Have you noticed this? Although we’re all “connected” 24X7 through our fave social networks, when the services go down we somehow think we’re ALL ALONE and that it’s only happening to us. That was my reaction along with many others this morning when Twitter became frozen in time. Ditto when Gmail went down recently.
Psychologists have had a field day with this phenomenon, speculating on whether the Internet makes us more lonely or disconnected, instead of the reverse (see here and also here from Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet Project). Usability guru Jakob Nielsen wrote about Internet loneliness in 2000.
Just sayin’.