As Carl Jung put it lucidly there really are two kinds of humans: introverts and extroverts. Geert Hofsteede (in a somewhat similar manner )distinguishes societies based their ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivisim’. In the former individuals make decisions based on their own discretion while in the latter the individual is concerned about his or her social setting such as society when he or she makes a decision.
If you traced humans over the years you can actually see a cycle transferring us from collectivists to individualists to collectivists. The individualist period is usually a plateau forming a nice for the new wave of collectivism. as we become individualist we reach a certain plateau as a human race and rethink what our sense of belonging is and begin another journey that symbolizes the public sentiment. We started off as nomads (individualists) settled into tribes (collectivists)…..countries (individualist to a certain extent because we connected to geography rather than society)…with the internet (initially individualist, later on collectivist with all the social networking).
As a human there is an inherent need for ‘belonging’ whether in one’s own fantasies or in grime reality. I feel our idea of a family is currently changing. Divorces, gay marriages, multiple-parents, spinsterdom, nuclearization…..
People seem to find more solace in connecting with people of similar interests or music or issues rather than blood allegiance. Thousands of years ago, our loyalties were to a tribe, hundreds of years ago to our families, and now perhaps to others of similar minds. We’ve already started cloud computing and soon we’ll look into a cloud for more than servers. With sites and services that allow you to rent friends, who needs to have a real family?
