How Has Technology Changed Us?

If you are around my age, you remember when the telephone was everything for a teenager. In most cases, there was only one phone line in the home that everyone had to share, so getting your precious time on it led to some pretty heated family moments. When the mobile phone was introduced, we marvelled at the idea of being able to hold a conversation with a friend from the car or some other remote place. But even with these apparatuses, it was not easy, nor cheap, to connect with people in other countries.

I was in graduate school when e-mailing became the craze, but very few of us could access it in our home because the internet was not widely available. And when the internet was finally installed in our homes, most of us had one computer—if that—and the internet had to be connected by the same phone line you used to call your granny in Saginaw. Very inconvenient! It wasn’t until the wide arrival of fiber optic internet that one person could talk on the phone while another checked her email at the same time in the same house. I don’t believe that these forms of communication changed our brain structures the way the next wave of innovations did.

When Instant Messaging was introduced, most U.S. homes now had at least one family computer on the desktop and adult members had a personal computer, creating a new sense of privacy we had never felt before. This significantly sped up the rate of communication and substantially increased the number of people with whom we could have exchanges. A barrage of chat rooms began to spring up where we could spend hours sharing our deepest thoughts and secrets with completely anonymous strangers who lived in a different state or country. This led to the invention of extremely powerful tools like social media, dating sites and smartphones. They completely changed the way we interact with the people around us and in the world.

Before Facebook, AOL Instant Messenger was a real game-changer.

We are now completely beholden to the beeps and tings of the plastic rectangles in our hands. The next time you are on the bus or train, look away from your iPhone and take inventory of all the people who are hunched over their own. Take stock in how little we have high quality interactions with each other. Our cultural norms have changed: what we consider to be good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable, friendly or rude has also been dramatically transformed, contorted and made ambiguous. Today, we have different ideas about empathy, community, fraternity and togetherness because we would much rather be alone with our phones than spending time with other human beings, who will eventually just bore us to tears because they cannot entertain us like scrolling through 7 thousand Tik Tok videos in ten minutes can.

So, the question is, are we better off now because of technology? Has technology rewired our brains, making us less prone to seek out human interactions? Do we love our phones more than we love our fellow citizens? Nowadays, when we see someone in distress, instead of holding out a hand to help him, we often reach for our phone to record him. At the end of the day, do we love our phones more than we love ourselves?

I don’t have time to answer any of those questions right now because an influencer is currently streaming something really cool….Gotta go!