How Technology Reshapes Our Minds
The Enhancing and Weakening Effects of Digitalization (Vol. 5; Issue 25)
If you use a gun to blow your brains out, will your “self” persist? Like most of you, I don’t believe so. Whatever you think of life after death, the “you” who existed prior to your suicide will vanish. Maybe the substances of your being will return back to nature. Maybe your soul will migrate to Heaven. Maybe it will unite with universal consciousness. Of course, no one knows for sure.
Meanwhile, few disagree that, once you slide down that birth canal, the mind, more accurately described as the body-mind (Karbelnig, 2021), expands far beyond the confines of your skin. You are, in truth, born into a world, real or imagined, and a culture. Culture, which includes people, things, and history, informs body-mind. Your subjective experience extends into the world around you. Your senses — namely the ability to smell, taste, feel, hear, touch and see — allow you to embrace the broader context around you.
Technologies assist how the body-mind becomes ensconced in the world. Consider how mobile phones broaden perspectives. We take such amplification for granted. If you’re interested in any imaginable topic, you need only ask Siri or Alexa. They will instantly provide reams of information. Millennial and Gen X readers will recall memorizing the telephone numbers of their close family or friends. These days such feats of memory are no longer required; you can reach any of your contacts with one tap.
We global citizens have grown accustomed to such techno-augmentations. Mobile phones are almost literally a physical part of us. They are everywhere. More than 19 billion of them are in use worldwide, far exceeding the global population of 8 billion. GPS services, available on most mobile phones, provide directions for travel whether across two blocks or two continents. Other apps offer predictions of weather, information about bus, train, and rail routes, guides for hiking trails, ways to meet up with people sharing similar interests, advice for managing finances, or ratings of restaurants. Facetime and similar technologies allow us to see others while conversing with them.
Marshall McLuhan (1967), a Canadian philosopher anticipating these mind extensions, describes how the:
medium [like a mobile phone] is not something neutral—it does something to people. It takes hold of them. It rubs them off, it massages them and bumps them around, chiropractically, as it were.
In other words, they forever alter our subjectivities. A telescope, itself a form of media, lets you observe distant orbs in the universe; a mobile phone does much more. It strengthens us: We can see, hear, and feel more than our creatureliness allows.
Just like any technology imaginable, the mobile phone also constricts. It causes us to lose any number of capabilities—like memory. These devices impact us in more onerous ways, like by destroying our privacy, inhibiting our capacities for socialization, and diminishing basic human kindness.
Regarding privacy and confidentiality, smartphones constantly track location through GPS, Wi-Fi, and cellular networks. These can be accessed by apps, the phone’s operating system, and even cellular providers. Your personal information is sold—just like any commodity—but in these cases transactions occur with neither consent nor remuneration. Even if you turn off location services, cellular providers record your movements. They can, and they do, sell this information without your knowledge. And, just like their larger computer cousins, mobile phones are susceptible to malware, viruses, and hacking. These, too, can expose sensitive data and allow for surveillance.
Most readers are already aware of the dire effect of mobile phones on socialization—particularly among the young. MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle (2016), who studies the smart phone world, says:
If you put a cell phone into a social interaction, it does two things: First, it decreases the quality of what you talk about, because you talk about things where you wouldn’t mind being interrupted, which makes sense, and, secondly, it decreases the empathic connection that people feel toward each other.
In confirmation, some 90 percent of people check their phones during conversations—even though they realize this disrupts meaningful interaction. Generation Z, the first fully digital generation, suffers the most. Cedar Roach, a communications expert at Arvo Executive Communications (and a Gen Z member herself), documents information overload and social anxiety among her colleagues in the age 13 to 28 group, saying:
Gen Z deals with constant information overload since we are constantly fed new information. As a result, Gen Z suffers from what’s been coined as ‘decision fatigue,’ with about 48% feeling anxious most of the time as a result.
Finally, and as Turkle also noted, mobile phones lessen empathy and, generally, contribute to the decrease in ordinary human kindness. They take away such common courtesies as saying “thank you,” “hello,” “nice to meet you,” and “please.” Furthermore, fewer people smile at one another. Fewer sympathize or help someone who is struggling. Instead, they insert emojis on their social media posts or in texts. These validate the erosion of decency.
Every technology comes with assets and liabilities, but none carry the social impacts of mobile phones. Nuclear energy may power cities, but the bombs that technology wrought threatens the existence of civilization. The same goes for petrochemicals and industrial agriculture. They also provide power, and feed people meat, while creating a similar civilization-threatening global warming. These are terrifying.
However, due to our capacity for denial, most live their lives without seriously facing either of these threats. In contrast, these omnipresent mobile phones, while providing us with instant access to unlimited information, create levels of social isolation never previously known. Michel Foucault (1977), the French philosopher writing decades before mobile phones were invented, correctly anticipated the human being would become “an object of information, never a subject in communication.”
I fear such depersonalization will lead to still further increases in violence. People have become desensitized to how digital representations distort our real, fleshy existences. How sad to think that, before nuclear or climate annihilation arrives, we may witness us behaving more like metal devices and less like human subjects.
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References
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. A. Sheridan (Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Karbelnig, A.M. (2021). The Embodied Psychoanalyst. (Ch. 14). In J. Mills (Ed), Psychoanalysis and the Mind-Body Problem. New York: Routledge.
McLuhan, M. (1967) McLuhan: Now The Medium Is The Massage. New York Times. Retrieved 2018-09-04.
Turkle, S. (2016). Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. New York: Penguin.