Sherry Turkle has written no less than four books about this over the course of the past 40 years. I've read three.

The Second Self dates to 1984 and discusses how children and adults interact with technology - how it is an "other" that is not quite alive and not quite unliving, a mysterious and unexplored gray area that provides opportunities to grow our physical and mental selves through the explorations of terra incognita.

Life on the Screen, which I have not read, is a 1994 study on identity performance and self-image as it relates to our ability to project our identities beyond our physical surroundings and beyond truth. It examines the changes we must make psychologically when we go from being a person to being an avatar and what it takes to successfully bridge the gap.

Alone Together is a 2004 examination of the alienating effects of technology on our lives and what our ready access to technology and alternate spheres of influence has done to us psychologically. It is not a happy book, illustrating that over the past 30 years the alienation of technological devices has left us bereft of many of the experiences that have been formative for every generation of the past several thousand years. One of the most damning observations she makes is that humans don't expect a lot from "the other" in our interactions; we're more than willing to fill in the gaps with our own expectations such that everyone you think you know on the Internet is actually just an augmented image of you.

2015's Reclaiming Conversation, unlike the other three books, actually contains actionable information and data but it really comes down to "put down the phone, get off the Internet, there's nothing there that will give you the basic psychological needs of community and empathy with even a tiny fraction of the utility that simply talking to a fellow human being in person will accomplish."

I'm also a parent.

Unless your parents are awful (and they may well be), they aren't withholding guidance. They just suck at it. My own parents, for example, limited their advice to "don't get married", "don't have kids" and "stay out of my way or I'll fucking kill you" although I occasionally got a "I sure didn't want you but you turned out pretty neat" or "we'll make a welder out of you yet" from time to time. That said, at least their advice has context. At least it has weight. At least it's tailored. The world wasn't telling me not to get married, my drunk, bitter father was telling me not to get married which allowed me to take it under advisement.

That's lacking on the internet.

I fully recognize the irony of advising someone via the internet not to take advice from the internet but there it is - you only know of me what I tell you. The context I present you is statistical and sparse. You know I'm male, you know I'm older than you, you know dozens of irrelevant details. I know you're female, you're young, and you work with mushrooms. The connection we form is generalized at best and any notion you may have otherwise - despite the deliberate poignancy of my words - is assembled wholly from your own background and perception. The phantasm behind the words you read has far more of you in it than me.

I've heard your argument before - "we lack the desire for an emotional connection." The data (four books of it) do not bear that out. You do not lack the desire, you lack the ability. You were never given a chance. A child that eats dinner while her parents stare at their phones is a child that learns that meals are a time for introversion. A child that communicates with her friends via Snapchat is a child that struggles to read body language, that struggles to hear tone, that struggles to understand subtext.

I'll say this: it's a muscle like any other. It grows stronger through exercise. Empathy, humanity, whatever you wish to call it, it can be developed. My parents were horrific. They failed miserably. I've scanned my early slides, from birth through age six. I've watched my own innocence disappear.

But my daughter smiles all the time. She laughs infectiously. She is keenly human, eager to engage and deeply interested in the emotional life of everyone around her.

If an emotionally-retarded psychopath like me can raise a smile like that, than anyone can learn to connect emotionally with anyone.

We didn't have to turn to people and be vulnerable in hopes somebody would be there.

As great as that may sound at first it means we lack the emotional connection that should have been made.

Ohhhhhhhh boy. Those two hit home. I'm trying to think of how to respond to this. Don't have much now, hopefully tomorrow, though.

I'd love to have this conversation with you again in 20 years.

Because I think there is something important in this about what phase of life you are in. From the other comments, I take it you are young and female, and therefore your life experience is limited.

The majority of my cohort are in their mid-to-late 40's, so we grew up finding this new shiny tool called The Internet, and adding it to our existing tool box of skills.

Recently - like, just in the last two years or so - a large number of my friends are turning away from the "social" aspects of the internet - because honestly it isn't actual "socializing", it is a simulacrum of it - and returning the internet to the toolbox. We still use YouTube to learn how to mount a shelf or tune a carburetor, and we still use email and respond to Evite invitations, but pretty much every single week another friend deletes Facebook, Instagram, etc, and falls off the internet as a uniquely identifiable person.

When I see these people in person (because now I seek them out to socialize with them) I find their lives richer and more interesting and more full of real stuff... they aren't worked up into a froth over the latest fabricated outrage, and they are handing me baskets of fresh-grown veggies, and eggs, and talking about how they went camping last weekend.

So what, goobster?

Well, I think as we age and become more "whole", and attuned to ourselves, and comfortable within our own bodies and environments, we settle into being who we are, and are care less about how others do "it", whatever it is. We don't seek answers to our problems from outside sources, we find them inside in our experiences.

So, as a young person, your internal well you are drinking from to gain insight and inspiration, is rather shallow. So you look outside for guidance and answers. Over time, your experience fills up your inner well, and you have more and more to drink from internal sources, than external ones. And the internal sources resonate deeper, since they are personal and first-hand.

So use the tools at your disposal: Papa Internet, friends, being a wallflower and watching how other deal with stuff... and by doing so, you fill your internal well with experience that you can draw on later. In short: It gets better.

Seriously though? Being in your 40's is fucking awesome.

I have two Hubski friends I consider my adopted parents.

Sometimes, the Internet can help you find others to supplement or outright provide the deep, meaningful, impactful, educational, etc, that traditionally, a person would either be forced to find in the people around them (both related by blood and just proximate), or go without.

That doesn't mean it's ok to be a crap or absent parent. But i think there is hope to be found in the internet, not just depersonalization.

I'm still a kid. Despite this I would say in all honesty the fundamentals in life are so often are being passed up by the parents of today.

surrounding your kid with love and affection, even if in good faith, can be exhausting to the senses of the brain of the recipient of your attention.

