Tam tired, exhausted if I am being honest. Life has become the equivalent to a sideshow, people see the act and cheer loudly only to inspire you to keep it going, but behind the scenes the real mess is hidden by a tattered velvet curtain. The phone rings, text ding, Facebook likes sore, and retweets beg for my attention all expecting a witty upbeat remark that I respond with through the filter of my digital self. Everyday I receive perfectly worded digital questions and take my time crafting and arranging every word I put into a reply, in fact I go as far to put in a LOL [laugh out loud) even if I hardly smirk while reading the message.
To avoid being alone we create digital-selves that are always connected, in demand, and available, creating the feeling that we can do anything everywhere because there is so much data to experience. Our digital profiles keep our lives a quick click from perfect at all times. Pinterest is the place we post and connect with the perfect we aspire to, such as the perfect backyard paradise, fifty meals jumpstart your metabolism, reinventing a night out into a dream. Instagram captures our life on the go and enables us to capture every smiling face, perfectly brewed latte, and warm beach scene.
It even allows us to filter imperfections to create the ideal sunset that is more beautiful than the real thing! Facebook works to connect us with all our high school friends and lets us highlight the parts of our lives we want others to compare themselves to, share, like, or validate. Social media acts as a pin board to document, share, like, and connect with our lives, friends, and people we have never met. But the best part is we can filter what goes online. We eliminate more than pimples, we edit relationships, type things that bolster our rojected image and create the self we desire to present to others, the self that is sometimes unachievable in physical circumstances. Somehow our physical-selves are affected by the number of likes on a photo or comments on a post, I believe this is a way we have adapted technology to quantifying the approval of others by comparing the number of virtual friends and likes with our peers numbers. Turkle writes that people would like to have artificial intelligence, such as Apple’s Siri, to be there best friend.
Robots to care for our children and be companions for the elderly living in nursing homes are already creeping into our society, as we have normalized and justified these kinds of interactions. When did spending time together with our loved ones become such a hassle? Has our culture objectified humans that we can simply set them in front of a machine and expect that machine to give the same feelings or bond that exist in face to face physical interactions? Machines allow us to become the people we want others to see us as, but Turkle explains “We don’t need to reject or disparage technology.
We need to put it in its place. ” (Turkle pg. 295) A question texted or emailed allows us to think of a response that is perfect to the question asked of us, it is almost a miniature press release. Before technology we would wait to see a person to ask a question, we would not only listen to their audible answer but we also analyze the small facial movement, body language, response time. This organic communication is incredible, one can recognize facial expressions and interpret a meaning in a split moment.
A machine, comprised of zeros and ones is simply a response to an input and for some reason we are drawn to it. Perhaps because of its predictability, but it could also be because it is so easy to pick up a phone and wicked hard to set it back down again. We agree that sitting a child in front of a television as way to keep them entertained, is not ideal as a child should be learning by playing and exploring their senses, how is subsidizing parenting with a robot different than an afternoon with the Wiggles?
Being mindful of the power of spoken words and human touch can often mean more than the words themselves, they signify that a person is willing to spend their arguably most valuable resource on you. Their time. Technology was predicted to allow us to be efficient, to work less so we may spend time in leisure, but the truth is we work more and spend money to take care of the things we objectify. Unfortunately through social media, text, constant connection, and demands of our work we turn people into things that we separated from our physical self through gadgets.
Technology has grown to become a buffer between a self and others. Today our mailbox is not filled with kind words from friends, it is advertisements and words of request. Unfortunately postcards of the exotic places people go have turned into seven second Snap Chats and keeping in touch via mail is outdated. People are too busy today to sit and write a personal note to everyone instead a snapchat is sent to a multitude of people to see the highlighted part of life for a split second, then vanishes. Turkle writes “passively being yourself. it is a curious locution. I come to understand that he means it as shorthand for authenticity. It refers to who you are when you are not “trying. ” not performing. ” (Terkle pg. 271) She goes on to explain digital life robs people of learning basic conversation fundamentals, the spontaneity is removed from people who are too busy for intentional traditional forms of communication. One can think about the words they write on paper, but the traditional cycle of letter writing has been sacrificed in favor of efficiency.
We can still reclaim and humanize our relationships and ourselves! We must connect and process our feeling not as a quantifiable check box or in 140 characters and less but through expression, touch, and experience. Technology has put us in constant demand and always reachable by our work and leisure lives, we must adapt and challenge ourselves to create sacred spaces for authentic real time conversation. Slowing down is not a negative, in fact it can rejuvenate our minds and allow us to experience the no.
Let’s go fly a kite to become inspired instead of uploading a photo of a kite that flies with the purpose of a hundred likes. Interactions and consecutiveness to technology must find a balance that enables productivity at work but protects human interaction in its most intimate form, conversation. The things that matter the most are not objects, they are highly adaptive, interactive beings that analyze every detail situation; they must become deeper than our filtered life that we put such energy into.
Humanizing life is natural, it is what beings and selves are, imagine being fully present and fully listening to everything someone is sharing. We could create connections with one another, authentic and raw, and unedited by stage we feel pressured to put ourselves one. Reaffirm a sense of connection by treasure the letters in a desk, thanking someone with a smile, or striking a deal with a firm handshake. It is not “weird” to slow down from our plugged in world, these feelings of being alone may evoke us to look up from our phone and find so much more to connect with that is around us.