Last week, in the middle of my creative writing class, my teacher stepped out to use the bathroom during our 10-minute break. This is usually a good time to crack light jokes with your neighbor or try and make small talk. Instead, every person except me and another guy was on his or her phone. The only reason I wasn’t looking down at mine was because it was plugged into the wall, charging. There was total silence in the room; nobody even glanced up or attempted to connect with another human being. And then our teacher walked back in and we resumed class. Is this just a minute instance of a current phenomenon I plan on stretching out of proportion? Possibly.
The more I scan the scene around me, though, the deeper my conviction sinks that this current technology, in giving us a limitless space in the virtual world, is eroding human connections, relationships and communities in the real world. This has been said before, and it will be said again, but that does not mean it is not worth repeating. We must tread lightly when dealing with technology. The current tendency of people my age is to equate virtual human contact — texting, snapchatting, messaging — with actual human contact. My dad always catches me on this when he asks me if I have talked to my brother recently. By talk, he means what he says: Have you used your voice in communicating with him? The real answer is no, but since I associate talking with texting, I always answer yes. I am certain a vast majority of millennials would, when asked the same question, answer in the affirmative.
But my dad has a point — why do we, when communicating with a fellow human being, choose to interact through a medium that kills all possibility of an actual human experience? In other words, I wonder why we often choose to argue, break up with our girlfriends or boyfriends, say "I love you" or send compliments through texting, when doing so automatically filters out the warmth or force of the statement being sent. Why don’t we save those things for when we actually see the person, when we can experience the true joy or the true pain of seeing the impact of our words on others? The irony is that our age, in being the most connected in history, is the most disconnected age in history. We hover over our phones or computers for hours on end, lost in a flurry of technological possibilities. I can text this person, read this article, watch this video — but in chaining myself to my device, I am consequently neglecting to live. In losing myself in my device, I isolate myself from my friends, my surrounding community and from myself.
I am so absorbed in my screen that I often forget there are other people sitting right next to me. A gulf has formed between me and you, a gulf as big as the phone in my hand. Through that device, I can friend you, Snapchat you, text you, FaceTime you, Facebook message you, email you or maybe even call you if I am feeling confident. It offers me hardly any limits as to how I can communicate with you.
But in doing so, in keeping my attention fixed on the multifarious nature of virtual communication, it blocks me from looking you in the face. It keeps me from sharing a conversation with you or even saying hello. I consider our age to be a lonely one, full of constant motion, sound and distraction. I hardly see strangers willingly share a conversation together; I hardly talk to those I don’t know. Instead, like in my creative writing class, we put in our headphones, angle our necks downward and lose ourselves in our own private worlds. To us, sadly, that is the only world that exists.
Scott Stinson is a UF English and philosophy sophomore. His column appears on Tuesdays.
