Digital Slaves

The internetas a whole emerged in our lifetime, undersigned, unexpected, unpredicted.Nobody planned it. Nobody is in charge. Nobody foresaw blogs, social networks,even search engines, in advance let alone in particular forms they took. No onesigned up for the loss of control. Yet for all its messiness the internet isn’tchaotic. It’s ordered, complex, and patterned. It’s a living example of thephenomenon of evolutionary emergence of complexity and order, spontaneouslycreated in a decentralized fashion, of course, without a designer. It’s thesum, the multiple, actually of many individually deliberate projects. Byproviding an always-present connection to a humming matrix of chatter anddistraction, smartphones have reshaped people’s experience of the world &transformed the way we live, work, learn, travel, shop, and stay connected. Noteven the industrial revolution created such a swift and radical explosion intechnological innovation and economic growth worldwide. Nearly all fundamentalhuman pursuits have been touched if not revolutionized by mobile……. 3G and 4Gtechnologies have reached billions of subscriptions, making mobile the mostrapidly adopted consumer technology in history.

Smartphoneshave, nevertheless, enslaved people to their devices. People downloaded theapps and set up an account for good reasons only to discover with grimirony that these services were beginning to undermine the very values that madethem appealing in the first instance. People joined Facebook to stay in touchwith friends and then ended up, unable to maintain an uninterruptedconversation with the friend sitting across the table. The endless bombardmentof news, gossip and images on the shiny baubles pull so instantly at ourattention, cultivating behavioral addictions, leading people to feel as thoughthey’re ceding more and more of their autonomy when it comes to deciding howthey direct their attention. As Neo-Luddites advocate abandonment of the mostof new technologies, the quantified self-enthusiasts carefully integratedigital devices of their life with the goal of optimizing their existence inthe context of the current moment of digital-overload. Techno-apologists arequick to push back the discussion to a utility.

   

As theyspend too much time in cyberspace, the youth of today are regarded as shallow,selfish, spoiled, feral-good-for-nothing, and full-of-narcissism. The’enterprise-culture’ means competition, overwork, anxiety, and falling ill(even though the children were more overworked and fell a lot more ill in theindustrial, feudal, agrarian, and Neolithic and hunter-gatherer past). It’s notabout usefulness; it’s about autonomy, the feeling of losing control. Where youcan simultaneously cherish your ability to discover inspiring photos onInstagram you fret about this app’s ability to invade the evening hours youused to spend talking with friends or reading with no social notifications, noquick snapping of photos to Instagram, no reason to surreptitiously glance downa dozen times during dinner. Few predicted how much our relationship with thisshiny new tool would mature in the years that followed.

The QuickGlance…….is the new technique that the Smartphone provided to banish theremaining slivers of solitude. At the slight hint of boredom, yousurreptitiously glance at any number of apps/ mobile –adapted websites thathave been optimized to provide you an immediate and satisfying dose of inputfrom other minds (the Smartphone usage in terms of time spent, looking at the screen,should be added with the time spent listening to music, audiobooks, andpodcasts). The intricate brain networks evolved over millions of years inenvironments where interactions were always rich and face-to-face encountersand social groups were small and tribal. The past two decades are characterizedby the rapid spread of apps, services, sites, etc. that enable people tointeract through digital networks, which have pushed people’s social networksto be much larger and much less local while encouraging interactions throughshort text-based messages and approval-clicks that are the orders of magnitudeless information-laden than what we’ve evolved to expect.

As peopledevote less time to offline communication, the small boosts we receive fromposting on a friend’s wall or liking their latest Instagram photo can’t comeclose to compensating for the large loss experienced by no longer spendingreal-world time with the same friend. The idea that real-world interactions aremore valuable than online interactions isn’t surprising. Our brains evolvedduring a period when the only communication was offline and face-to-face. Theseoffline interactions are incredibly rich because they require our brains toprocess large amounts of information about subtle analog cues such as bodylanguage, facial expressions, and voice tone. The low-bandwidth chattersupported by many digital communication tools might be look-alike of thisconnection but it leaves most of our high-performance social processingnetworks underused—reducing these tools’ ability to satisfy our intensesociality. The value generated by Facebook comment or Instagram like—althoughreal—is minor compared to the value generated by an analog conversation orshare real-world activity.

Onlineinteraction is, both, easier and faster than old-fashioned conversation. Humansare naturally biased toward activities that require less energy in the shortterm, even if it’s more harmful in the long run. We end up texting our siblinginstead of calling them on the phone or liking a picture of a friend’s new babyinstead of stopping by to visit. As the digital communication tools sabotagethe offline communication our primal instincts to connect is so strong thatit’s difficult to resist checking a device in the middle of a conversation witha friend. Our analog brain cannot easily distinguish between the importance ofthe person in the room with us and the person who just sent us a new text.Face-to-face the conversation is the most human and humanizing thing we do. Fullypresent to one another, we learn to listen. It’s where we develop the capacityto empathize. It’s where we experience the joy of being heard, of beingunderstood.

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