Alone with our Technology: Part Three

In the first two posts, I covered why time away from technology is important for our growth as individuals. We need that quiet space to sit and think, to understand that being alone isn’t something to fear, and that we don’t have to be “on” all the time. The call of technology is loud; we’ve become accustomed to on-demand entertainment and we worry about missing out if we log off. One of the scariest things about logging off is that we may discover that without the constant stream of someone else’s updates, we’re bored. Yes, there is a very good chance that you might find out that you, the master of witty status updates, are boring.

Is this more exciting than being alone with your thoughts?

This is the risk we take when we log off. However, as with any risk, there’s an equally good chance that the experience could surprise us in a good way. After a period of separation, we may find that we value the presence of others more than before, but we’ll never know if we don’t take that first, scary step. In the words of Deresiewicz, “The more we keep aloneness at bay, the less are we able to deal with it and the more terrifying it gets.”

Rediscovering solitude requires us to first acknowledge the role that social networking plays in our lives. Disalvo explains in Scientific American, “As social networks proliferate, they are changing the way people think about the Internet, from a tool used in solitary anonymity to a medium that touches on questions about human nature and identity: who we are, how we feel about ourselves, and how we act toward one another.”  If we learn to enjoy life without constant connectivity, we can learn to use technology as a tool instead of a crutch. Instead of using the Internet to IM our friends, we could invite them to meet us in person.

Communicating offline.

Another option is to use the Internet as a way to get out and meet new people. Try using MeetUp.com or googling local groups that share your interests: book clubs, amateur theater groups, or intramural sports. Even if we can’t meet face-to-face, we can video chat with our friends and family to help reestablish those nonverbal cues.

We can once again find the balance between intimacy and isolation, logged in and unplugged. We can appreciate quality friendships over a quantity of acquaintances, and we can use social networking to our advantage. You may have 600 “friends” but Dunbar’s number proposes that we can cognitively maintain a maximum of 150 actual relationships. At 150, we have time to properly nourish these relationships, as well as focus on our own individual growth. Consider the problems associated with maintaining several hundred friendships:

1. The people who don’t matter distract you from the ones who do.

Let’s be honest. As useful as social networking can be, it’s also a massive time suck and the perfect procrastination tool. I would love to finish that paper, but I have to comment on my colleague’s vacation photos or she’ll think I don’t care. Typically this analogy applies to your work, but it can also be used on your real relationships. It’s easy to become distracted by everyone’s random links and statuses, and miss out on the information from people who really matter. More than once I’ve been distracted by photo albums and links to articles and then completely forgotten to send that email I promised to a family member. We need to know how many relationships we can honestly maintain at one time, and then give our full attention to the ones that matter.

2. The intimate details of strangers cheapen your real friendships.

I’m sure you have a few people in your friends’ list who are casual acquaintances at best. Maybe you met them once at a party, or you worked together for a few weeks. At any rate, these are not the kind of people you hang out with on a regular basis, but I bet you know a lot about them. Without even being nosey, you are inundated by pictures of their children, updates about their daily personal struggles, and information about the issues that matter to them. In effect, you know the quirks, features, and virtues that make them a unique individual. These details used to be reserved for close friends, shared over dinner after years of knowing one another. If you know everything about everyone, what makes those intimate details special?


3. Dragging your past into your present can sour your memories.

There’s probably a few other friends in your list that at one time, you knew very well. Someone from high school or college will normally work for this example. You had so much in common and were great friends. You vacationed together, drank together, and genuinely enjoyed each other’s company. Note the use of past tense...

Normal life events would’ve taken you on your separate paths, and you would’ve looked back on your years together with a smile. Thanks to social networking, you are still in contact with them and to be perfectly honest, they annoy the shit out of you. You’ve both grown in different directions and hold opposing world views. Sometimes you wonder why you ever liked this person in the first place. If your past had stayed in the past, your memories of this person would still be good ones.

Think of it like a bouquet of flowers. Yes, they were beautiful and were a wonderful addition to your life, but now the dead leaves are making a mess on your counter and it’s time to let them go.

4. Your friends hate your other friends.

Social networking has this amazing way of bringing together your past and present and then letting them engage each other for all to see. I’ve seen far too many status updates turn into a slew of insults from people who have never met and have nothing in common but you. Lists and filters are helpful, but it was much easier to compartmentalize our various social groups before we had an online presence. If nothing else, at least our grandma didn’t have the option of reading a hate-filled comment stream.

