I was listening to Dr. Sheryl Turkle of MIT who was an early
supporter of Information Technology(IT). Her research has been on human-
machine communication. She is now concerned about the negative aspects of IT,
particularly the social media. She finds that people using social media all the
time are losing empathy since they do not communicate face to face. She is
correct. To develop connection with others we have to speak with them, face to
face.
We have to understand their facial
gestures and body language to truly understand them. This is completely lost
when we are looking at the screen and twiddling with our thumbs and not looking
at the person in front of us.
A young friend told me recently that one of his social media pages
has 687 “friends”. I asked whether he knew every one
of them. He obviously did not. I did not
ask
whether any one of them will come if
he needed help, if any of them will maintain long-standing and close
friendship. Developing relationship requires face to face time and sustained
effort. My guess is that he has very few intimate friends who can share his ups
and downs and help him when he is in need. Probably my friend gets a sense of
“ Self-validation” to know that he has “687 contacts” or “followers”. I hope this is
not the only way he gets his self-identity.
It is no wonder that students who are endlessly texting are
afraid of face – to - face transactions.
Many of them have lost social skills
by spending time interacting with the tablet or phone instead of
with people.
It is easy , of course, to deal with the machine or with someone somewhere
else, since it
is less demanding. May be this is one of the reasons that
loneliness is a major problem among adolescents and young adults (millennials
and Gen Z, I am told) growing up with technology and social media. They
probably do not even realize what they are missing.
I have written
earlier that it is difficult to develop compassion in a world dominated by
competition and pursuit of personal happiness. In living a life with focus on
personal liberty and personal happiness, we forget others and their needs.
Empathy and compassion take a back seat to aggressive pursuit of personal
gains.
Now, technology has added another impediment to developing compassion
and empathy. Technological devices such as smartphones tablets and social media
hinder human to human
interactions. We
spend more time with machines than with people and even when we deal with
people it is through the medium of technology. Personal connections, better
communication, empathy
and compassion are more likely to develop through face
to face conversations and sustained relationships. That requires time and
effort.
As Dr.Turkle has suggested, our young friends need to spend
less time interacting with screens and more time interacting with real people.
