Does Technology Make Us Alone? - Essay Sample

Introduction

Technology is dominating nearly every sector in the 21st-century world, from the financial sectors, industries, transport and communication, politics, and virtually every sector associated with the human life. This involvement has had tremendous impacts on the economic, social and political dimensions of their lives, positively and negatively (Franzen 428). A century ago, the forms of communication and interaction translated to a one on one physical connection, but with the rise of social media, it is quite normal to find individuals within a centralized geographic location preferring to interact through their phones or laptops as opposed to the readily available interpersonal mode of interaction. The social media and the internet are expected to make us social beings, but as much as the coverage, convenience, and speed have been advanced, we end up missing the basics of relationships and friendships presented by proximity and intimacy. In the workplace, the employee interaction is narrowing down to Facebook posts, Instagram likes, and Facetime leaving out the lunch break conversations and the departmental sharings on the progress of work and possible challenges. Mechanization has also replaced the human labor that facilitated conversations within the workplace, leaving a few individuals, mostly the technical teams dealing with the machines. A question arises, how social is social media? Is technology making its consumers lonelier while presenting a fake sense of belonging?

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The telecommunication technology has spurred up position-taking arguments and conflicts between generation and individuals with some aligning to the positive bit of its services on the table, while others hold a strong position in criticizing the atrocity it has generated in a world that was pure and functional. Religious leaders, politicians, and concerned authors have assumed opposing opinions as well. The latest case involves the papal views on technology. In 2010, Pope Benedict XVI termed social media and the internet as established "forms of communication that do not increase humaneness but instead risk increasing a sense of solitude and disorientation." (Adam and Kurt 3). A few years later, in May 2016 Pope Francis differed with this point of view stating that the internet and social media are "a gift from God" which "offers immense possibilities for encounter and solidarity." Sheryl Turkle, a renowned media scholar, in her book Alone Together claims that technology has made human beings treat each other as inanimate objects while attributing human qualities to gadgets and objects. In one of her TED talks, she observed the insanity the world is living in by putting too much expectation in technology while expecting so little from each other (TED). Keith Hampton, on the contrary, attributes the newly found persistent and pervasiveness of communication to technology, saying that it enables human beings to interact in more positive ways.

Every individual in their freshman year in a university outside their hometown, or in the military posted in the countries away from theirs feel the need to be close to their family members and friends. Just a century ago, this was made a bit challenging with the two-week span on the delivery of letters, but with technology, the distance is only geographical as they can talk to each as frequently as they wish to, live within the family events through video calls and the multimedia services that enable the transmission of photographs. The principal outcome enjoyed from communication is the feeling that there is someone else who shares the emotions, values, and perspectives on different issues in life. Distance has a way of depriving individuals of this life-giving sense of belonging, but with new technologies coming up every single day, individuals are guaranteed of being in constant interaction and touch with family and friends, experience births, birthdays, weddings, read bedtime stories to their children and offer their love to their loved ones however far apart they are on the world's globe. Virtual or online interactions provide the most convenient form of keeping in touch with family when utilized as a supplement to an already established offline relationship.

Interactions involve the satisfaction of one's emotions, and thoughts as these are the two aspects that make communication worth a try. Online platforms limit the fulfillment of the feelings and thoughts, making it a little mumble-jumble with no social benefits to the individuals involved. Taking the Instagram for instance, with a limitation of a hundred and forty characters and a couple of emojis, the users are not able to comprehensively express themselves to others, connect emotionally or cognitively. Facebook accounts, on the other hand, do not provide personalized interactions as there are chances for fraud identities. This unreal communication underrates the establishment of interpersonal ties between individuals, and in the end, fills them with massive emptiness rather than the sense of belonging they sought in the first place. Take an instance of online date applications. These are application meant to bring together individuals in the quest for love. A unifying factor, right? Wrong! Many of these dates are dominated by fake information of each other, from the socio-economic status or interest in life (Adam and Kurt 26). Were this "hookups' a success, it will present a case of being "alone together" as there are no shared interest or emotions for that matter.

The workplace has also experienced the depersonalization of interactions, as technology dominates a majority of the sectors. From the communication to the production processes, devices, gadgets, and machines are gradually replacing the human experiences making them isolated from each other. Technology is eliminating the need for human labor as most of the work can be executed by a single machine (Cascio and Montealegre, 355). The most immediate repercussion for this trend is the massive layoffs, and this instantly cuts off relationships that the employees had established within themselves. Looking at the same technological involvement issue in the workplace, the workers can form social media platforms through which they can conduct follow-up activities, share on the day's achievements and failures and pre-psych each other up for the next days' work.

Conclusion

Taking isolation in the context of teenagers locking themselves up in their rooms for a more significant part of the day interacting with their lifeless gadgets, this is the prima facie situation of the loneliness brought about by technology. However, to those who already have established offline relationships with each other, social media and the internet offers just the right amount of interaction distance and busy schedules deny them. The same technology has, on the other hand, depersonalized communication, with each individual at the end of the communication line presenting the most convenient forms of themselves, and faking emotions and enthusiasm just so to please each other. Workplace interaction is minimized to person-gadget interactions eliminating the valuable human touch each of these souls needs to feel they belong to the world they exist in. The issue on the technology is not monolithic and therefore tackling it as one might present biases and fallacious assumptions.

Works Cited

Cascio Wayne and Montealegre, Ramiro. How Technology Is Changing Work and Organizations. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior. 2016. Vol. 3. Pp. 349-375

Franzen axel. Does the internet make us lonely? Oxford university press. 2000. Europeans sociological review. Vol. 16(4). Pp. 427-438

TED. Sheryl turkle: connected but alone. Ideas worth spreading. 2012. https://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together#t-431407

Adam Waytz and Kurt Gray. Does Online Technology Make Us More or Less Sociable? A Preliminary Review and Call for Research. Perspectives on Psychological Science. 2018. Vol. 13. 10.1177/1745691617746509. Pp. 1-32