As a social species, humans create emergent organisations beyond the individual—structures that range from dyads, families, and groups to cities, civilisations, and international alliances. These emergent structures evolved hand-in-hand with supporting genetic, neural, and hormonal mechanisms because the consequent social behaviors helped humans survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too survived to reproduce. We are only now beginning to truly understand the ramifications of our individualistic lifestyles, as ...