October 24, 2007

• Do you think technology breeds isolation?

  My wrist watch never made anyone more isolated. Ok, maybe an argument can be made for the wrist watch, but my pencil sharpener certainly never made anyone more isolated. 

  So, since it is apparently absurd to think that technology inherently breeds isolation, the question I guess is, have certain technological developments of late breed isolation.  Things like printing presses and televisions and radios and video games and telephones and cell phones and mp3 players and guns and computers and the internet. Those are the usual suspects and people have been saying that they were making us all into lonely isolationists for years and years and years.

  Well, it is certainly true tha some of these technologies can be used to substitute direct person to person interaction. You can call someone up or have a teleconference rather than meeting face to face. You can do you research through the internet rather than having to go to the library, and you can shop online rather than having to go to the store.

  But is the thing we are replacing direct human interaction with properly called isolation? I wouldn’t say so. I mean people are connecting and interacting with one another in lots of new and fascinating ways. They are connecting and interacting with people all over the world whom they otherwise would never have met. Is this isolation? Youtube and facebook and xanga and myspace and secondlife and world of warcraft? All these resources are called online communities for a reason. People interact. The interaction just takes place in a different way than normal face to face communication.  To call a world dominated by these resources a world of isolation suggests a bias in favor of direct human interaction. And I think that’s simply unjustifiable.

  In the future we will see these interaction mechanisms become more and more ‘like’ direct human interaction anyway. Everyone will be able to communicate through visual and verbal interfaces in real time. We may even be able to create holographic interfaces and possible even simulate smell and touch. Then will people still say of these interactions that they aren’t sufifciently ‘real’? Will people demand that people go out and talk to people in person despite the fact that all relevant details about the interaction can be completely simulated online? That strikes me as nothing but a prejudiced pro-”real life” position that has no place in the future we are building.

  Technology simply empowers. It increases our capacity to do whatever it is that we do. If we choose to use technology to isolate ourselves it isn’t technology’s fault.  But from what I can see, we, as a society, are doing the exact opposite.We are using the power of technology to improve our capacity to interact socially, to enable us to forge more and stronger connections with a more diverse community of entities. This should really be no surprise at all though. We are inherently social beings, why would anyone think that we would use our enhanced powers to act against our very nature?

  btw, the two most often sited culprits: “the internet” and “video games” were always conceived of as means to enhance social interaction. Video games originally were designed in the model of amusement parks. The idea was that people would get together and go places (arcades) to play games together with friends and strangers alike. When the home console developed the idea was always as a means of home entertainment involving people getting together and playing games together at each others houses.  That was the idea. It was always meant to be a more immersive, more interactive, more social experience than television and movies.  The internet during its early days of course was all about people sharing information with one another as quickly as possible, via email, newsgroups,  bulletin boards, and web sites.  How people have managed to give these tools such a bad reputation as isolating mechanisms despite their distinguished history of doing the exact opposite, I doubt I’ll ever fully understand.

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  • 6:31 pm
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