The act of compassion can easily be mistaken by an overbearing parent.

How would your advice translate to a different world than the one you were raised in? For example, what if the child found themselves in a situation where they were starving, and their security network was no longer sustainable, or the underlying value of such advice was simply not applicable to a world outside of what you knew?

Not sure if I'm making much sense here but there is something that translates regardless of environment: the golden rule. It is not good, nor bad, it just is.

You want to be treated like an asshole? Be an asshole.

You want to be treated like a queen? Be a queen.

This also leads to the next lesson in life: we all have our own values.

Don't have a specific topic or start here, but loads of thoughts on the subject seeing as I can relate to this idea on many levels. So many, that this may well turn out as just another surface level comment. The idea of the web being a surrogate source of information without emotional connection has been a consistent theme/thought from my time on it - ya know, most of my life so far as I can recall.

Over time, mostly through gaming communities (Shadowgun: Deadzone, Minecraft, sub-communities I've kept in touch with today from years ago), I've stumbled into and grew up with different circles of online friends. It's allowed for an easier pick-and-choose of relationships as I could just "drop" a ball I'm juggling or come back to it just as easily with the excuse of "life getting in the way". On the other hand, they were easier maintain seeing as the online forms tended to have an international crowd allowing for interactions at anytime - none of these having social consequences with my own life, I could simply switch them off and continue life as it was "IRL". Though as I've grown used to this mode of communication more and more, I've developed a better insight into navigating online groups, I've grown to severely lack them in person (feeding into my own thoughts of self-worth, and that just becomes its own vicious cycle for some other discussion). But one odd complexity I've found in the communities I've kept in touch with for so long is connection.

Years on the internet in terms of gaming is a long time, I think we all can agree. This length of time tends to take relationships out of a game and into daily lives, in my experience. That is to say, people go into a game, find people they enjoy interacting/playing with, and establish forms of communication outside of it. These forms, in my experience, include various forums, google hangouts, Skype, Facebook (using their personal accounts, mind you), online messengers, and newer mediums such as Discord and the like. Using these extensions of the internet I've grown to, genuinely, care about lives of peoples around the world - as I've seen expressed in so many words here of other users. Interestingly, the extent others have been willing to divulge, or rather seek out help other than their parents, per se (keeping somewhat in-line with your post) varies vastly by culture. People will talk about day-to-day life, yes. In some places, conversations can become heavy with emotional weight attached.

My own experience of these two sorts of bonds I've invested years into compared to my "real life," again find me severely lacking in social skills short circuiting my ability to make meaningful connections as quick as I would like to. As a result, the path of least resistance is to default back to online - frankly, my aversion to 'real interactions' as a result becoming habitual I think may contribute to the diagnosis of Aspergers, but that's blind speculation unsubstansiated, neither here nor there. Back on topic, the catch despite inordinate amount of time spent fleshing out one's soul online doesn't produce that same result if repeated face-to-face.

After juxtaposing the time spent and conversations on online communities versus entrenched volunteering in those 'therapy retreats' as I'd like to call them, there's nothing that can convince me otherwise. A key element in the dichotomy I'd like to attribute to the gap in efficacy is in part as bl00's stated is tailored context paired with the development (or mere channeling) of what empathy would look like. With regard to context, it can be gained in years of sustained, open connection online, but even through video, there's nothing I've experienced like seeing someone's empathy or compassion in chorus with body language to tell you that you've been heard.

To the people saying online communication is not close to real life interactions: How do you feel about video chat? Or do you need to be in i-trust-you-not-to-stab-or-shoot-me-distance?

I agree with the consensus expressed thus far, I'm just wondering how much closer to real you guys think video chat is.

I'm the opposite. I crave emotional connection and I feel that I have been spoiled on it- Papa Internet is more like a drug dealer who has me hooked and needy.

There once was a girl who was my pen pal, we wrote to each other dark fears, crushes, troubles with parents, etc. When she started to go to my high school, we decided to go from letters to a leather diary. Every few days I would go to my locker and find the diary with a fresh new entry inside of it, and then I'd spend a few days writing my own entry to it. We spilled ourselves into this back and forth relationship. We did this for years, and I eventually realized that this was the way I enjoyed listening to others and expressing myself in the world- long form, open, intimacy.

Today, I've built up a group of close friends who I have the ability to talk incredibly intimately with about anything. Over the years, MSN, Gaia, Myspace, and Messenger were avenues for sharing diaries with people I found genuinely interesting. You could set the length of entries and match your partner's. You could take your time to ruminate someone's problems. You could take the conversation a wild new direction without making it seem like an interruption. The long form is my preferred form of intimacy.

And then I extended it out- forums, Reddit, hell, even here on hubski, I have no qualms sharing the thoughts that knock around the insides of my brain with Papa Internet. But there's a catch with Papa Internet- it's an unbalanced relationship. The problem is that there is so many people hidden with Papa, and after skimming so many paragraphs, the mind is skewed to think- Ok, it's my turn now. All I want to do is talk about my own day. All I want to do is talk about my own problems.

Something terrible has happened recently- someone told me over Messenger that it was like I was talking at them, rather than talking with them. No one has ever told me this before, in my 12 years on the internet, sharing public diaries with others. Have I changed? Worse- have I remained the same in a different world?

You definitely cannot get as intimate on the Internet as you can with real physical presence, but I don't think that means there's no emotional connection with the Internet either. In fact there are loads of online communities that allow people to discuss and empathise with others. The tricky part is fostering that conducive environment while fending off saboteurs of this safe space.

Funnily enough I think the rise of Internet accessibility has made me interact more with my parents, because they end up a little more aware of rising trends and hot topics online, giving us more material to chat about.