A TechnologicalA TechnologicalWorldWorldA look at the impact A look at the impact of technology on of technology on human interactionshuman interactions

Let’s take a trip back in time. It’s the year 1954. Dwight Eisenhower is the president, the Internet has not yet been invented (that will take place in 1958), and the only telephones peo-ple had were basic black rotary dial phones. People lived in a family cen-tered nation during one of the happi-est decades in American history. There was a feeling of camaraderie, and neighbors interacted on a daily basis, whether to borrow baking ingredients, talk and gossip about the house down the street, or just to gather for dinners and outings with friends.

Now fast-forward sixty years. It’s the year 2014. Barack Obama is the president, 76.5% of households own computers, and even ten year olds yearn to own the newest version of the iPhone. People’s lives center around technology, and nearly all Americans have some form of a social media ac-count, and can almost instantly get in touch with anyone, whether through texting, email, Facetime/Skype, phones, Internet, Facebook, Snapchat, or any of the other countless types of communications technologies.

How did this happen? How did our society get this way?

All of the new technological chang-es in our modern world have caused many other changes as a result. With the inventions and developments of new technologies, especially the Inter-net, the connections of the modern world have changed forever. Techno-logical changes have changed the very nature of human social interactions, and despite their goals to unite and connect people, they have generally caused more harm than good.

The Society of Social MediaOne example of this is seen in var-

ious popular social media networks, like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Social media is, by defi nition, the social interactions of people over vir-tual networks. In an article published in the Atlantic in 2012, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely,” Stephen Marche argues that even though the social media revolution has made people more technologically connected than ever before, loneliness still permeates American society and actual human

interactions are suļ ering. Marche believes that social networks like Facebook and Google+ provide diļ er-ent levels of interaction based on how a person uses it to interact with other people. While the sites claim to promote interactions with other people, non-personalized use of the sites actually results in the complete opposite.

According to Marche, “when you sign up for Google+ and set up your Friends circle, the program spec-ifi es that you should include only “your real friends, the ones you feel comfortable sharing private details with.” That one little phrase, Your real friends—so quaint, so charm-ingly mothering—perfectly en-capsulates the anxieties that social media have produced: the fears that Facebook is interfering with our real friendships, distancing us from each other, making us lonelier; and that social networking might be spreading the very isolation it seemed designed to conquer.”

Even though social networks try to promote connectedness, the

Technology

By Courtney KennedyBy Courtney Kennedy

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impersonality of their systems make it harder for people to foster strong re-lationships, and lead to the declining quality of human interactions. How-ever, this is not a new phenomenon. Marche says that throughout human history, similar new technologies or products have produced similar results and caused lower levels of human interaction. The usage of social media sites is causing the same eļ ects that have been previously seen in history. Marche likens this reaction to “when the telephone arrived, people stopped knocking on their neighbors’ doors. Social media brings this process to a much wider set of relationships.” Because the so-called social media revolution takes human interaction to a much larger state, the potential implications and eļ ects of its chang-ing nature can—and will—have a large impact on human nature as a whole.

In addition, it is safe to say that everyone who has any type of online account has an online persona. From email addresses to Facebook profi le pictures, everything we put out on the web tells people distinct things about ourselves. And often, the people we present ourselves as online are very diļ erent from who we really are. Me-gan Garber, a staļ writer at The Atlan-tic who focuses on technology and in-

novations in the media, says that “the logic of conversation as it plays out across the Internet, however—the into-the-ether observations and the never-ending feeds and the many, many selfi es—is fun-damentally diļ erent, favoring showmanship over exchange, fl ows over ebbs. The Internet is always on. And it’s always judging you, watching you, goading you.” People know that everything they post on the Internet is public, and they react accordingly, knowing that people judge others based on their Instagram posts, number of Facebook friends, and even the number of retweets they re-ceive on a “funny” tweet.

