Good Media
Technology and the Journey of Life
Andrea Rock, contributing editor
We live in a time of explosive growth and change in technology, where the devices we rely upon become obsolete in record time. The convenience that technology brings to our lives is legion, but from time to time, we need to ask ourselves whether negative changes may also be coming about.
For one thing, the speed of modern communication seems to have made us less patient and more in need of instant gratification. I can remember discovering the world of the fax—how many years ago? That new-fangled device eliminated the days or weeks required for the postal service to move documents, yet people stood over the fax machine complaining about how long it took for a message to come through!
Today, young people’s lives revolve around computers, tablets, cell phones, and more. Most of our kids know much more about these technologies than we do! I wrote in an earlier column that our kids may be running into cyberbullying on the Internet, and they may be giving up too much information on Facebook and other social networking sites. What they think is private information may wind up in the hands of advertisers, predators, and future employers!
But equally disturbing is the fact that kids—and all of us—are free to “create” persona on Facebook or through texting. We’re able to present an image of who we’d like to be, or who we’d like others to think we are, rather than who we really are. We may boast of hundreds, even thousands of friends on Facebook, but how superficial is the conversation and the connection that we make? And sadly, because of the amount of information kids put on the Internet about themselves, the president of Google recently said that by the time they turn twenty-one, young people will need to completely re-invent themselves!
In a recent book and an article for the New York Times, psychologist and M.I.T. professor Sherry Turkle warns of the new phenomenon of our being “alone together”—being in the company of family or friends, while each person is connected technologically to someone else. We text or surf the Internet, while ignoring the company we keep. When we text, we send abbreviated messages, using abbreviated words, so although we are “connected” the amount of information we share is small, and more importantly, we are not interacting in person. Turkle cites a 16-year-old boy who texts continually saying, “someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”
When we are together, our conversations may become deep—we can reveal ourselves to family or friends, in pursuit of a caring, supportive relationship. We can’t achieve a level of caring when a few cryptic words are texted onto someone’s tiny screen. It takes time to get to know another person, to build a relationship. Relationships are can be sometime messy, sometimes marvelous, but they always require patience. In this hurried atmosphere of shortened attention span and instant gratification, there is room for a wildly wired, but disconnected world.
Families aware of these threats are taking positive steps that we might ponder. We can make certain areas of our homes, like the kitchen and/or dining room, “device-free” zones. We can make the same decision about our cars. We can take action in our communities to disallow team sports or other activities at the dinner hour. And we can make the family dinner a time for pure, in-depth conversation that has no room for technology.
Sherry Turkle’s book is Alone together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.
