Nobody, give or take the occasional blues musician, likes to admit to being lonely. People who study loneliness, like Harvard University psychiatrist Jacqueline Olds, typically have to rely on anonymous surveys to gauge the size of the problem. On the Internet, though, anonymity is the default position, which explains the extra-ordinary story of what happened on the website Moviecodec.com.
It wouldn’t be unfair to call Moviecodec a website for geeks: codecs are pieces of software that transform audio or video files from one form to another, and discussion on the site is usually technical to the point of being incomprehensible. But in July last year, at 9.49 one Wednesday morning, someone posted a message with an incongruous subject line, no less heartfelt for its lack of punctuation. ”I am lonely will anyone speak to me,” it read. Half an hour later, the first reply arrived, bearing another hallmark of online anonymity: mindless abuse. ”OK so how are you,” the respondent wrote. ”Are you a piece of pig’s bollok?”
But then something remarkable began to happen. Within a week -— for reasons having to do with the way Moviecodec‘s tech-literate owner had made it easily accessible to search engines — the loneliness discussion had become the number-one result if you searched Google with the phrase ”I am lonely”. And judging from the messages on the board, a lot of people were doing so.
”Dude, I typed ‘I am lonely’ in Google and your post was the very first response,” wrote someone using the name Wetfeet2000. ”Does that make you the most popular loneliest person on the planet?”
The messages grew from a trickle to a torrent, as visitors who had stumbled on the site posted their own thoughts. What was reve-latory was not so much the well of unwanted solitude, as the way that participants were discovering it. We have become accustomed to relying on Google as a gateway to information of any variety. But countless people seemed to be using it for something more profound — as a source of oracular wisdom, and for answers that the Internet was surely unable to provide.
Or was it? Only days into the life of the Moviecodec discussion, which is still going on today, the benefits of finding people in the same boat began to make themselves apparent. ”I feel so much better that I am not the only one that typed in ‘I am lonely’ on Google,” one person wrote.
Of course, some people began to argue that spending too much time on the Internet was one of the causes of all this loneliness. Others just seemed disgusted that the topic had been raised, and a taboo broken: ”My suggestion to your problem is two things,” wrote SAGoon. ”First, buy a gun. Second, shoot yourself in the head. Fuck you and don’t post faggot shit like this again.”
As summer turned into autumn, though, the discussion began to adopt a pragmatic tone. ”Maybe some volunteer work is the right way to go,” wrote someone under the pseudonym LonelyMan. ”At least then I’ll be doing something to help others, instead of feeling sorry for myself.”
For as long as people were still accessing the site by typing ”I am lonely” into Google, the discussion had the air of a shared secret. Then, the week before last — after the discussion had grown to 107 pages — a brief article about it appeared in the New Yorker magazine. The website suddenly had a whole new audience, many of them presumably curious, rather than lonely — and the site’s regular visitors responded with all the hauteur that might be expected from the followers of an underground phenomenon that had suddenly entered the mainstream.
”I’m outta here!” wrote FrenchToast. ”This used to be a pretty cool site. People discovered it through serendipity and wound up sharing some very personal stuff. But since that %@&* New Yorker story there has been a flood of idiots.”
If that judgement was overblown, the tenor of the discussion was certainly beginning to show signs of intellectualisation. One contributor last week took a moment to note the distinctions between the words athazagoraphobia (fear of being forgotten) and eremophobia (fear of loneliness).
For more than a year, Moviecodec had provided an unlikely connection in a world in which there aren’t enough of them. But by last week, the discussion was beginning to feel disjointed, oversubscribed, as if it had outlasted its usefulness. The site’s original participants seemed to be discovering that, while it is definitely distressing to feel as if one has too few friends, it can also be possible to have too many. — Â