About Connections: Love it or hate it, history is a map. Those who hate history think it irrelevant; many who love history think it escapism. In truth, history is the clearest road map to how we got here: America in the twenty-first century.
In this age of hyper-connectivity, it is ironic that what we yearn for most is human contact.
According to University of California Sociology Professor Claude Fischer, “People [today] are profoundly lonely.”
Once we were physically isolated from one another. Fewer people were scattered over a larger mass of undeveloped land. Our link to one another was by slower and more difficult modes of transportation. Then, in those circumstances, we defined loneliness in terms of physical isolation. Today, we live cheek by jowl on a crowded planet simultaneously connected to one another; yearning for one another, and ignoring one another. How do we account for this new phenomenon?
It is a basic law of the physical world that everything (object or person) is either here or some place else; nothing can be in two places at once. That is, until now. Today, with all the hand-held devices and cutting-edge technology, people are rarely in one place. Their concentration is permanently split between what is right in front of them and what is on the screen before them.
Think this is an exaggeration? The doctors were too busy snapping “selfies” with an unconscious Joan Rivers to notice when she stopped breathing. She died surrounded by doctors and nurses with cell phone cameras.
How do we better understand these technology-toting bipeds formerly known as human beings? Can we blame the technology alone?
Israeli social psychologist Yair Hamberger calls this “The Age of Loneliness” and writes, “Loneliness has become the most common ailment of the modern world.” He does not ignore the presence of underlying factors, but places a fair share of blame on technology.
Hamberger writes, “There is a natural need in all humans for social connectedness and engagement to support our journey through life. We do not, by nature, make it alone.”
However, technology seems to promote and support the fiction that we can make it alone. Apparently, technology enables social isolation. We are “always connected” but no less alone. Communication no longer includes human speech. We no longer need to hear or listen or see another human being to call it conversation. The light we are basking in is not another human being’s smile but the glow of a computer screen. Man’s new best friend is digital — the Internet.
In “Conscious Communication in the Digital Age” UCLA Clinical Psychologist Dr. Daniel Siegel and Alanis Morissett write: “Things would be improved if [social media] offered avenues for deeper, not just surface, ways of sharing.”
Instead, Social Media converts the deep meaning of friendship and intimacy into photos, chats, and tweets, and sacrifices meaningful conversation for mere connection.
“The result,” Siegel says, “is that we have many contacts, thereby appearing to have many friends, while experiencing deep loneliness.”
So, is this just modern angst? Were our forefathers more socially connected and less lonely?
Siegel concludes, “The Internet did not create the experience but rather reinforced what was present in the culture.”
As early as the mid-nineteenth century, artists and writers were expressing fear about the alienating effects of industrialization.
John Steinbeck did a masterful job of describing how the economic Great Depression of the 1930s also caused psychological depression and loneliness. When hunger, thirst, and the desperate search for work drove people down the road away from their social center, their family and friends, they were profoundly alone.
In the 1970s, as the economy changed and the Bell curve flatten, psychologists in California wrote the “Warm Fuzzy Tale” to explain the economic and cultural impact on our psychological well-being.
Simply, the tale suggests that, out of fear or greed or alienation, people stopped giving one another warm fuzzies, that is, genuine heart-felt affection. They substituted “plastic fuzzies.” Plastic or manufactured fuzzies were consumerism, mass entertainment, and guarded speech. Plastic Fuzzies kept us from “dying of loneliness,” but plastic fuzzies could not satisfy or feed the soul.
The 19th century proponents of a “return to Arcadia,” John Steinbeck, and the psychologists in the 1970s, placed blame on the economic factors they believed shredded the social fabric. Similarly, Hamberger, Siegel and Fischer blame today’s economy and values.
Hamberger writes that we now value “competition rather than cooperation, individualism rather than membership, and consumerism.” All militate against community. And all are enabled by technology, he concludes.
What should we call our predicament, how should we christen this age? Like the Stone Age and Iron Age, the name Digital Age describes the resource, not the impact on human society. What impact does digitization have on us? Is this the Age of Loneliness? Is technology causing loneliness or exacerbating it? Perhaps it is all too new, too soon to understand it, too soon to find the right name for our time and our dilemma.
Only the fish doesn’t know he is swimming in water.