Tuned In But Tuned OutThe social media revolution has

not just impacted how people interact online, but also how people interact when they are together. Electronic devices draw people in, often at the expense of noticing the real world around them. Sherry Turkle, a cultural analyst, psychologist, and sociologist, studies how technology shapes mod-ern human relationships. She believes that signifi cant progress has been

made in the tech-nological realm in the past few decades, which in turn has changed the way people have conversations and interact with each other. In her February 2012 TED Talk, “Connected,

but Alone,” Turkle showed the audi-ence a picture of her daughter and her friends “being together but not being together.” The teenage girls are all sit-ting together, clearly “hanging out,” but they seem more focused on their smartphones than the faces around them. Even though they are together in proximity, they are also not togeth-er at the same time.

This is just one example of how be-ing connected online can make us dis-connected from the real things around us. Often times we are too tuned in to our personal devices, and this comes at the expense of the people around us.

“When the telephone arrived, people stopped knocking on their neigh-bors’ doors. Social media brings this process to a much wider set of relationships.”-Stephen Marche, The Atlantic

“Together” 24/7From laptops to smartphones to tablets to reg-ular old house phones, it is easier than ever to get in touch with someone with just a few clicks of a button.

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I saw this most recently on a family vacation to Florida, when my parents, brother, aunt, uncle, and cousins all fl ew down to stay at my grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving. It was my fi rst time seeing those particular cousins in more than two years, and we were all anxious to make up for that lost time. However, after dinner one night, my uncle pointed out something rath-er interesting: my sixteen-year old cousin Liana and I were spending a lot of time on our phones snapchatting and texting friends back home instead of putting the phones aside and just spending time with our family.

From snapchatting while laying out on the dock to texting during family movie night, we seemed to be more interested in things going on back home than the things and people that were right in front of us. Even after not seeing each other for two years, we couldn’t bear to put our iPhones down, just in case we missed some sudden major “emergency” or event back home.

He went on a long rant about how people need to put down their tech-nological devices and focus on the people and the world around them. My parents and grandparents chimed in too. This raised a few dinner table discussion questions–how has the way people interact changed with the new technologies available in the modern world? And how important actual-ly is human interaction? Clearly it is important to interact with your family, especially if you don’t see them all the time, but is online interaction the same thing as human interaction?

It isn’t.

A Social ExperienceIn Second Life, users socialize and connect over the Internet in an entirely user-generated world. People access and create the “world” through ava-tars. It is used by companies, people looking for re-lationships, colleges, and even just people looking to make their own lives more interesting.

95% of teens (between the ages of 12 and 17) use the Internet

81% of teens use at least one social media site.

91% of the adult population owns some sort of mobile phone.

61% of Americans own a smartphone

How are we using technology?

Statistics according to Pew Research Center

An Online WorldTake for example Second Life.

Second Life is a virtual 3D world where users can socialize and connect using free voice and text chat.

In an article published in News-week in July 2007, Jessica Bennett and Malcolm Beith said that “the power of Second Life lies in its utility for the gamut of human activities. It’s a potent medium for socializing—it provides people with a way to express, explore, and experiment with identity, vent their frustrations, reveal their alter egos.” Basically, it takes human interactions of the real world and transports them online, where every-thing from nightclubs to relationships now takes place at home with the click of a mouse.

More and more, technologies like Second Life are being used as mediums for socialization. Proponents claim that Second Life interactions are more personal than emails, but it’s hard to

argue that they can meet the stan-dards of face-to-face interactions.

However the world of Second Life is not just limited to computer nerds who want to meet other computer nerds. Even companies are using the technology in their daily business, with international companies like IBM and ABN AMRO. Nissan even lets customers test drive cars on Second Life. Montana State University profes-sor Terry Beaubois teaches a college course via Second Life—remotely from his California home—and meets with his classes on the class-designed “University Island.”

While I can see how designing a virtual environment might be edu-cational for an architecture student, I doubt that they are receiving as good of an educational experience without getting to interact with their professor one-on-one. Do they actually even know him? Are they even learning anything at all?

