Society’s Digital Aging
Being born in the year 1997 has meant that I have lived my full life with technology at my fingertips, being the first generation with this ability. While people may argue whether the rapid advancement of technology is a gift or a curse, there is one undeniable truth: it influences us in nearly every aspect of our lives now.
Werner Herzog’s film, Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World does a phenomenal job discussing a large array of technological topics, ranging from the seemingly limitless potential of artificial intelligence, internet addiction, and just the true scale of how intertwined our lives have become with technology.
Early on in the film, Ted Nelson states, “The world is a system of ever-changing relationships and structures”, and it couldn’t relate any more to the world of technology in which we live today.
Ever since the first computers were invented, we have seen the expansion from very simple machines that would fill up a whole room just to compute a math equation, to far more powerful devices that found themselves at home in the pockets of a great deal of people. This progression may seem like a luxury, but as the film uncovers, this newly accessible power is a double-edged sword.

Herzog delves into the topic of internet addiction and the seriousness of something that many question whether or not is an “illness”.
One case that is quickly profiled chronicles the story of a South Korean couple who were addicted to an unnamed video game where the objective of the game was to nourish a young child and make sure it was well taken care of. While they were being sucked into cyber space, their daughter in the real world ironically died from starvation.
Although this is a rare case, cases like this one have proven that not only is internet addiction a real disease, it can have fatal consequences and needs to be treated as such.
In my own experience, I could never see myself being that attached to my devices or the internet. As someone who grew up in a generation that has had access to the internet for their entire life, I don’t think that most people my age are nearly as hooked to the internet as teenagers are nowadays. Some studies show that children in their early teens spend more than 10 hours a week on social media, which has a direct correlation of the mental states of this age group as Jean Twenge states in her 2017 article, Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?, “The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression.”
The discrepancy between how much I’m on my phone opposed to how much teenagers are, in my opinion, doesn’t come from technology advancing and becoming more and more impressive. Rather, I believe that the accessibility that people now have to the internet via their smartphones is the cause for the drastic jump in screen time.

Although it may seem as if technology is an unavoidable piece of our lives now, Herzog’s film documents a small colony of people who suffer from Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity and must remove themselves from all types of radio frequencies and other variations of electric wave frequencies.
To get a better understanding of what it would be like to have Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity, below is a clip from Vince Gilligan’s show Better Call Saul, depicting what it’s like for Charles McGill to live with said illness:
People with this disorder have proven that although it’s not easy by any stretch of the imagination to completely remove yourself from technology, it is possible to do it. Although I don’t believe it’s necessary to completely remove ourselves from technology, I think that we should distance ourselves a little to (somewhat) lose our apparent dependence on having constant access to the internet.
Regaining our independence would be a very tall task, as well as a very rewarding one. The challenge of not using something that we’re so accustomed to poses a very difficult obstacle simply because we’ve never known anything else. I’ve had an iPhone since I was about 13 or 14, and I hardly remember what it was like before the days of being able to access the internet from wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. One change I could make would to be trading my iPhone for a flip phone, but I’d never do that because seeing as I’m so accustomed to my current way of life, it’d be an extreme inconvenience to revert to a simpler time.
As technology becomes increasingly impressive and our future generations become more and more dependent on their devices, I believe that technology will become more and more second-nature to us as a species, and it will get harder and harder to distance ourselves from it.