Social networking is here to stay, and can offer us some amazing benefits. On the flip side, it can also cause us more than a few headaches. As with all things, it’s a matter of finding the balance. From time to time, it’s ok to unplug and simply be alone with our thoughts. To put the world on pause, and rest without computers or smart phones. Consider it a vacation from the network.  You could even try it out while on vacation.

A cell phone free zone.

In part one, I mentioned that Montaigne called this space our “backshop, wholly our own and entirely free.” It’s a space where you can do whatever you want, be whoever you are, and not have to answer to anyone. Being alone and away from the network doesn’t have to be something we stress about. It’s a break from the world. Enjoy it!

Deresiewicz, William. “The End of Solitude.” Chronicle of Higher Education 55.21 (2009): B6-B9. Web.

Disalvo, David. “Are Social Networks Messing with Your Head?” Scientific American Mind 20.7 (2010): 48-55. Web.

Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Trans. Charles Cotton. 1877. Web.

Alone with our Technology: Part Two

In Part One, I started to discuss how social networking can negatively impact our lives when it infringes on our ability to be alone. I’m continuing that thought here, but focusing on the two groups that are most active on Facebook: teenagers and young adults.

Erik Erikson studied Freudian psychoanalysis in the early 20th century, and even expanded Freud’s stages of development. Don’t use this as an excuse to dismiss his ideas just yet. So why am I telling you about an old psychoanalyst, and how does this apply to our topic of social networking? First of all, I find the history of modern psychology to be fascinating. Second, Erikson’s Fifth Age of Man is Identity vs. Role Confusion. This stage happens during the teenage years or in other words, prime social networking time. It’s referred to as a “moratorium,” or a time for “finding oneself.”

Erik Erikson

As more and more teens discover the power of technology, they’re losing out on their moratorium period. Turkle explains, “The idea of the moratorium does not easily mesh with a life that generates its own electronic shadow.” When every mistake and outburst is logged in a permanent record for the world to see and interact with, these adolescents are constantly “on.”

In 1950, long before free love, disco, or smart phones, Erikson wrote that teenagers are “primarily concerned with what they appear to be in the eyes of others as compared with what they feel they are.” Facebook can be a place to test out certain facets of their personality, but the pressure to “like” the right bands and say the right thing in the eyes of their peers can be overwhelming.

When in doubt, "like" the cat pictures. Always a win.

An off comment in a conversation can quickly be forgotten, but when typed onto the glaring white screen of a user’s profile, there’s a tangible record of that moment to be copied and shared with others. Before we launch into a tirade about how easy teens have it these days and how much harder it was when we were kids, let’s just consider the social implications of an online presence in high school for a second. Think back to your most embarrassing teenage moment. Now imagine that video or picture being posted on Facebook or YouTube, to be viewed on-demand by everyone you know. Cyber-bullying aside, social networking can add a cruel twist to an awkward teen’s life. I imagine that "Star Wars Kid" wished he was a child of the 80's so he could've had this moment without over 25 million people viewing it:

Personally, I wish I had access to Google as a teen. I also wish I would’ve been guaranteed the privacy of a cell phone conversation without someone’s mom picking up the downstairs’ line, but I feel so lucky to have gone through my high school years without the stress of social networking. Before the world of Facebook and text messaging, teenagers could test boundaries and try on a variety of roles, but they also had more anonymity with their mistakes.

Another change continual technology offers is that teens never have to make a decision on their own. Even picking out a shirt can be a collaborative effort. A photo can be snapped on a cell phone and uploaded in seconds with the question “What do you think?” posed to hundreds of friends. Collaboration can be an excellent skill to have, but to allow others to influence every decision denies them the ability to grow in their own right. Turkle explains, “We used to equate growing up with the ability to function independently. These days always-on connection leads us to reconsider the virtues of a more collaborative self.” We don’t have to learn independence when the Internet makes it so easy to learn the preferences of others and glide seamlessly into that adolescent desire to fit in, to be indistinguishable from the cliquish herd of their peers.

Look at that intensity...

But how do young adults discover themselves when they’re logged in and under scrutiny? How can they learn to independently consider deeper decisions when a multitude of opinions is always available at their fingertips? We don’t have to think anymore, to make difficult decisions, to work out what we truly value, when we can allow the network to do it for us. It’s easy for us to stay in the mentality of the teenager, reaching out to others to validate our needs. But in order to become fully functional adults, we need time apart. We don’t get the chance to grow up when we live exclusively in relation to others.

