…or analog reticence?
There’s been a black-and-white photo doing the social media rounds recently, taken in a 1950′s railway carriage. In the picture, everyone has their heads buried in a newspaper, in exactly the same way as people today have theirs buried in a smartphone or tablet. The implication, to borrow a phrase from a very old book, is that there is ‘nothing new under the sun’. Is technology really making us more antisocial, or just giving us a more graphic-rich and resource efficient way to do it?
Many will have read today the sad story of a retired schoolteacher who took her own life because she felt unable to adapt to modern life. In an interview published yesterday, she lamented what she perceived as a lack of genuine social interaction, exacerbated by an atavistic absorption with technology. People hungry for a headline have been quick to seize on this as an example of ‘digital isolation’ and the first note in a synthesized funeral dirge for real society. Many, though, will appreciate that the complexities behind the decision made by ‘Annie’ will not have been nearly so simple.
Meanwhile, a small, crowd-funded initiative to get Londoners talking to each other, got savaged in another newspaper on exactly the same day as the suicide story was breaking: ‘Surely the point of living in a city is that you don’t have to talk to anybody. That’s certainly a big part of why I moved to one.‘ Such an outlook needs no encouragement from technology to be isolated, it does it all alone in an old-fashioned analog way.
If we want to talk, we will do it – with or without technology. If we want to be isolated we will do it – with or without technology. Let’s not blame technology for our disinclination to take the risk implied in every encounter with ‘the other’ though. A true encounter with another human being – whether across the bus face-to-face or across the Atlantic Ocean on Facetime is something which enriches us all:
“When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them” – Martin Buber
Image: talktomelondon
