The Ever Tightening Net Constricting Emotions and Sociability

A commercial plays on the television in front of you: a young boy uses his iPad to improve his public speaking skills, and then to research how to ask a girl out. What goes through your mind when seeing this? Is it a thought of how helpful the Internet is, or do you wonder why the boy is turning to something as cold as technology for something as intimate as love? The Internet has succeeded in permeating our lives, but is this the success we intended? Emotions are dulled from the insulation of technology, while people are developing less of a “self” than a “one,” and one of many at that. Relationships do not require the closeness that they used to, causing people to retreat more into their Internet worlds as real life interactions are never as engaging or mesmerizing. We have trained ourselves to seek stimulation overload, making only experiencing one thing or person at a time nearly unbearable for some.

Technology’s grip has dulled our expression of emotion and possibly even our experience of it. So many interactions with our friends and families do not require us to express the emotion we convey to them. We condense our emotions to two or three symbol “emoticons,” as we claim to be happy , laughing xD, sad :’(, or mad x(. Yet when you see people walking and texting, are their faces not usually blank? How do we know we even feel these emotions? Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011) says communication has evolved from, “I have a feeling, I want to make a call,” to, “I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text.” We are chasing something we do not know how to experience anymore. It is possible even that we are experiencing these emotions, but like an addict who builds up a higher and higher tolerance, we find ourselves unable to register a feeling unless it is extremely intense. What provides more intense engagement than the ever-present Internet? If we do not return to contacting each other directly, the Internet will change from a mere social crutch to an absolute necessity for hu-

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mans to connect to one another. The young boy, instead of searching how to ask a girl out, may instead look up the girl’s many social networking sites. Instead of figuring out how to speak to her, he can utilize the networks’ options for flirting that takes no effort of social thought on his part. He can simply “poke” her on Facebook, thus sending her a notification to get her attention. She may even “poke” back. What a large step for their relationship.

As technology enters more and more aspects of our lives, the concept of the individual is slowly dying out. More people than ever claim to be individual; after all, when have they ever before been able to express all that is unique about themselves on social websites, for all to see? However, the self we portray is not the one we are, we only share what will get us liked, pitied, favored, and eventually we become these traits, nothing more. To paraphrase a favorite author of mine, Patrick Rothfuss reveals something true and dangerous, “We all become what we pretend to be” (The Name of the Wind, 2013). Every online identity blends into one, and as people of all varying ages begin to frequent the same web pages, we begin to become the same. People no longer even need to change as they grow older. They can stay in their same isolated corner of the Internet. We are, as Turkle says, “alone together.” The Internet is the most populated plane of our existence, but the only one on which you will not meet a single soul.

This dulling of emotions and loss of sense of identity has estranged us from each other. We find it difficult to meet anyone, and nearly impossible to meet anyone interesting. The qualities we have had trained into us, repel us when we see them in other people. Every conversation is a variation of something generic and predictable, so we are no longer excited or interested by each other. We require technological intervention even to fall in love, because the spark that might have used to light that flame is stomped out before it is born. Accidental eye contact that might lead, in Turkle’s words, to a “moment of more,” is effectively avoided by directing human attention constantly to technological devices. People now get their fix of “more” from technology’s cold embrace. What we do online is like “a living death!” How can it be considered a life? If it has roots in the real world then it can be considered a piece of life, but the roots living in the real world are gradu-

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ally dying, the nourishment of the social gone from that world. In order to survive, we retreat up to the branches we have spread in the Internet, but once our roots our gone, we will have nothing to anchor us and we will fall.

Perspective is very important to keep in this modern time. We must be careful not to switch completely over to the technological medium. Everything requires balance. The Internet has succeeded in helping humans, since it has given us new ways to keep in contact, access information, and broaden our horizons. However, many people view these benefits and do not see that they should be used as supplements. They begin to believe that the Internet is much better than reality and thus that we should do everything via it. Yet there is the old phrase “too much of a good thing is bad” and the Internet proves this to be true. The real point of success for technology and the Internet will be when it finds its place of balance in our world, where it is not dominant in relation to real life but supplemental or, at most, coexistent.

Currently, technology is putting us through a vicious cycle that makes other humans dissatisfied with us and we dissatisfied with other people. We come to value an ideal that is above anything a human can achieve. We expect perfection and instant gratification, but these are impossible in the real world. When I was younger, I said something on a social networking site, not directed to anyone, that I am just now realizing the meaning of: “I didn’t know cameras could capture personality too, you look exceptionally two dimensional on it.” This phenomena has become more and more common on the Internet. Personalities are beginning to fit into a mold as we condense ourselves down to the “essentials” in this new plane of existence.

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