What does it mean to be human, now?
I’m here to talk about how we are all slowly losing the ability to communicate and engage physically with each other since the explosion of digital communications. I’m writing this on a digital media platform because that’s the only way I’m going to have the potential to reach absolutely everyone.
It should be acknowledged early in this piece that without the Internet or a digital platform such as Medium, you, the reader, and I, the writer, would not be here.
These days you could send a quick Snapchat or text to your BFF to say hello, you could post a video on your Insta-story because you want to interact with all your followers (half whom you’ve probably never had a solid conversation or physical interaction with), maybe a quick Tweet is more your style, condensing your thoughts into 240 characters.
On my daily commute to Uni or to work, I’ve got my headphones in listening to my top Spotify playlist, I’m really in a world of my own. But as strangers pass me; kids on their way to school, people on their way to work, I smile at them — I hope they have a nice day doing whatever they’ve got planned. The kids usually stare blankly or look away shyly, which is fair enough, “stranger danger” right? The adults I’m more critical of. Some will smile back pleasantly or awkwardly, but others will stare straight ahead with their Beats on with some interesting podcast playing, I’m sure. Others make eye contact and, without generating an inch of a smile, will go back to staring at their far more interesting phones. Is a blank stare really what we’ve come down to?
It should now be addressed that, while the Internet and technology, such as smartphones and tablets, has changed the way we, as a species, learn and generate, and transport information around the world, it has forced us to adapt to new ways of communicating and interacting with one another. the question revolves around whether we’ve been forced to form new skills, or if we have had to sacrifice ones, we already had in order to acquire the new.
I recently graduated from high school, so Facebook and Instagram are hotspots of connection for me and my friends and all my peers who I never really spoke to but still want to be updated on about anyway. I text my close friends now and then to see where their lives are up to, but aside from that I just watch people’s Insta-stories and flick through my never-ending Instagram and Facebook feed of posts. Without these social media platforms, it’s likely I wouldn’t have stayed in contact with most of my friends because it just seems way too hard, right?
We are almost solely dependent on our phones to be connected to society.
To have to call people and arrange dates to meet up and then actually go and meet each other and talk — God what a nightmare! Thank goodness we can just send cute little emoji faces that hopefully, the other person will interpret the exact way it was intended.
You see, our increasing usage of phones to stay connected with non-physically current events and people, has come at the cost of our connection to the present, physical people and events in our lives. We are losing our interpersonal communication abilities in the physical realm because we are too far focused on homing in on our digital audience and connecting with them instead.
As the stranger with their Beats on, I smile because they’re still a human being whom I share the same natural communication instincts with. When they don’t smile back, staring straight ahead, or worse, staring blankly at me — I start to rethink if they actually do have the same natural human instincts of communication as myself.
I’m a young woman who has grown up on the brink of the digital revolution. My young years were not much different from the generation before mine, there was not an abundance of touch screen technologies or smartphones. My generation has had the opportunity to see the world with and without the dependency of social media and digital communication technologies, as have the many generations prior to us.
However, the difference lies in that my generation became the first to grow up with the heavy influence of social media and reliance on digital technologies. Self-esteem went out the window early on and talking to boy/girls/whatever you’re into just became impossible because now you had the option to message them online which gave you a fast pass through the awkward phase. However, in hindsight, that ‘awkward phase’ is the most human quality about an initial interaction between two people because it’s raw human emotion and instinctive in the moment response. Through social media comms, you can plan and edit what you’re going to say to someone, moreover you can disassociate yourself from the text and the attached sentiment, in case of a negative response. This places a buffer on the development of our natural human interpersonal skills.
I decided to put it to my Facebook followers, being friends and family, to address whether they felt social media was impacting their social skills at all.
These three responses highlighted similar points of issue. With input from other users of social media, my argument that it relinquishes us of the ability to “understand physical emotions” gains ground. Social media and digital technologies act as filters to the physical world around us, disabling us of the need to express emotions physically, or even remotely humanely. With emojis and memes, we have other ways of transmitting our emotions, no longer in a human form but in a digitised regurgitation of what a machine conceives a natural response to being equivalent of.
Are we human or are we…?
Put your phone down when you don’t really need it. Take in your surroundings; the sound of the wind through the trees, the chatter of people around you. Look up at the sky above you, blue or grey or black, it’s incredible, isn’t it? Your damn phone can’t replicate the exact impact of a personal view of a city landscape, or the Milkyway from below, or the interaction between two dogs on the street. Your phone can’t have the same conversation with you that you can with your own parents or best friends. Don’t be a slave to the data chip in your hand, don’t be a stranger to your fellow human.
We can all identify moments in our day where we were on our phones for no reason other than to not look awkward. Put your phone down, you won’t look awkward standing in line for your coffee, you’ll look human.
