I have always been a neo-luddite when it comes to technology. I resisted getting on facebook and resisted getting a smart phone for a long time. I refuse to have a tik tok account – though I suppose my resistance might wane with that too.
I long for the days when we wrote hand-written letters which took weeks and sometimes months to get a response from. I long for the days of slow, deep, meaningful communication as opposed to the inundation of trivial, trite, superficial texts all hours of the day.
But enough about my luddite fantasies… How has social networking (and texting and online dating) changed communication?
I once read a study how social media is causing an incredible uptick in anxiety among particularly young people. This is not only because of increased self-comparison. But unlike earlier generations of kids which only had to guard their reputation while in school, the new generation has to be constantly vigilant about putting out potential gossip-fires which can start online at any hour of the day. When kids come home from the social drudgery of school they can’t turn off and relax like older generations. Instead they are constantly pinged for their attention.
While this applies to all ages, I think it is particularly fraught for young people.
The consequence of this is an oversaturation of capacity and subsequent shallowing of attention. (Perhaps related to ADHD?)
I believe the most valuable currency we have as a human is NOT time, but rather our attention. We only have a limited amount of attention to give every day.
There is an avalanche of information coming in from the plethora of screens in our lives. News, social media, youtube, chats and texts. The consequence of this inundation is lack of depth. Videos are increasingly getting shorter where we have only a few second long reels/shorts to convey flashy click-bait information to the now callous consumer of information. News articles are increasingly bullet points. Text messages are ambiguous emojis. And online dating is swiping based on one highly curated vapid photo.
Online profiles are increasingly photo-centric as opposed to the former “about me” profile-centric approach. Whereas before I learned about what a person’s favorite books were, what type of spirituality they have, and their goals for their life … now I just see highly staged pictures of people pretending to live more exciting lives than is reality without context of the depth of who they are. In other words there is a sad vapidity and lack of depth increasingly permeating online communication.
This massive amount of “info” and “convo” in our lives creates “noise” in our environment.
With the unprecedented noise in the domain of communication and information, the meaningful “signal” has to be overt, short and catchy at the expense of subtle, deep and nuanced. This is shifting our overall dialect away from the numinous words of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman towards the iconographic ways of the Kardashians.
I am being extreme in my obviously biased perspective here, there is still profound depth to be found.
I will also say that the democratic nature of technologic communication has given voice to people who otherwise may not have a voice in previous eras. We are able to hear the uncensored and diverse voices of wisdom through the many different channels of communication. And I am grateful for this. It allows me to find other people with similar specialized interests of such obscurity it would be almost impossible to find such people the “old fashioned way”. We are able to glimpse other cultures, societies and ways of being that would have otherwise been inaccessible.
As with many forms of technology, it is a double edged sword. What can simultaneously be an incredible tool for self-actualization can also be a black-hole of addiction. Our smart phone, the internet and AI are perfect examples of this.
I personally use “AppBlock” on my phone and “FocusMe” on my laptop to limit how much internet I can access every hour. I also block particularly distracting websites. I want to control technology and not have it control me.
A really good book about having focus in our age of distraction is “Deep Work” by Cal Newport.
I also like the book “Slow Sex” which compares sex to food. There is fast food and slow food. Slow food is more enriching. I think this concept of “fast” and “slow” can also be applied to communication. Social media, chats and texting are the McDonald’s of communication whereas face-to-face is the home-cooked meal from garden grown produce.