Short Term Distraction, Long Term Uncertainty

It’s easy to claim the life we live is surrounded by distractions. There’s more stimulus than ever, with technology competing for our attention day and night. It’s not unusual for us to grab our phones first and last thing each day, as we go to and get out of bed. Some argue blue light addiction is what is killing us all. I even wrote about The Digital Divide previously, and how we’ve become farther the more connected we’ve become.

There are pros and cons to everything. The benefits of technology are obvious, allowing us luxuries such as globalism, the internet, social media, smart-technology, and more. We’re on the cusp of incredible technology as well, with nascent developments in artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, supercomputers, and more. The obvious downsides of technology are described in aspects such as the digital divide, technology addiction, and old knowledge becoming obsolete.

There’s a much deeper issue than just the pros and cons of technology: it is our cultural behavior and acceptance towards technology. We’ve seen tech companies rise, spawn, and compete with each other for what ideas and apps are valuable and to manifest what they believe to be important to us. We’ve seen pushback from audiences asking for those who grew in prominence to hold more responsibility. As our culture adapts and accepts new avenues, new laws and regulations are placed upon them.

That’s easy to see from the conglomerates point of view. But what about the people using the technology day to day? How have we become affected outside of the direct benefits?

I’ve previously written about the change in our dialogue, and how generations before the internet have different conversation skills with those after the internet; the same goes for smartphones. Communication is just one avenue.

Another is our forecasting of the future. As technology transforms more rapidly in front of our eyes, the amount of lifetimes it requires to see dramatic change reduces. When it once took several generations to go from ocean travel to sky travel, it’s taken remarkably less time to go to space travel. The same goes for our ability to communicate. When it used to be one village, it then went to one country, and now we can speak to anyone in the world quickly.

Rapid changes to developing industries is not a new demon. There’s always been early adapters of technology and there’s always been schools or groups dedicated to honing crafts by any means, including forward-facing technology. Yet as technology grows faster and faster, these changes are harder to implement. In my college days, professors could not teach the most current material but they would at least acknowledge its existence. It was difficult for just a few professors to quickly change the pipeline of education, so no matter how fast technology grew or changed, the academics would be lagging behind, struggling to catch up.

There in lies the most uncertain future we’ve ever seen. I graduated college 10 years ago and life is only changing more quickly. It is true some things never change. Yet it is also true that what works today may not work tomorrow. We’ve seen megacompanies fall to the wayside by refusing to grow with the digital era and we’ve seen companies that are less than 10, 20 years old become the wealthiest and most powerful companies ever. It is already taking less than one generation’s lifetime to see our lives change more than our parents could expect. Soon, it’ll change faster than the current generation can expect. From there, how can we be certain of any future?

Distraction comes from the Latin roots of “dis” meaning apart, and “trahere” to drag. We are dragged apart from our duties when we are distracted. Yet what are our duties if the future is uncertain? All the stimulus we react to may not actually be such a distraction. In times of survival, when our lives were most uncertain, hyper-attention to any stimulus may be the only thing saving us from a tiger in the jungle. The anxieties was face today are boundless by society and boundless by arriving technology. Is it all a distraction? Or are we just trying to survive?

The Digital Divide

I first heard the term phone world from a book called Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari. I’m fascinated by modern dating and would say I’ve spent more time than the average person thinking about and spending time on dating apps.

But this post isn’t about dating. Rather, it’s about how we’ve become farther from each other despite becoming more connected.

We’ve all been in the presence of a phone party. There’s multiple people standing around, sitting around, but there’s nothing happening. Everyone is plugged into their phone, engrossed in their phone world. This isn’t a new phenomenon, as we’ve seen commuters ignore each other since the dawn of commuting.

This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned the term phone world. It’s one of the primary forces of loneliness in our Western world. Unlike distractions of the past, our phones persist with us throughout our lives, spanning several years of time now. Contacts, photos, and social media have created an inseparable bond between us and our phones, allowing us to always return to our comfortable world whenever we desire.

The ability to always return home is one of our first metaverse abilities. It is the ability to center or ground ourselves in digital space and reliably express ourselves. Unfortunately until our phone worlds connect, that is the end of our current state of the metaverse and it is why the best way to socially enjoy a phone party is to stand next to each and show each other what each individual phone is displaying.

Until we have the ability to enjoy an in-person live experience of our phones connecting, they will primarily be seen as a force of escape. Escape is necessary, but to have it be the only option seems disappointing. As technology develops, our connections with each other should slowly adopt a more in-person touch. We can see this from looking up directions on our PCs and printing out MapQuest, to using digital maps, to using live data, to soon asking AI.

Conceptually, it is easier to refine processes like looking up directions than it is to counter-disrupt what our phones have done to our social exchanges. Our phones and apps do try to talk to each other, and they’ll become better at it over time. The question is, do we try to talk to each other, and will we become better at it as our technology divides us?

Proximity and Relations

After the height of the pandemic, I was in need of a part time job so I went out around my town and looked for one. I applied to a few places but the place that accepted me immediately was Jimmy Johns, a sandwich franchise I had once worked for in college.

As usual with minimum wage jobs, there were a handful of teenage coworkers. Teenagers have changed slowly over time, revealing how old I really am. While some things changed and others hadn’t, I would gather little nuggets of information from my coworkers, learning more of the status of the high school, its local community, and what the students were like.

From stories of kids vaping in school, to having sex on campus, social media and flagrant attitudes have embolden students to take their teenage life into their own hands, rather than be subjects of high school. When once high school was an academic time-out to let hormone imbalances naturally settle, it has now become a playpen of agency for high schoolers to compliment and criticize their peers online.

While the topic of social media both dividing us and connecting us with more opportunities is a nuanced and complex topic, the topic of today’s post is actually about the absence of proximity during the pandemic and how it affected high schoolers.

Despite it being early for academic backed papers to come out and address how the pandemic has affected education on an academic level, kids are already describing how the pandemic has affected education on a social level.

The most succinct explanation I got was “they just don’t know how to talk” or “they haven’t really matured” when asking about freshmen and sophomores. The high schoolers explanation was that usually middle school students have a coming of age or maturation in their first two years of high school, developing social skills and and understanding their social environment. That went out the window the two years students were learning from home, in isolation, away from their peers.

I could argue that with or without the pandemic, our younger generation has become more in tune with their phone world than with our shared world, which has several implications on its own, including the inability to communicate with generations that lacked this technology. My previous post, Digital Integration and the Chinese Room, covers how technology and social media have changed our communication.

Social media and our digital evolution is only a part of the equation in why the teenage social atmosphere is the way it is. The other half will be largely influenced by an absence of proximity, caused by large issues like the pandemic ranging to small issues like service on demand.

I’d like to touch on the topic of dating in the digital age as well as further touch on the topic of disconnected communities, within education and other sectors. For now, I’d like to leave off with a question. Technology has created new avenues for old needs, allowing us to do age-old activities in new ways. What are some ways technology could help us do new activities, in age-old ways?