In class yesterday we had an extended discussion about the effects of technology on our lives. The conversation centered around three questions:
1. Have we stopped living in the moment?
2. Is conversation dead?
3. Is social media making us sad?
We ultimately decided that to each question, the answer is sometimes "yes"and sometimes "no." It might seem like a convenient way to avoid taking a clear stance on how technology is affecting our daily lives, but the way I see it, there is no other choice.
Making a generalization about the effects of technology-- iPhone use or social media use, for example-- requires making a generalization about people. Technology has brought us a host of tools that can be used for good or bad, in moderation or in excess. Hand two people a Netflix subscription and one may watch their favorite show for an hour before bed each night and the other may binge-watch to the detriment of his real-life relationships. Similarly, one person may use Facebook to maintain regular contact with friends and family while another may escape to the depths of their feeds until voyeurism replaces meaningful friendships.
I babysit a girl and a boy, in 5th and 3rd grade respectively. For them, the lure of their iPads is real, but fortunately their parents have instilled in them values of self-control by allotting specific amounts of time for internet use. When I see young families in a restaurant all glued to the screens of their smartphone, I blame not the smartphone but the family's lack of discretion to ban phone use at the dinner table. "Everything in moderation" is a bit of a cliche, but I think it applies when answering the three questions above.
Have we stopped living in the moment? Some of us probably have. The people who spend the duration of a concert viewing it through the screen they hold in front of them, for example. But others have learned to use their phones selectively to prolong a special moment, capturing the memory for future reminiscence. In my post about the UNC basketball victory over Duke this year, in which I respond to the question "did our phones ruin our victory over Duke?", I argue that my phone actually enhanced my memory of the win. Now whenever I want to relive that moment I can watch the video I took as I stormed my way from the Dean Dome to Franklin. And my ability to do that outweighs the slight distraction I might have felt by bringing my phone out for a few minutes
Is conversation dead? Not for some of us. For some of us, conversation is richer than ever, flourishing on more platforms than we've ever had access to before. A face-to-face dinner table conversation can be augmented by the countless new perspectives that are voiced on Twitter, forcing us to refine, and sometimes reevaluate, our own arguments. For others who choose to hide behind their screens and use digital communication as a substitute for in-person chats, conversation may be dying. Technology has the ability to shape, extend and challenge our conversations in new ways when we use it to supplement the conversations we have in real life.
Is social media making us sad? All the fuss about FOMO has led many critics to conclude that technology is creating a general sense of dissatisfaction among its users who are constantly exposed to the exciting, superior-seeming lives of their friends. Sometimes, this is true. Over Spring Break I had to make an active effort to avoid Instagram so I wouldn't compare my work-filled break with the tropical, booze-laden adventures of my friends. But that's a choice everyone is capable of making. It's not like social media is forcing us to wallow in our own envy. The happy people use social media to connect, share and grow. All of my cousins on my mom's side live in Texas, and I see them once a year during our annual family beach trip. Before social media, I had to wait a year to find out how they had changed and what new things they'd gotten involved in, but with Facebook I now feel closer to them than ever.
Humans have always (and will always) adapt to new technologies in different ways, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. A knife can be a cooking tool or a weapon, and just because some people use it to inflict harm doesn't mean we should discount all of its wonderful uses. The problem I find with people like Sherry Turkle is they place too much blame on the technology and not on the people using it. Technology is capable of being seductive, distracting and intrusive, but it can also be informative, reflective and empowering. It's every person's job to define the role of technology in his/her life in order to harness its benefits and minimize its potential harm.
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