Oh the Irony

            Now we’re drawing in close to the holiday season and I’m sure that some of you can already hear those sleigh bells a’jingling. Its hardly the time of year to bring up a serious topic. Most of us just want to use the holidays as an excuse to escape the glaring imperfections of our lives, preferably doing so at a kitschy themed party, sipping eggnog and bedecked with the absolute best sweater for the season.

            But it was at one of these jovial Christmas celebrations that at first a nagging concern and then a snarling beast were awoken within me. I was catering the party of a wealthy family friend, a great, opulent occasion; Silver hors d’oeuvres trays, Children running underfoot dressed like miniatures of their parents, complete with a real life Santy Claus. I was toiling away contentedly in the kitchen, allowing myself to be filled with the buoyant atmosphere, when I overheard two mothers asking their children, fresh from the fur trimmed lap of Santa himself what they had asked for from St. Nick. I stood, grinning to myself stupidly, awaiting the young girls’ dreams of Barbies and Ponies to reveal themselves. At their response my jaw dropped far enough so as to hit the floor and remind me that I was indeed seeing products of the twenty-first century. These two cherubic individuals had said to their mothers, with the honesty that only a six year old can really be accredited, that they fully expected Ipad Minis from Santa this Christmas.

            And if this fails to shock you, it turns out that they aren’t alone; a recent article in the Herald Leader reports that one half of kids aged six to twelve also have an Ipad on their wish lists. How can it be that an entire generation has such high expectations? Suspicion points me towards my old foe of technology. Looking at numbers alone will show you how pervasive technology has become in our world. How many of us use a cell phone or the internet on a daily basis? It’s unanimous. Now I ask, how many of you can remember the last time you wrote a handwritten letter? or experienced something so overwhelming that it defied any attempt to capture it in pictures or words on a blog. Because there is a difference between standing on the side of a mountain, with the wind rushing around you and the smell of evergreens harsh upon the nose, and squinting at a backlit screen, trying to piece the pixels before you into something beautiful.

            Don’t get me wrong, I think the fact that more information is more widely available to more people is great. I believe that people learning and absorbing things is a fulfillment of our place in the universe. So it would be different if cell phones and the internet were making people smarter, but they aren't  Because our forbearers didn't have access to the great swaths of data that we do, they had to remember things, to know things, to commit them to a special place in their minds from which they could be recalled when needed. And this is where the problem with our generation lies; because we don’t have to remember things, because we don’t have to think, we don’t, because we can just Google it. Studies have shown that in comparison with previous generations, we lack the ability to recall things as effectively from memory, but are far better at cataloguing information and knowing where to look for it. We are essentially making the species-wide shift from intellectual holders of data, to data secretaries, content to take the time to look everything up. In technological terms, where our ancestors were individual CPUs, with information saved to their hard drives, we will simply be faceless terminals through which the same public domain flows unilaterally.

            In today’s world, with the onslaught of ever-changing, and improving technology, with more and more ways to be plugged in and less and less ways to not be, we face nothing less than a loss of identity, an effacement of everything that makes us individuals. But we’re caught, we’re hooked. I cannot count the number of times I have heard someone profess how they would “die without their phone” and can’t help noticing our obsession with what must be our society’s greatest fear, a loss of the internet. We live in a country where 95% of teens are online, and 80% of those are involved in social media. We are the generation who shrunk the attention span to the width of an electron, the tribe of TooLongDidntRead. We are the self-entitled whose expectations of the world have long surpassed the value world itself.

            The days of Thoreau’s view of life and beauty in the world around you have been usurped by the beauty of what you can buy and how comfortably you can live. We live in the era of irradiated, shrink wrapped, processed foods and home lighting that never, ever goes out. We've traded the unsanitary nature of tradition and nature for the clean, cold, precision of technology.

