Senior year of high school, I made the radical decision to delete Facebook off my phone. I unfollowed people on Instagram and exclusively started following dogs. I never figured out how twitter worked so that was fine. The impetus for all this was college decisions. Ironic given where I am now I suppose but I remember feeling like each Facebook post declaring “______ class of 2020!!! #soblessed” was wrecking my sanity.
Since then, with sanity readjusted, I have re downloaded Facebook. I can justify it by saying that I use it for interacting and connecting with people I meet but in reality, I spend more of my time looking at Harvard’s Meme and Tourist Haiku pages.
I worry however, that the next generation of kiddos will not have the same kind of self awareness when it comes to their technology. I have seen groups of fifth graders walk through a Children’s museum where I worked completely glued to their phones, experiencing the world through Snapchat filters, and taking social inventory through likes and heart reacts.
Yet far from the usual condemnation, my experience inclines me towards existential concern. Because Facebook didn’t become the ubiquitous monolith it is at present until middle school, I can ground some of my notions of normalcy outside the realm social media. I fear that the next generation won’t have that advantage.
As I have gotten older, I’ve started to think more about how technological development shapes the way I perceive the world. Before getting a cellphone, and in particular a smartphone, I recall being far less concerned with immediacy of response. Now, getting left on “read” is the equivalent of getting stood up on a date.
The boundaries between technology and reality is rapidly dissolving and the Internet of Things is only speeding up this process.
The ubiquity of cellphone usage moves us even further to having “the world at our fingertips.” Given that the cellphone has become the universal remote of the future in addition to our primary mode of social interaction (arguably) there is reason to think about the potential ramifications on the collective social psyche.
The last great existential crisis happened after the world wars. From that we got the Postwar literature that would define the century—Kurt Vonnegut, Albert Camus, The Razor’s Edge—redefining themselves in attempt to find meaning and identity.
It’s probably a romanticized notion of the past, but I am compelled to believe that what so profoundly informed the world views of these great figures beyond whatever innate talent they possessed was the cultural norm of reading books.
While books are obviously not the end all for existential solvency, there was far more effort and time spent enjoying literature….time I now believe we spend mindlessly scrolling through Facebook. I’m not merely being facetious either. According to Pew Research, 27 percent of US adults did not read a single book within the last year. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/27-percent-american-adults-didnt-read-single-book-last-year-180957029/)
**https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0806/reading.html
Books have been replaced by cellphones and to that extent social media in their occupation of our time, thoughts, and ideas.
We have become desensitized to tragedy because of a vicious media cycle and information proliferation. Young people will grow up in a world of near constantly comparison insofar as social media presence is coming close to transcending the technological-ontological plane. And what’s more, the incoming generation will have amount of self-awareness of technology’s impact once the internet of things seamlessly integrates into all part of our quotidian existence.
Because it’s convenient, we are apt to disregard security and conventional morality in favor of the next big thing in tech.
Technological advancement and integration is not inherently bad; it can be incredibly useful and enormously advantageous for our development as a species. But once the lower tiers in the hierarchy of needs have been met by these advantage, how will we confront the question of self-actualization? Of identity? Of genuine relationships?
All of this is to say, the time scale of human brain evolution is incomparable to that of Moore’s law. Unless we have some sort of philosophical paradigm shift that encompasses the material and ontological questions brought on by technological integration, we are set to be the first lost generation that can’t transcend existential despair. Until then, humanities concentrators will still have a job.
Additionally…
Two Black Mirror episodes that are super related to what I’ve talked about:
Season 3 Episode 1
Season 1 Episode 2
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So, have you tried going for some period of time totally disconnected from the network?
Part of my worry is the overwhelming expectation that one is always connected, and that one must answer immediately. We worry when our email isn’t immediately answered, or our text message replied to in seconds. Sometimes, it is worthwhile to break that expectation in others.
At Harvard, if you are staff, there is a nearly ritual message that everyone leaves when they are going to be away from their email. You start by saying that you are out of the office, when you will be back, and that you will be looking at email only occasionally. Then you give a name and email of someone who should be contacted “if this is an emergency”.
The first time I was gone for a while after joining Harvard full time, I left a message that started in the standard way. But when it got to the second paragraph, I told people “if this is an emergency, you might want to re-examine your priorities. There is nothing I can do to help in a real emergency. Get in touch when I get back.”
The reaction was, well, somewhat entertaining but also telling. People didn’t know that you could do that. But I found it both true and liberating.
Moral: don’t let the expectations of others determine your response. But sometimes that means that you need to train them, and yourself.
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