People think technology is tearing at the fabric of society, but it’s not. It’s actually making all of our lives better. However, there’s a large portion of society that is hell-bent on trying to “prove” that it’s lowering our attention span, isolating us, and some outlets won’t even try to hide their motive and literally say it’s “enslaving” users. While there might be merit to some of these arguments, that’s not what the overall tone of this movement suggests and is not what I’m going to be talking about in this article. Instead I want to highlight some of the great aspects of technology and how it’s improving our lives the more advanced it gets.
You’ve seen the articles everywhere about how technology is isolating us, keeping us from forming any authentic human interaction. The truth is that nobody has ever liked being social. In the past, we’d always find a reason to ignore someone, whether it’d be a newspaper, a book, or staring out a window to avoid looking at Hank. Nobody likes Hank.*
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Yup, everyone was super social and engage with each other back in the day.
But the thing that’s different now is that we get to talk to who we want to instead of being forced into a room with people we don’t like. How dope is that? The way that technology and social media is set up allows us to see a list of the content we want to consume or the people we want to talk to. The old adage about how globalization has shrunk the world is true, and in practice allows us to cultivate a world we want to be in instead of making us talk to Hank.**
But most people don’t like this argument. They think that we should enjoy talking with whoever is around us at any given time. Oh yeah, that sounds fantastic; who doesn’t like being forced into a conversation with someone? That’s a form of punishment Guantanamo interrogators wouldn’t use. Oh, you don’t know what Guantanamo is? Guess what? You can search it on the Internet and learn what I’m talking about! Yeah, really makes you miss going to your local library and picking up an encyclopedia, looking up “Guantanamo,” getting confused as to why I’m talking about a city in Cuba, and then forever wondering what my reference was about. Yup, life pre-Internet was fantastic and the best.
* Sorry for any Hanks reading this -- I’m sure you’re a fantastic person and this article about a fake, hypothetical version of someone with your name probably doesn’t represent you as a person.
** Seriously, I’m sure some people like you.
