Stowe Boyd

Practically every week some magazine runs a story about how email, cell phones, texting, Facebook, Twitter, etc., etc., have diminished the quality of face-to-face communication. In 2009 the New York Times profiled a family of six in which every member, including the five-year old, starts the day by grabbing a nearby electronic gadget instead of talking to each other. There is nothing new about the fear that technology is harming human interaction. People philosophized and worried about telegraphs and telephones in very much the same way that people now philosophize and worry about the Internet. In an 1880 novel titled Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes two telegraph operators carried on a very politely Victorian version of cybersex and pondered whether they had a “real” relationship. Going back even further, Plato fretted about the impact of writing on human interaction 2,400 years ago in the Phaedrus. (To see that writing is a technology, consider what it would take for you to create a pen, ink, and paper on your own.) Plato argued that unlike its author, a written text could not engage in conversation; if questioned it would simply give the same answer again. Knowledge only truly exists in human interaction, he said. He concluded that by seducing people into believing that they can obtain knowledge from solitary reading, the written word threatens human ties.

The debate about technology’s effects on social interaction has been around for so long that it is essentially technology-independent. I see it as being about the tension between conflicting desires for autonomy and community. On the one hand we want to be autonomous, and seek space and privacy. On the other hand we want to be known and loved, and seek intimacy and community. These desires are in constant conflict. By constantly introducing new ways to be alone and together, technology keeps renewing the conflict. The conflict endures through the millennia; only the specific technologies change.

Michael Chorost, World Wide Mind