You can call me old fashion, but I was under the impression that technology and social media were supposed to help us not just evolve but also stay connected and be more aware of what is going on around us? Thus, why is it that so many of us in society are acting like mindless, insensitive drones, whose only concern is the amount of information we can acquire without actually retaining said information. Not to mention the fact that people are too concerned with how they look, and how many likes and shares they can get on social media rather than the actual people who are physically in their lives. With that being said I did a little research and found two videos from two famous speakers and this is what they had to say about us and social media.
Nicolas Carr – What the Internet is doing to our brains & Sherry Turkle – Connected, but alone?
After watching both videos from Nicolas Carr and Sherry Turkle, I have come to realize that technology is and has affected us in more ways than one and also in ways that I had not even thought about, unconsciously we check our phones and emails 20-30 times within an hour and we send over 3000 text messages a month according to a study that was conducted for Mr. Carr’s research. Carr focused on how technology affects our brains and our ability to properly receive, process and retain useful information. He attributes this to a study that was done to see how people who multitask heavily how their brains received, processed and retained information for long term use. The study showed that due to the high volume of information that was being transmitted into the brain all at once it was hard for the test subjects to retain the information because of information overload. In order for us to retain information in our long term memory we need to be able to focus on one thing at a time and allow our brains to decipher the information for us to choose what is useful information and what is not.
Mr. Carr went on to further state that we have become slaves to technology and our ability to acquire and receive new information has taken over our way of thinking. We have cut ourselves off from being able to acquire useful information, think critically and reflect on all the information that we have acquired. We no longer aspire to grow our minds and think deeply we have become comfortable with just being able to acquire information and that makes it difficult for us to have an intellectual conversation and have full use of brain.
Turkle, speaks about our ability to have conversations and our need to always be connected and why we do it. She states in her TED talk that people need each other and cannot get enough of each other but, we only want each other enough for us not to feel alone. In other words we use staying connected as a way to try and fill a void, it is a way for us to make people see us how we want to be seen without them actually seeing us. We no longer have conversations anymore or try to build actual face to face relationships because, we think they are too messy and intimate. Therefore, staying connected through text or email or on our daily online profiles like Facebook, Twitter & Instagram just to name a few allows us to share and connect without being vulnerable. It also gives us a sense of false assurance that we are not alone, we belong and we are accepted and liked.
In staying connected all the time we sacrifice our ability to form meaningful relationships with others and ourselves. Turkle, explains that we are so afraid of being alone and that no one is listening that we use technology to replace human beings. Facebook and those other social platforms become our companions. Turkle is afraid that people will stop to rely on each other all together and thus human interaction without the use of social platforms will no longer be.
I myself have to say that I have fallen into the category of people who sometimes prefer not talk to anyone unless I am sending a text or email, because it is easier than having to deal with someone and more convenient. In some respect I do agree with both Carr and Turkle we have become cut off from human interactions and conversations, the last time I went out with my friends I had to ask them what the point of coming out was if all they were going to do was post videos and pictures to Snapchat and Instagram all night. I have also experienced the problem of not being able to retain something that I read because I was reading and my TV was playing and I was also texting at the same time. I could not remember where I had read in my book or what the book was about so I gave up reading to focus on texting and watching TV. Right here we see that I chose to idle instead of reading my book. I was so caught up in the texting and the movie that I was watching nothing else mattered in that moment. There are days that I would not even want to answer my phone when someone called just because I did not want to have to talk over the phone so I would tell them to just text me.
It is sad but this is the reality of the world and time that we live in now we are sacrificing human interaction and human relationships and our ability to receive, retain and process meaningful information, either because it is convenient or just because it satisfies some need or partially fills a void for us.
However, I had to ask myself after watching these videos if this is the person I want to be? The type of person that prefers be alone behind a computer screen or a smart phone because I am afraid of forming and developing human relationships.
Do I really want to have “Amputated Fingers in a Detached, Connected Society?”
