I continue to be amazed by how invasive cellphones have become. Here are a couple examples of what I’m talking about.
The other week I was at a Christmas event. The had a local high school chorus come on and sing songs. What surprised me was that some of these teens were singing while holding their cellphones in their hands. One student even started talking on his cellphone as he was leaving the stage! Must have been the Joint Chiefs of Staff calling or something…
A couple of months ago, I was a restaurant and there were a couple of high school age kids in the booth next to me. They each had their smartphones and were rapidly typing, surfing, or whatever. Over the course of a meal, I realized that these two never said a single word to each other. Now, I’m not exaggerating for the sake of writing this post. They did not say a single word to each other the entire meal.
At the end, one of them said, “Are you ready?”, and then they left. Wow! What’s the point of having lunch “with” someone if you don’t actually talk to them??
I think technology has outpaced people’s ability to handle it.
i agree 100%. i have become so frustrated by it that i am becoming a ludite in rebellion (as i type a message in a virtual conversation over the internet).
My daughter and I discussed this the other day. We are wired to seek certain things, and we feel reward from doing so. In the case of food, our wiring gives us a strong reward for certain tastes and nutrients. When we find these in nature, we gorge. When we find counterfeit tastes that don’t exist in nature, but are the result of unnatural combinations or chemicals created specifically to trigger that same response, we gorge. Just like unnatural combinations of tastes and chemicals can hit those reward centers, unnatural electronic experiences can do the same.
Consider that we get tremendous reward from being or feeling related. In a small hunter gatherer tribe, the most related is also the most respected AND the most protected. The one who has no friends is the least safe. So there’s a giant reward for becoming related. That’s a good thing. But Facebook and texting create a counterfeit reward that people gorge themselves on just like they do potato chips and ice cream.
If you have the choice of being related closely to just one person in the tribe as opposed to all of the rest of the people, which is better? Which produces the reward? Obviously, you get the biggest payoff by relating to the whole tribe. So the people you see (I see them too) who sit at a restaurant and don’t speak while texting and being on Facebook are falling for a counterfeit version of relatedness. They’re connected to their 500 “friends” on Facebook, as opposed to the one real person across from them.
It’s no different than porn addiction, which is a counterfeit reward, or drugs which directly produce the chemical reward. I do believe that electronic forms of counterfeit reward are destined to grow. Eventually someone will make the online game where you can kill your enemy, defend your tribe, then have virtual sex with the appreciative women. At that point I don’t expect to see a single young adult male in the real world ever again. Sigh.
Oh, back to my daughter. She immediately got this process, and told me about her friends who post pictures of themselves continuously on Instagram. She said the other day a girl at school was SOBBING during lunch because she had only gotten 2 likes on one of her pictures. Virtual rejection by the tribe can be pretty traumatizing, even if it’s all counterfeit to begin with. Crazy. And my daughter also understood why her phone has no internet access, and her texting is restricted to family members.
Excellent comment! I agree 100%. You worded things better than I did. “Counterfeit relatedness” is growing and getting worse.
Maybe Einstein really wasn’t a Physicist but a Prophet…He said:
It is appallingly obvious our technology has exceeded our humanity.