Is technology making us more connected or isolated?

Recently I heard a TED talk by Sherry Turkle where she presented an interesting scenario where the use of technology is helping us to be more connected but at the same time making us more isolated. All these social networking sites like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, MySpace, and Orkut are now very popular among people from all age groups. Since their launch many of these have become immensely popular with an increasing number of users every day, some of them have more users than populations of many small countries. I think they are creating a parallel universe of their own, a virtual world where people live and interact with each other in a very unique way. Many have separate personalities and identities in that world, different than their real-life personality. These social networking sites along with the revolution in device manufacturing allowed us to use all these functions on our tablets, and phones. We can carry this world in our pockets almost everywhere. Now almost everybody lives at least two lives one is real life and another one is virtual life where we are with a device constantly updating our status, tweeting out thoughts, posting on our blog, or texting. These little devices that entered our lives very recently are psychologically very powerful, they dominate our lives totally even before we realize that they are there. They also now make us do the things that we normally never do, like texting or checking FB status during any meeting or presentation or during class, parents and kids texting during dinner or whenever they are together and then complaining about lack of attention from each other. These little devices changed not only what we do but also who we are, and how we interact, they are even redefining our relationships. 

No doubt that these technologies and devices have done many good things for us. They help us to reach people who are geographically distant from us, help the world to come closer, make us aware of many issues around the globe, and definitely improve our understanding of the world. But all this came with some side effects, nowadays I see that many kids are more comfortable with texting each other than talking with each other face to face. Many of us like to connect with each other but not to talk with each other, our understanding and meaning of conversation is changing. We are more comfortable with emails, texts, tweets, or status updates as they allow us to edit our feelings and opinions before posting, and they allow us to present a curated version of ourselves. Normal human conversations are often spontaneous and emotional. They take place in real time and many times we don't have control in which direction it might go. Our relationships are very demanding, even messy sometimes, and require a lot of commitment. These new techniques (texting, email, social networking) are pretty amazing and very useful but they can not replace face-to-face conversations at least within family.

We get a chance to understand each other better during face-to-face conversations, I know that it's not possible to interact with all our friends and relatives like this but the problem is we are not doing it even with the people around us. This technology has definitely helped us to reduce the distance with our distant relatives, and locate and reconnect with lost school and college friends, but at the same time, it has distanced us from the people around us. We want to be in many places at the same time, and these devices allow us to exit and enter any place we want at our own convenience. We pay attention only to the part of conversation or meeting in which we are interested and conveniently ignore the rest, some may call it efficient time management but at the same time by doing this we are getting more connected with machines than people around us. Slowly these phones and these other little devices are becoming our best friends for many of us, many phone companies are now developing software that they claim will make these devices our best companion and friend. I am not at all against cell phones but still don't have one which I can call my own. I use them as per my needs, maybe I am still an old-fashioned guy.

We want to be connected with people but don't want them around us, we are now afraid of physical intimacy. Not many days before we used to remember people, used to get emotions and feelings and then call them to express them but nowadays people want to have feelings to update their status, want to have something so that they can always present it on their wall. It seems that we started believing that being lonely is a problem and we need to solve it immediately. People forget solitude, they don't like to be with themselves anymore, they don't know what to do when they are alone, and they always want to remain connected. As Sherry Turkle said in her talk we have to reclaim those sacred places in our homes where conversations used to take place. We can't replace people with machines everywhere, at least not in our personal relationships. We can't operate from behind curtains all the time, good to get new technology and use it but we should not lose our old good ways of communication, we don't want to live with a robotic companion, or do we?

Thanks for the reading and please share your opinion.

(Copyright: Vinay Thakur. Please contact the author for re-posting or publishing)