As I sat in the airport waiting for my flight back to Providence last week, the terminal was filled with college students heading back to school. A few were reading books and a few were napping, but the vast majority was looking at their iPhones or iPads. Not a single one of them was talking to someone sitting in the next seat. I was taken aback. And yet, that image seemed all too familiar.
Big things happened in technology during the last decade. Chief among them was that the world went from being connected to being hyperconnected. The world is quite literally at our fingertips. Ten years ago it would have been unheard of to video chat friends from your phone or text people in other countries. Now it’s second nature.
But as we continue to make computers smaller and communication more accessible, we have been unable to help ourselves from excessively indulging in the social media and real-time connectivity around us. I guarantee this is something you notice every day. Can you remember a time when you were so buried in a Buzzfeed article that you almost walked into oncoming traffic, or a time you missed a story a friend told you because you were reading a text message? When we’re less engaged in the world around us, we have a greater propensity to lose out on what’s going on in our lives. We fail to notice the little things, to take advantage of opportunities at hand, and to develop meaningful relationships with people around us.
Our failure to make meaningful human relationships is the most unfortunate consequence of our recent dependence on technology, and also the one that will perhaps be most difficult to rectify. In a 2011 New York Times opinion piece titled “You Love Your iPhone. Literally,” author Martin Lindstrom wrote about an experiment he conducted to find out whether iPhones were truly addictive.
Eight men and eight women between the ages of 18 and 25 were exposed to audio and video of a ringing or vibrating iPhone. Lindstrom found that when his subjects heard or saw the iPhone ringing, the fMRI scan showed a burst of brain activity in the insular cortex of the brain, linked to emotions like compassion and love. As Lindstrom wrote, “The subjects’ brains responded to the sound of their phones as they would respond to the presence or proximity of a girlfriend, boyfriend or family member.”
Lindstrom’s experiment indicates that technology has a tangible impact on our relationships with others. We can literally fill a void of human contact with our electronics, and it’s so easy to do that we don’t bother to do things the old-fashioned way. I bet that if Lindstrom ran a similar study using Facebook notifications, he would find comparable results. Our phones are our lifelines to everything and everyone, but at what cost?
For those of you who have seen it, these themes come to life in Spike Jonze’s newest movie, “Her.” The film follows the story of Theodore Twombly, who, after going through a dreadful divorce, falls in love with his artificial intelligence system named Samantha. As the plot develops, Samantha becomes so realistic that viewers find themselves bringing her to life in their own heads. They can imagine what she looks and feels like, and what they would want her to do. Suddenly, she’s no longer a computer.
I’m not suggesting that it is realistic for college students to fall in love with their phones the way that Theodore falls in love with Samantha. But just as Theo uses Samantha to fill the absence of love in his life, we can use our technology to fill real emotional gaps in ours. We use Facebook and Twitter to satisfy our cravings for attention, we use our phones as an excuse to avoid the awkwardness of running into people on the sidewalk, and we hide behind text messages because it’s easier than saying the hard stuff in person.
I won’t ruin “Her” for those who haven’t seen it, but I will say that at some point none of us can ignore the power of real human interaction. As the spring semester progresses and we attempt to adhere to our New Year’s resolutions, it might be worth adding another to our lists. The man or woman you or I love may have been sitting across from us at the airport terminal last week, but how can he or she compete with the 16GB in our pockets if we won’t even look up to say hello? Let’s be conscious of our dependency on technology and remember that human relationships are strongest when in the presence of others.
Daniel Delaney ’15 will be trying not to text in the presence of others. He can be reached at daniel_delaney@brown.edu.
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