Writers tend to be introverted, so I have no problem working mostly online. (As you get older, it’s harder to be social in the conventional sense—many of your friends and colleagues have passed on, after all. The crowds in the pubs are younger; if you go to church, you only see irascible oldsters like yourself worrying about their mortality; and so forth) But three news items from the business world caught my attention recently. First, venerable Macy’s is closing a slew of stores. Second, bookstore-barn-giant B&N just fired their CEO. And third, the Trump casino in Atlantic City will file for bankruptcy. What do these news items have in common? Their cause, the internet. At least partially. Let me explain.

People are spending more time online, whether via smartphones or computers (their distinction is only semantical now), and whether buying, playing, or socializing.  All department stores from Macy’s to Wal-Mart have been affected by online buying. People don’t go out and buy as much anymore.  And if people get out to shop in these hectic times when you might not be sure you have a job next week, they often don’t buy; they just look (window-shopping is the old descriptor), assess their options, and go home and order the goods online. Some pundits call this the Amazon effect, usually in a pejorative sense, but that gives that retail giant way too much credit.

B&N bookstores’ problems are just bigger ones that every bookstore shares and are comparable to the department stores’—online buying is preferred by many customers. The B&N bookstores are big barns for books; the department stores are big barns for clothing, home furnishings, and other goods. The merchandise is different, but the effects of the internet are the same. There are other effects, of course. B&N has been in a downspin since they spun off the Nook business. Macy’s has been hurt from the top and the bottom—your elite stores like Nordstrom’s and Lord and Taylor’s pretend to have better quality merchandise and your Targets and Wal-marts the same products at better prices. And then there’s Amazon.

The fall of the Atlantic City casinos probably just started as a result of more competition too—casinos in Connecticut and Pennsylvania are just as close for NYC and NJ gambling addicts. They’re often newer and glitzier too and less affected by NJ crime (if you go to Atlantic City, avoid being alone in a parking garage or on the boardwalk late at night—like Rio, human predators are just a few blocks away, ready to pounce).  Don’t think all the NJ criminals are in Camden, Newark, and Trenton or on reruns of The Sopranos. But there’s no doubt in my mind that online gambling has also affected the industry.

This internet effect is exacerbated by a generational divide too, of course, with younger people opting for online buying, playing, and socializing more than older people. While baby boomers and their surviving parents still represent a large demographic, Bernie Sanders showed how the under-forty crowd can flex their muscles, largely through social media AKA the internet. I rarely go to a department store these days, but, when I do, I see mostly people around my own age. Some are dragging kids and grandkids around, of course, especially during the “back to school” sales (a special time where I make sure to stay away from department stores!). Same for bookstores, and the people in casinos tend to be my age or older too.

Dylan’s song “The Times Are a Changin’” is just as appropriate now as it ever was, but it is the internet that is changing us, at least the traditionally mobile generations younger than boomers. They and even tech-savvy boomers are using it to buy, play, and socialize. Face-to-face anything plays second fiddle to online now. Everyone has a Facebook account (although frequent contributors tend to be narcissistic people yearning to be told how great they are).  A recent car commercial has an octogenarian lauding the car’s wi-fi because she can update her blog. Is this all bad? No. Human beings are social animals, but we actually do more socializing than ever before. Maybe face-to-face interactions aren’t needed anymore? I say they are, but the internet interactions complement face-to-face ones.

Just like we go to B&N and browse for books and then come home and purchase them online (maybe even from B&N if you have a Nook, but probably Amazon), we meet people face-to-face still and intensify those meetings online, or vice versa, as in online dating.  100% internet relationships aren’t rare either. Just like the online gambler never has to go to a casino (will s/he go to an online psychiatrist to cure her or his addiction?), I can meet people on the internet and become friends without ever meeting them face-to-face. I have more friends of that type now than conventional friends. Some of that is due to moving to a new town late in my life, or many internet friends are associated with my book business…or see the first paragraph.

The internet extends our circles of friends far beyond our local communities. I can Skype with anyone anywhere if I need a visual stimulus, but I can go far beyond that with texting, email, and voice (I prefer email, but that’s just me). In the same sense, we can sell or buy goods or service from anyone anywhere too. People in my current publishing team are in Ontario, California, Illinois, and Georgia, and I live in NJ. I’ve never met them face-to-face but I consider them very special friends. I haven’t seen some of my relatives in years. Pre-internet communication with them was via letters (letter writing is a lost art; emails are generally poor in quality in comparison; and smartphone texts are illiterate pseudocode).

How can it be bad to expand our circle of friends and where we do business? The internet expands our little tribal bubbles with their inbred social interactions and connects us with the rest of the world. That is good…and it just might be humanity’s salvation.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 25th, 2016 at 4:00 am and is filed under Education, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.