I share, therefore I am: how technology is making us more lonely

"Connected, but alone?" was a TED talk given by Sherry Turkle last February. It's an excellent look at the ways in which we are isolating ourselves in and through technology. We have a desire to connect more with people, but the ways in which we are connecting are actually making us more lonely. Check it out:



And here are some of her quotes:

"We're getting used to a new way of being alone together. People want to be with each other, but also elsewhere, connected to all the different places they want to be. People want to customize their lives."

"We can end up hiding from each other even as we are all connected to each other." 

"Human relationships are rich, and they're messy, and they're demanding, and we clean them up with technology. And when we do, one of the things that we do is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection." 

"We use conversations with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves, so a flight from conversation can really matter because it can compromise our capacity for self-reflection." 

"People get so used to being short-changed out of real conversation, so used to getting by with less, that they become almost willing to dispense with people all together." 

"That feeling that no one is listening to me is very important in our relationships with technology. That's why it's so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed: so many automatic listeners. And the feeling that no one is listening to me makes us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us." 

"Technology appeals to us most, where we are most vulnerable. And we are vulnerable. We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy." 

"We are designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship." 

"I share, therefore I am." 

"You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude. The ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself and where you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are, it's as though we are using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true. If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely."

How Using Smartphones Can Consume Us

A recent Chicago Tribune article looks at the problem of people constantly using smartphones while in a theater. It explains how most people do it without really understanding that it's a distraction for others. Commenting on people texting and tweeting during his shows, comedian Bill Burr wittingly remarked, "half the world is acting as if they're documenting events for a magazine they're not working for."

Here are a couple of interesting paragraphs that talk about the chemical reaction going on in our brains and its effects:

"There are studies about the craving we have for new information. It's pretty clear that when we get a new little piece of information, our brains release some dopamine — which is the neurotransmitter chemical that is how the brain encourages us to do things; it's also the chemical implicated in most addictions. And as you get rewarded by that kind of pleasure of getting a new piece of information, you want to repeat that. … There is something very deep and very primitive in our minds that wants us to gather every little bit of information around us."

(...)

Reached by phone, Greenfield explained the potential downside of all that dopamine. "You're on constant high alert, your adrenaline is rushing because you're clicking and you're texting and as soon as you respond a new thing flashes up. In terms of human beings up until now, this is an unusually fast-paced interactive activity. And we know that dopamine dampens an important frontal part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex," which can cause people to behave more recklessly and with less empathy toward others, she said.

"What our mobile screens seem to encourage is going into a mode that is a rather early stage for the human brain — it's one that small children are in, which has a strong sensory focus and it's very exciting and arousing. This is very different from adult human cognition normally."

But both Greenfield and Zecker point to psychological factors relating to self-worth. Or as Greenfield put it: "One can point to things like Twitter and wonder why people say, 'Look at me doing this' and so on. It reminds me of a small child: 'Look at me, mummy.' Because if you don't look at me and give me feedback, I won't exist."

Something to think about as we should all be considering how to limit the amount of distractions in our lives and also not be consumed with telling the world where we are and what we are doing.

I also thought Nicholas Carr's (author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains) final remark of the article was spot-on:""We have trained ourselves to multitask even when we're relaxing."

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