We were promised a global village instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.Īt the forefront of all this unexpectedly lonely interactivity is Facebook, with 845 million users and $3.7 billion in revenue last year. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. In 2010, at a cost of $300 million, 800 miles of fiber-optic cable was laid between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange to shave three milliseconds off trading times. Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment. We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible. Vickers’s web of connections had grown broader but shallower, as has happened for many of us. In the months before her grotesque death, Vickers had made calls not to friends or family but to distant fans who had found her through fan conventions and Internet sites. Savage later told Los Angeles magazine that she had searched Vickers’s phone bills for clues about the life that led to such an end. With no children, no religious group, and no immediate social circle of any kind, she had begun, as an elderly woman, to look elsewhere for companionship. Certainly she received much more attention in death than she did in the final years of her life. She had long been a horror-movie icon, a symbol of Hollywood’s capacity to exploit our most basic fears in the silliest ways now she was an icon of a new and different kind of horror: our growing fear of loneliness. Within two weeks, by Technorati’s count, Vickers’s lonesome death was already the subject of 16,057 Facebook posts and 881 tweets. The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined “Mummified Body of Former Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers Found in Her Benedict Canyon Home,” which quickly went viral. Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the empty space. Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. It does not store any personal data.Yvette Vickers, a former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly.
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