Technology Is Destroying Our Inner Lives
Technology Is Destroying Our Inner Lives
By Carol Becker
1:14 PM ET
Carol Becker is the dean of Columbia University School of
the Arts and author of Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production.
"As a result of our 'always-on' ethos, we have
neither time nor space within which to lose ourselves in reflection"
Two years ago, I started using the Kindle app on my iPad
to read those big heavy biographies and novels that I had been lugging around
the world. I still wasn’t using it to read books I might reference in my
writing, but nonetheless I was glad to discover, by chance, the underline
function. While immersed in Pico Iyer’s The Art of Stillness, underlining as I
read, I was completely unnerved when a message popped up to announce: “You are
the 123rd user to underline this same passage.”
Shocked by this intrusion, I threw the iPad onto the bed
and nearly out the window. A sickening feeling came over me. Then I became
afraid. Someone was reading over my shoulder. Not a person, but a Program,
calculating what I found most important in the text. Was I supposed to feel
validated (or banal) to learn that a passage I noted many others also liked? Or
was this data only for some marketing strategy?
The idea of surveillance, in the abstract, has not
bothered me as much as it perhaps should. I have acclimated to the notion that
everything we do is findable, knowable and marketable—forever—except, I
believed, our deepest thoughts, which is why the intrusion on my contemplative
reading affected me so profoundly. Reading is my refuge from the world, and now
it too had been invaded.
A 2011 article I read recently conjectured that, in the
past, we were “private by default and public by effort.” At one time it was
difficult to get information about other people and just as difficult to put
information about ourselves out into the world. Now, we are public by default
and private by effort. But how much exertion does it take to keep a sense of
inviolability?
We can be found most anywhere in the world at any time,
through our own devices (pun intended). The intrusion is ubiquitous and
omnivorous.
Most of us are addicted to these systems of connection.
That’s what humans do: we get addicted to the things we create. People expect
an answer, and they expect it now. At times the ability to work depends on this
immediate access. We have internalized these time/space obligations and don’t
know how to step away from them. If we do not make a Herculean effort to remain
balanced within this imbalance, we feel fragmented and often unhappy.
What would it mean if the species were to completely lose
the need and/or desire for privacy, solitude, time and focused attention? What
if we were the last humans to be bothered by intrusions into our privacy? What
would it feel like if our species evolved out of the need for an inner life?
Maybe I have become what social media scholar Danah Boyd
calls a “techno-fretful parent.” But I have a public self as a university art
school dean and a private self as a writer. The writer self has a deep need for
solitude, or rather, I have a deep need for solitude, which is probably why I
write. My longing for quiet and solitude comes from another urgency—the desire
to think. And thinking requires no intrusions, at least for a time.
As political theorist Hannah Arendt noted, thought is
essential to understanding our human condition. In order to tell the stories of
human experience—inner and outer—writers and artists must have solitude and
time to think. As a result of our “always-on” ethos, we have neither time nor space
within which to lose ourselves in reflection. There is always something outside
the self, robbing the self of the self.
When Thomas Merton, author of The Seven Storey Mountain,
was ordained as a Trappist monk in 1949, his decision was unexpected. Not long
before, he had been the editor of a student humor magazine. But Merton, who
loved the world, was not moving away from it; rather, he was moving toward
himself.
Theorist/situationist Guy Debord has labelled modern,
external reality, the “spectacle,” describing it as a “social relationship
between people that is mediated by images.” For Debord, what is dangerous about
this “passive identification” with the spectacle is that it “supplants genuine
activity.” Our relationship to reality is inverted, and the projection of the
self, and the addiction to this projection, becomes more real and significant
than human interaction, which has the potential to bring about societal change.
What could better describe our contemporary situation than to say that the public
sphere is no longer a place for collective action, but rather a dangerously
redesigned network whose main function is to publicize the self?
Perhaps we are over-adapted to being watched, to having
little left of ourselves that is not “posted,” “liked,” or “deleted.” At what
point will our humanness, as we have known it, become unrecognizable to us? Or
has that already occurred?
Comments
Post a Comment