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Popular Apps for People to Stay Connected

iMessageMessaging apps like

Apple’s iMessage help with texting.

Twitter135,000 new people sign up for a Twitter

account daily.

SnapchatThere are more

than 400 million “snaps” sent daily.

Instagram13% of Internet users

use Instagram.

FacebookFacebook currently has more than 757 million daily users.

“ ”Nobody’s talking about anything except what’s on the machines.-Sherry Turkle

And what about the so-called “re-lationships” fostered on the Second Life site? Sure, it’s not an online dat-ing site—that’s not its purpose. But many people still fi nd and maintain virtual relationships via Second Life. Rhonda Lillie and Paul Hawkins have been in a so-called “dating relation-ship” for more than two years, even though they live thousands of miles apart. According to Beith and Bennett, the two believe that “the detachment of meeting through their avatars al-lowed them to open up to one another in a way they might never have done in the real world.”

I have to disagree. Can this even be considered dating? I don’t think so. Without personal interactions, their so-called “relationship” is missing a crucial ingredient—them.

Is this Helpful?This idea carries over to the real

world as well. While the world is more connected than ever before, humans are not really talking to each oth-er and having actual conversations. Look around any public setting, and you’ll see people more focused on their technologies than their people. According to Turkle’s research, these people can be classifi ed as “alone together,” and even in public places where there does seem to be a buzz of activity, “nobody’s talking about any-thing except what’s on the machines.”

But in that way, is technology actu-ally helping us interact?

Keith Hampton believes so. Hamp-ton, a professor at Rutgers University, has spent years recreating the “Street Life Project” experiments of renowned sociologist William Whyte to study how people interact in public spac-es. Some of Hampton’s results were surprising. For example, mobile phone use (texting and using apps) was lower than expected, and most of the phone users were alone, not in groups. This goes against the idea that people are too attached to their phones, although Hampton does acknowledge that this is probably due to an increase in loitering, where people on their phones will tend to sit for a long time while others will simply pass through the public place. In an 2014 New York Times Magazine article, Mark Op-

penheimer, a writer who focuses on urbanism, summarized Hampton’s experiments, revealing that “not only were people not opting out of bowling leagues—Robert Putnam’s famous metric for community engagement—for more screen time; they were also using their computers to opt in.”

There are certainly benefi ts to technology. The Internet and phones can be very helpful in staying in touch with far away friends and relatives when you can’t see them everyday. This past year, two of my best friends started college—Katie at the Univer-sity of Pittsburgh and Erica at New York University. I fi rst met the two of them at ballet when I was seven years old, and we were nearly inseparable in the years since. However, the nature of our friendships changed after they left for college. Instead of spending 20+ hours a week in the studio togeth-er (plus more time just hanging out together outside of dance), we were forced to resort to texting and social media in order to stay in touch. But as much as I appreciated the snapchats of former Disney Channel stars Cole and Dylan Sprouse (courtesy of NYU student Erica), it still wasn’t the same as seeing my best friends every day.

I did appreciate how technology enabled me to stay in touch with my friends, but an element of our friend-ship was lost once it moved online. When they come home to visit now, we still love hanging out with each other just as much as we did before, but our friendships are arguably not as strong as they were a year ago when we saw each other more than our own families. This is our own fault. We relied too much on technological ways of keeping in touch. Even though social media was supposed to keep us connected, you simply cannot main-tain such good quality friendships over the Internet. We fell into the trap of believing that you can.

Even though there are defi nite-ly benefi ts to using technology, the negative impacts that such technolo-gy has had on human interaction are wide reaching. They cause people to lose sight of the world around them, and personal relationships suļ er as a result. Technology has changed us more than we can even comprehend,

and social interactions have been changed as well. For many people, a long heart-to-heart discussion can easily be replaced by a simple text message conversation, but is that re-ally a true replacement? Can anything ever truly replace social interactions with other people? Maybe there was something to the pre-Internet 1950s. Life was simpler, people were happier, and there were no iPhones or laptops in sight.

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