You don't need continuous feedback every minute (or even every day). If you know what you're doing and get in a thrall, 'closed door' days can be amazing.
If I knew what I was doing I wouldn't be working for a company at all. I have the programming expertise but I don't have the business expertise. And I find the more granular back-and-forth I can have with someone who does, the better the end result.
It depends on what your role is. I'm a marketing analyst, and 80% of the communication I have is people checking up on their favorite project. I used to be the last cube at the end of a dead-end office, and my new cube is basically right be the door in a hallway-ish office. I'm half as productive because of all the people dropping in to ask me questions.
I think all the communication options we have make people anxious if we aren't communicating. It's like cell phones. People lose their minds if their phone breaks and people can't contact them immediately, but people survived for tens of thousands of years without that ability.
Well for tens of thousands of years people lived in close-knit communities where they could communicate with all their friends every day by talking to them. To recover that while being able to live in a city and choose our friends and gain all the advantages that come with that, we need other means of communication.
My phone's in for repair at the moment, so I'm very conscious of how much difference it makes to my life. Waiting is a lot more boring without it. I've had some good times that I wouldn't have been able to without modern communications (last-minute parties that I'd've missed if I hadn't been so easy to contact). And fundamentally I like talking to my friends (interestingly this is something that has changed as I've got older - when I was 20 or so I was much more content spending days at a time on my own).
I would certainly advise pruning any communication sources that don't bring you joy, KonMari-style. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I don't think moving to cities is the issue here. I think the ease in contacting far-flung friends is a bigger issue. People don't seek new friends when they can stay in contact with everyone they've ever met.
It's not just an issue for cities. One of my best friends is a high school teacher, and she said that kids told her they felt less lonely after a cell phone ban came in to effect. Before the ban kids would text their friends who weren't there if they didn't know anybody. After the ban they started making new friends at lunch, since they wouldn't choose a convenient spot and stare at their phone the entire time.
I'm willing to trust people to be able to make their own choices. Some people find it easier to make friends than others; some of us can't always rely on strangers to even tolerate us, for various reasons. I'm a lot happier with communications technology than without it, and I wouldn't rob people of the ability to make a choice even if many of them choose wrong.
