Does Technology Make Us More Lonely?
A popular topic of discussion these days is that of the effect technology has on human lives. While there is a plethora of examples wherein technology helps us and improves our quality of life, there are plenty of ways in which it has made us helpless and secluded. The idea of humans sitting and staring into screens for hours on end goes against almost every natural tendency that we’ve evolved into over the past million years. This theme came to me recently as I was listening to one of my favorite albums, Reflektor, by Arcade Fire. In the title track, lead singer Win Butler speaks of a new “reflective” age, in which people fall in love online and how even love itself has become a breakable plastic. So with this idea in mind, I urge you to not imagine technology as a bright white computer screen, but as a mirror, in which people have become more obsessed with the surface level than anything that holds real value.
It seems to me that social media has made us less social, (odd, huh?) and more afraid to interact in the real world. While this may seem counterintuitive, it makes sense that the ability to communicate in such detail over long distances pretty much voids our need to speak very frequently face to face. Why dial a number and have to maintain a conversation with someone when you can send a quick text and be done with it? Thoughts like these go through my millenial mind often, and I can’t help but beat myself up over it whenever I see it happen. The basic fact of the matter is that humans have reached a point where laziness has outweighed the need for true, physical connections and conversations. This is not to say we don’t need each other- we have always (and always will be) social creatures, but we also really don’t like doing things that are inconvenient for us. Enter Facebook.
In Reflektor, Win Butler pushes this idea that while social media was thought to be a place for connections, it ends up only reflecting people's individual desires and beliefs back to themselves. This is a strange yet familiar idea in light of recent news regarding Facebook, where the company was accused of taking and holding people's personal information. In this case, I’ll take the cliche side of “technology is bad,” but I can completely understand the other side of the argument as well. While arguably creepy, people do save time and energy with predictive ads, which use your past searches to guess what you will need next when shopping online. I could write a whole novel talking about the implications of artificial intelligence here, but I’ll just say that it is likely useful for productivity in the short term but dangerous for our species in the long term. The same can be said about modern technology as well- it may seem to have a positive and productive impact on our species, but it is slowly changing the way we behave. A plastic bag can stay intact for decades on end, never breaking down, but a single person can tear it to pieces- that is what I believe technology is doing to us. The argument of whether or not technology makes us more alone is multi-faceted and is something that we will certainly be talking about for the foreseeable future.
By Tillman Minter
