The Limits of Technology

Since the advent of Twitter, I have been thinking significantly about the role of technology in our social fabric, and what it means when people can readily access "tweets" about the miniscule details of someone else's life. What is interesting to me about Twitter, as with many other technological "second selves" is its manipulability. With Facebook, blogs, Myspace, Second Life, Email, Gchat, and other forms of virtual reality, the user only portrays the self that he/she wants others to see. Further, instead of having a face that conveys emotions the user often cannot hide, despite his/her greatest trying, the interface conveys only the emotions the user chooses to divulge. In real relationships, you cannot just "unfriend" someone and never see them again. The decision not to invest in a friendship anymore has real, tangible consequences that one can see on the others' face. Twitter and other social networking technologies, in my opinion, may exacerbate certain problems already prevalent in our global (and highly individualized) society.

In the '90s chat rooms were all the rage, now its facebook, twitter, and myspace. We've constructed a social reality that is, in a sense, completely separate from true reality and real relationships. Amidst a technologically saturated world, I often wonder if we've lost a sense of being. Within this lifestyle that necessitates cars, trains, and buses for global travel, we can abandon things or people we once cared about and pretend that they never existed because the consequences do not lurk at our doorsteps. Meanwhile, if we are bored with real life, we can escape behind the screen to construct reality in a form more suited to our tastes and interests, and keep others at a distance so that they cannot hurt us. This was not always the case, and relationships and communications have taken new form due to the technological revolution. I am not convinced that this shift is for the better.

While many shout the praises of new technology and the Internet Age, I counter that there are many consequences to embracing and utilizing technology and suggest that we should more frequently unplug and live life. The following lines from Neil Postman's "Informing Ourselves to Death" speak to some of the unspoken limits of technology, and remind us all that cultivating a meaningful existence goes well beyond the boundaries of satellites, electric grids, printed word, and cellular devices:

The computer and its information cannot answer any of the fundamental questions we need to address to make our lives more meaningful and humane. The computer cannot provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking. It cannot provide a means of understanding why we are here or why we fight each other or why decency eludes us so often, especially when we need it the most. The computer is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing what we most needed to confront -- spiritual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, usable conceptions of the past and future...

read on: http://www.mat.upm.es/~jcm/postman-informing.html