Solitude Networking

Anybody there?

'I am lonely, will anyone speak to me' pleaded the message on the website. Within minutes someone did - and soon thousands of total strangers were sharing their emotions. Oliver Burkeman on an online phenomenon


Nobody, give or take the occasional blues musician, likes to admit to being lonely. People who study loneliness, like Harvard psychiatrist Jacqueline Olds, typically have to rely on anonymous surveys to gauge the size of the problem; when you ask people to identify themselves by name, they tend to use words like "independent" and "self-sufficient" instead. On the internet, though, anonymity is the default position, which explains the extraordinary 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. "I'm surrounded by so many people every day but I feel strangely disconnected from them," one wrote. "I used to have a big family and now am down to a few aunts and uncles," explained somebody else. "The friends I have had moved on and got married. I must have done something to deserve this." "It's 3am here," read another contribution. "Just woke up next to my boyfriend and felt so incredibly lonely and sad."

What was revelatory 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. And: "Can't believe I typed in this message and found so many people feeling the same way."

Of course, many people might argue that spending too much time on the internet was one of the causes of all this loneliness. Some of them argued that on the website itself, even though they must have come there in a similar manner themselves. 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." Another participant said he felt suicidal, and a fellow site visitor tried to talk him back to calmness. Bjarne Lundgren, who runs Moviecodec from Denmark, added his own thoughts. "I'm the webmaster/owner of Moviecodec.com and I'm also quite lonely," he wrote.

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. Most visitors, by definition, had already overcome the hurdle of verbalising their feelings and typing them into the search engine's little white box. Then, the week before last - after the discussion had grown to 107 pages, and thousands of messages - 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. (The New Yorker article, at the time of writing, has even replaced Moviecodec as the first Google result for "I am lonely".)

"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 have been a flood of idiots."

If that judgment 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).

A hierarchy of loneliness began to emerge with the old guard at the top - something new contributors felt obliged to acknowledge. "I read about this site in the New Yorker . . . guess I'm not an authentic 'I'm so lonelier'. In fact, I can't say I've ever thought of typing in emotions on Google." Before long, the number of participants who had discovered the site through the New Yorker appeared easily to outnumber those searching with the phrase "I am lonely".

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.

Some of the messages so far ...

In NYC, millions of people, but here I am: quite overweight, single, nearing a big, ugly birthday. Time to stop the pity party, I know, but terribly lonesome in the meantime - NYERREADER

I was reading one of the posts at this site a few hours ago. It said a good thing to do was just go out walking. So I did and ended up on the main strip in the city, all bright lights and hundreds of people having fun. Nothing worse. But then I bumped into a friend of a friend and his friend. We talked about nothing for a while. I suddenly felt a lot less lonely. So, yeah, point is getting out of the house worked for me - I googled too

This is quite the little postmodern community, lonely people who find each other at the touch of a button ... Do I feel less lonely now? I knew there were lots of lonely people out there before. Now I am in conversation with some of them, but maybe I am just saying my little piece, congratulating myself . . . Maybe no one will read my post and understand it. Maybe I haven't said it right. Maybe someone out there will read it and understand, and maybe she will write back - oddkod

I'll be everyone's friend!!! - Kristen

why do so few lonely people get along with other lonely people? - jingo

some of u talk to damn much! no wonder u lonely - Jac the King

this thread is so beautiful...it feels like humanity crying out in one voice... I'm lonely tonight too. Anyone in montreal? I wish we could go for a walk together ... - alonetonight


Tuesday August 30, 2005
The Guardian