Always Connected, Yet Still Alone

-- By MatthewSchwartz - 3 Dec 2023

Technology and its Relationship with Human Attention

The ongoing proliferation of technology across all aspects of life continues to reduce the attention people allocate towards their everyday human interactions. According to Sherry Turkle in Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, technology has enabled humans to multitask more than ever before. By walking into a modern-day classroom, it is evident that students are distracted—whether browsing the internet, texting their friends, or engaging with a social media app. These distractions come with costs that impair our ability to succeed. According to the Cleveland Clinic, multitasking makes humans less efficient and more prone to errors. In studies looking into screen times and ADHD severity, there is a positive correlation between screen usage and ADHD symptoms.

The internet is no longer just a tool, but also an addiction. As much as 25% of children are addicted to the internet. Children are glued to their phones and spend an average of 4-6 hours per day on screens.

Loneliness

The loss of interpersonal socialization and relationships can have detrimental effects on mental health and wellbeing. 37% of Americans do not interact with anyone at least once a week. And according to Turkle, since 2014, people have reported a dramatic decrease in their interest of others.

The combination of the minimal time spent with others and a decreased interest in doing so helps explain why 34% of Americans feel lonelier than ever before. In 2017, the U.S. Surgeon General said that we are living through a loneliness epidemic. The modern world is an incubator for loneliness as shared experiences and personal connection have now been replaced with time behind a screen.

Anxiety, Stress, Depression, and Social Skills

Anxiety, stress, and depression have been shown to be significantly positively correlated with internet addiction. There have even been calls to include internet addiction into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, due to the strong correlation between high internet usage and anxiety, stress, and depression. In a climate of rising internet addiction, it comes as no surprise that another study found that the prevalence of anxiety disorders and depressions worldwide are rising.

The physiological impact of technology could in part be to blame for these mental disorders. Technology usage has led to sleep deregulation due to extended exposure to blue-light radiation, which has been shown to disrupt REM sleep. REM sleep is necessary for brain maintenance, keeping elevated moods, lowering depression and anxiety levels, and improving social skills.

Technology is also altering our natural communication patterns. Non-verbal cues, like body language, facial expressions, and voice tone are all much more challenging to identify now that we are spending more time than ever in front of a screen instead of face-to-face. Following the COVID-19 lockdown, I realized how much harder it was to socialize, since Zoom interactions became the new norm. While the COVID-19 pandemic was an extreme form of an antisocial experiment, I believe continuous exposure to screentime throughout the course of life will affect humans’ ability to socialize.

Relationship Simplification due to Confusion

According to Turkle, technology causes confusion about the proper amount of communication required in an interaction, which has led to the simplification of relationships. People are in a constant state of confusion about whether they have communicated enough; in fact, many often try to not engage too much or appear overeager in order to seem “cooler.” In turn, as a society we now have lower expectations from our relationships. For example, we don’t expect our friends to engage us in deep conversation over text, or for them to reply immediately.

Nevertheless, people are more connected than ever before. Adults under 45 send and receive 85+ texts per day, on average. However, our definition of “connected” has shifted. While we may literally be connected to people at all times in a virtual world, our relationships are shallower and more surface-level than those developed through in-person communications. The number of people that technology allows us to communicate with at once also reduces the attention a person can allocate to any single individual.

Technology as a Gap-Filler

Technology has also become our escape from human relationships altogether. We often spend time interacting with robots and other online avatars, which per Turkle, is a way to fill any voids in our life. Our identities as people have changed, as we now think about ourselves by both our real-world identities and internet personas combined. We are no longer just who we present ourselves as physically; we are also judged by how we appear online—whether that be how many followers we have on Instagram or how many friends we have on Facebook.

Turkle mentions how in her studies she has identified that younger humans are more accepting of falling in love with a robot or using robots to replace humans’ roles in particular tasks. It will not be unheard of for humans to marry robots and become best friends with robots, instead of trying to befriend a real human. Humans prefer to feel in control of their conversations and relationships, which robots are able to accommodate. Robots accept our feelings, feel safe, and allow us to be 100% in control. This may help explain our preference for texting conversations, where we can determine when to reply and end a chat. With this in mind, it is no surprise that Gen Z is opting to avoid calls.

Conclusion

With the influx of technology, we expect less out of each other. The result is we find ourselves feeling more alone. Technology and social media are now used as a gap-filler and are seen as part of who we are. How many followers do I have? Anxiety, stress, and depression are at all-time highs. Social skills are weaker than before. It is clear that social media and technology have the power to destroy relationships altogether.

Sherry Turkle doesn't write satire, so now I think we have agreed on the genre you're in. It is now a genre; what the platforms want is to delay the argument over causation for at least as long as the tobacco companies did. The situation is actually murkier than theirs was. And by the time the argument has come to the conclusion you propound (and with which I pretty much agree) the platforms will have lodged themselves so deeply in the educational systems that it will be impossible for the human race to educate its children without them.

In that context, focusing on personal well-being may be subsidiary to the larger public health questions: Sherry may not have expected in 2012 that a decade after Alone Together the US Surgeon General would see an epidemic of loneliness as our greatest public health challenge. It's a reflection of the profound depth of her insight. The present draft's strength is in the immediacy of its grasp of the personal. If it can be equally tersely welded to a view of the social, something great would result.

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