             Man was not meant to wear starched white collars and stare at screens in small offices for hours a day. He was meant to toil and work hard, to exercise his brawn over the Earth, but respect its multitude of wonders. He was meant to learn things about the world through his own eyes and ears and hands; never another’s. He was meant to have a difficult life that conditioned him to never take a single thing for granted, to really live and love his existence. For it is at the brink of survival, using your hands and your wits to keep yourself alive that the bright things in life seem all the more bright and the dark things do not serve to shock the senses. Today, we are meant to believe that every little thing is good and comfortable and so when some horror befalls us it shocks us into an insurmountable stupor. We are manipulating our natures with all of these promises and illusions of grandeur without knowledge of the consequences of doing so. For what other reason would it be that disillusionment and depression run so rampant in our society?

            It is fair to say that I blame a great majority of our nation’s ills, perhaps too great, on the proliferation of advanced technology in every aspect of our lives. I say that apathy, atheism, insensitivity and immodesty, problems today’s youth are plagued are derived from this technology. To see the whole world before you, without leaving your couch, leads to a lack of confidence in experience. To see the entire world’s troubles, happening uninhibited and seemingly unopposed breeds in our youth a sense of helplessness, a question as to whether anything they do really can have an impact. This listlessness in our youth is the direct result of these corrupting influences.

 Though their forefathers were devout Jews, Catholics and Protestants, our youth cannot develop faith in a world where everything must be proven with facts A, B, and C; a world in which all are available thanks to the internet. A generation-wide cynicism and skepticism has resulted, turning sons to attack the beliefs, the very faiths, of their fathers. Rarely is an honest and healthy relationship seen among young people for this very reason, they have this attitude of mistrust engrained within them.

            Desensitization may be the most pressing of the ailments of our youth, for it is the most prolific. A young person entering the web can never be prepared for what lurks there. The pornography and the violence and the crass behavior degrade morals faster than anything else can. In a study by the Pew Research Center on online behavior in teens, a middle school girl said that she did indeed feel that people were more inconsiderate online because “You can’t punch nobody through a screen”. Another middle schooler said,” I know people who, in person, like refused to swear. And online, its every other word”. This disconnect between actions online and real life repercussions is a serious problem among our youth. Children exposed to the sex and violence of the internet, television and the silver screen are never shocked enough by images of starving African children, and rarely stirred by tales of massacres in our schools. They have come dangerously close to losing the last of their empathy, one of the only things that separates us from the animals.

            Our skills of human interactions are waning with each new generation. Humans are social animals, we have an acute need to be around and understand others. Unfortunately for most, this need is not fulfilled by superseding Dunbar’s number of Facebook. Man, especially in youth, needs face to face contact with others to learn how to act in society. Activities like texting, instant messaging and e-mail, while convenient, detract from the value that we place in each other and our relationships. There are many important aspects of communication that text will just never capture; inflection of voice, body language, the imprecision of human speech, and the pure association of a voice with a face. Face-to-face interaction and involvement in the community are directly related to that community’s success, however in America, these fraternal organizations and social clubs are being usurped by online social networking, most reporting a 6% drop in membership in the last 10 years. Pamela Paxton, professor of sociology a University of Texas Austin reminds us, “When we connect with one another in [social] associations we learn that our self interest is actually connected to the interests of others. That gives us a conception of the public good, common identity and a sense of common responsibility as a nation and as citizens. Any decline in that, scholars see as potentially detrimental to democracy”. So this shift from Rotary Club to Reddit may actually be pushing us closer to the demise of our democratic system we so take for granted. On top of building shaky relationships and threatening our self government, engaging in many conversations by text messaging can also lead to an unnecessarily high level of stress. Look at it this way; when you’re expecting a grade back of a quiz or test, the whole while it is being passed out your brain and body are on high alert, the anticipation only receding with the paper in your hands. This is a small amount of stress, waiting with a foreseeable end. But when texting, you never know when you will get a reply, you have no foreseeable catharsis to your anticipation. The constant state of high alert can be lead to a dramatic overall increase in stress and irritability, paranoia, and depression can result.

            If a life full of complications and these technologies leads only to stress, depression and the corrosion of morality, perhaps the only solution is to simplify things? To take a step back from it all. So maybe, just maybe, if you turn off Twitter, forsake Facebook, and take a leave of absence form Tumblr, things might clear up. You might find time to think about things you never did, or discover that you find something that you never thought was important. Strive for simplicity, for honesty, wean yourself from the digital teat, and revel in the organic world around you. Live as Man was meant to live.