As you might suspect, Erikson’s Fifth Age of Man is followed by the Sixth, defined as Intimacy vs. Isolation. This is the period we enter in our early 20’s. The goal of this time is to learn how to commit ourselves “to concrete affiliations and partnerships and to develop the ethical strength to abide by such commitments.” Should we fail to find the balance between intimate relationships and a comfortable level of solitude, “a fear of ego loss may lead to a deep sense of isolation and consequent self-absorption.” I imagine Erikson would be impressed by the variety of examples of self-absorption one can find on Facebook.

The debate continues to rage: does Facebook create narcissists or simply allow them to shine? I’m firmly in the camp that the apparent uptick in narcissistic tendencies is a sign of the times, and Facebook is just another venue for the self-absorbed to express themselves. When you grow up continually hearing that you’re special and never have to experience the pain of failure, it can’t really come as a surprise that you have some narcissistic tendencies. This, however, is another topic all to itself.

The argument that social networking and narcissism are related gained further ground after a Guardian article reported on a Western Illinois University study. According to the article, the study provided “some of the first evidence of a direct relationship between Facebook friends and the most ‘toxic’ elements of narcissistic personality disorder.”

Researchers at Appalachian State University found that narcissistic users were no more likely to update their status than other users. Shawn Bergman, who led the study, reported to Discovery News that “There is a significant amount of psychological research that shows that one’s personality is fairly well-established by age 7,” so it is unlikely that social networking is the cause of the problem. However, the same article notes that narcissists do tend to have different motivations for updating their statuses. They want people to read about their lives because they think people are interested in them, and their profiles “tend to feature more self-promoting profile photos and first-person singular pronouns.” If nothing else, social networking does make narcissistic tendencies much easier to spot.

Conger, Cristin. "Don't Blame Facebook for the Narcissism Epidemic." Discovery News 04 Aug 2011. Web.

Erikson, Erik. Childhood and Society. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993. Print.

Pearse, Damien. "Facebook's 'Dark Side': Study Finds Link to Socially Aggressive Narcissism." The Guardian 17 Mar 2012. Web.

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2010. Digital.

Alone with our Technology: Part One

One of my passions is investigating the role of social networking in our personal lives. As I have a blog and spend most of the day online, I can appreciate the way the Internet allows me to connect with a wider audience, in a way that no previous piece of technology has been able to accomplish. With the prevalence of smartphones and tablet PC’s, we literally hold in our hands the ability to reach out anywhere, anytime. Although I love this ability, I find myself wondering if continual connectivity is too good to be true. My fear for the technology generation is that by allowing ourselves to be perpetually "plugged in" we’re giving up an essential piece of our humanity: our ability to be alone.

I want to share my thoughts on the balance between technology and solitude to you in a series of posts. The irony of using a blog to explain why it’s important to unplug and be by ourselves for awhile isn’t lost on me. If you prefer video to reading, I’m including a link to Sherry Turkle’s TED talk at the end of this post. Turkle, a Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, recently wrote the book Alone Together. It’s a fantastic read and I can’t recommend it enough.

Additionally, I would like to point out that although I typically use Facebook as an example, I’m referring to all social media sites. Facebook just happens to be the most popular, and I’m generalizing for the sake of brevity. Relax, Twitter fans. I respect all 140 characters of your opinion.

So why do I advocate solitude? Many confuse this word with loneliness and imagine eccentrics in caves or the weird kid sitting alone in the cafeteria. According to a 1993 Washington Post article, we fear solitude when we "unfairly equate 'alone' with 'lonely.' And a whole host of other unhappy words, like friendless, unlikable, unlovable, unloved." Solitude is, quite simply, the state of being alone, without any of the negative or positive emotions we may attach to the word.

The dog won't care if you're alone with your thoughts.

When we view solitude as something more emotionally charged than this, we naturally want to avoid it. Thanks to technology, we have an easy way to this. William Deresiewicz, a former English professor at Yale, noticed a trend amongst his students. More and more of them were mentioning that they didn’t enjoy being alone, even when they were studying. He has since written about the way technology allows us to be physically separated, without ever being alone. He fears that in losing our solitude, we have also lost "the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life."

Regardless of how you define "spiritual life," solitude has always been necessary place to explore your own thoughts and feelings. After all, if you don’t understand you own mind, how can you understand the workings of someone else’s? Alone, we take the time to nurture our minds and ourselves; we take the time to explore hobbies and read books. The poet Francis Petrarch wrote: "Isolation without literature is exile, prison, and torture; supply literature, and it becomes your country, freedom, and delight." He had good reason to be biased, but he’s not wrong.

Michel de Montaigne wrote an entire essay about his love of solitude arguing, "We have lived enough for others; let us at least live out the small remnant of life for ourselves." Deresiewicz’s university students found solitude to be uncomfortable, whereas Montaigne felt that “the greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he is his own.” Through his work, he taught others how to separate themselves from the masses and learn to trust in their own company. Online, we leave behind his “backshop, wholly our own and entirely free” in order to lose ourselves in the quiet glow of our computer screens.

Facebook, the most popular social networking site worldwide, warmly asks it users, “What’s on your mind?” In the book I mentioned earlier, Turkle points out that “Every day each of us is bombarded by people’s random thoughts. We start to see such effusions as natural.” Does the world really need to know what’s on our mind at any given moment? And why do we feel the need to check in several times each day to read the ramblings of someone else’s life?

We have developed a fear of missing out. If something happens and we don’t read about it in a status update, we fear that we’ll be left out of the gossip. We want to feel as though we’re a part of the group. We need to know that we matter. Similarly, we need to demonstrate to the rest of the world that we’re doing something with our time. We’re exciting, interesting people dammit!

Deresiewicz wrote, “This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible.” In this desperate drive to reach out, connect, and share, we’ve become even lonelier than before. We’ve increased the quantity of connections, but we’ve lost the quality. We’re losing a bidding war to be heard as we broadcast the mundane details of our lives. I can almost hear John C. Reilly singing “Mister Cellophane”:

Everyone gets noticed, now and then,
Unless, of course, that personage should be
Invisible, inconsequential me!

No matter how boring the update, we want to connect! Human beings are social animals, and the Internet can be great for reaching out to faraway friends and family. However, the quality of communication we have is greatly enhanced by our perception of their expressions. Robert Putnam expressed this concern in his best-selling book, Bowling Alone. “Computer-mediated communication, now and for the foreseeable future, masks the enormous amount of nonverbal communication that takes place during even the most casual face-to-face encounter.”

An email (even with emoticons, all caps, and excessive punctuation) can’t convey the same amount of information as a face-to-face encounter. We miss the nonverbal cues when we scroll through our Twitter feeds or respond via text. In a live conversation, we don’t have the option of pausing for two minutes and rewording our response. We can tell when our friend’s eyes light up at our news or look away with disappointment. In short, we’re more “real” when we don’t have the option of polishing our response.

The other aspect of quality we’re missing is the ability to know if we have our friend’s full attention. When we’re IM’ing or even talking on the phone, we have no way of knowing if our friend is fully focused on our story, or if they’re also maintaining four other conversations. Does that “Mm-hmm” mean they’re nodding in agreement, or passively acknowledging us while scrolling through their inbox? Turkle pointed out, “We enjoy continual connection but rarely have each other’s full attention.” We don’t feel completely alone, but we don’t feel completely connected either. As social networking grows and increasingly becomes the preferred way to connect, author David Disalvo worries that it “will supplant the richness of real-world relationships with an endless stream of trivial interactions.”

Convenient, but not ideal.

It’s so easy to pull away from others and drift towards the safer world of online communication. Rejection online isn’t the same as having to face the awkwardness of rejection in real life. The world of the Internet is faster, more animated, and involves less of an emotional investment. It’s the fast food of social interaction; who wouldn’t see the appeal?

Take a Facebook friendship, for example. We can interact with snippets of their personality, respond to the comments we find favorable, and ignore or even filter out the aspects that we don’t like. We never have to deal with a whole person, for better or for worse. We can choose which side of their personality to engage. It’s a way for us to be in a “relationship” but protect ourselves at the same time. However, when we only focus on the parts of a person that we agree with, we lose out on the richness of true human relationships. Instead, we fade in and out of our digital worlds without ever experiencing the full weight of friendship and interaction. It’s not hard to see how this superficial communication would leave us feeling lonely, even when we’re not alone.

Brown, Joe. “Me, Myself and I.” Washington Post 15 Oct 1993, Final: N7. Digital.

Deresiewicz, William. “The End of Solitude.” Chronicle of Higher Education 55.21 (2009): B6-B9. Web.

Disalvo, David. “Are Social Networks Messing with Your Head?” Scientific American Mind 20.7 (2010): 48-55. Web.

Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Trans. Charles Cotton. 1877. Web.

Petrarch, Francis. The Life of Solitude. Trans. Jacob Zeitlin. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1924. Print.

Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2000. Print.

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2010. Digital.