Confirm Humanity
Technology that affirms our humanity is 2023 goals
It’s a new year and you know what that means! New year, new goals. In 2023, I’m adding a series about how tech can confirm our humanity, each month focusing on an aspect of digital well-being. Of course, I’ll still explore how technology shapes our emotional lives, reflect on the latest developments in empathic technology, and collect internet emotions here too.
✅ A year for confirming humanity
When we aren’t too busy confirming that we aren’t robots, accepting cookies, closing ads, posting, liking, and endlessly scrolling, we suspect we might be miserable. We are pretty sure technology is to blame.
Research makes a convincing case. Staring at screens is ruining our eyesight. Being hunched over a smartphone is damaging our posture which is, in turn, ruining our mood. Tech at bedtime disrupts our sleep while tech during the day increases the health risks of a sedentary lifestyle. Social media is chipping away at our self-worth and making us more socially awkward in person. Technology is reshaping our attention spans, making them even shorter.
We don’t need research to tell us this though. We feel it. We find ourselves spending too much time Snapping and Whatsapping and texting and not enough time with our friends IRL. We touch our phones thousands of times a day, more than we pet our pets or our partners. We feel the ick after too much time online. We adopt and adapt, but it seems like technology doesn’t always align with our best interests.
So, we try our best to become more mindful of our technology use. We aim to follow our intention and write for an hour, or check our email only 3 times a day, or limit social media use to evenings. We even download apps to get ourselves off the other apps.
Some of us might go further and try a digital detox for a weekend, or go on a retreat where we surrender our devices at check-in. Our hope? To restore balance. The reality is that deprivation may actually make us more eager than ever to get back to our tech.
It’s just not realistic to unplug, at least not for long. After all, technology isn’t all (or even mostly) bad. Reconnecting with long-lost friends, getting creative ideas for your next big project, sharing enthusiasm for bird watching, laughing at a cringe video with hundreds of strangers, planning an amazing vacation, chatting with a bot modeled after your inner child, congratulating your Roomba for a job well done, and just doing your own work are all positive daily experiences.
Technology can manifest as wisdom or confusion, helpful or harmful, happiness or misery. It seems like the burden is on us to sort it out. What if is isn’t? Well, not completely.
What if technology could meet us halfway? Rather than nudging us down the purchase funnel, perhaps there could be space for reflection. Rather than going to great lengths to get our attention right now, what if tech companies could take the long view? Rather than persuading us to engage more often, maybe our favorite apps could be designed to help us live balanced lives.
In 2023, on the verge of immersive, ingestible, artificially intelligent, AR-VR-DALLE-NFT-GPT-WTF technology into every aspect of our lives, let’s take this opportunity to step back and consider where we want to go.
Each month I’ll consider a new topic, with the help of smart people I’ve been lucky enough to meet. Some of these incredible people are experts. Many of them are wise, funny, complicated people who are trying to fit technology into their everyday lives. Maybe you?
I hope to come away with some new ideas for the next wave of technology and some small steps we can take to create positive technology. Let’s imagine a positive future where technology truly confirms our humanity.
🦾2023 goals
January is for Restoring Focus
Our attention is a scarce resource, and yet every device, app, and website demands its share. Much has been made of using technology mindfully but I’m also interested in how technology can be reimagined to demand less of our attention.
February is about Deepening Relationships
Research has shown time and time again that what makes you happier is relationships with people. Social media connects us with new people in new ways. And yet, it can also feel unsatisfying. How can we reimagine the role of tech in our relationships?
March is for Cultivating Optimism
Hope is essential to creating change in the world, but I’m having a hard time finding it in my daily doom scrolls. Sure, there are lists of positive news items or feel-good viral content to be consumed. Let’s look for other ways that technology could encourage us to be more optimistic.
April is for Practicing Compassion
In the tech world, we do a lot of thinking about empathy. It’s at the heart of human-centered design and it’s the basis of new tech like empathy VR and emotional AI. Can we create tech to counteract shaming and schadenfreude?
May will be about Fostering Creativity
How can technology encourage us to be curious without clickbait? Some of the happiest moments people have online are when they are feeling creative, according to my research, but people think about creativity more broadly than I imagined.
June is for Rethinking Presence
Our obsession with capturing the moment, perhaps to remember it or maybe to frame it in a particular way, sometimes gets in the way of actually enjoying the moment. At the same time, it seems to be eroding memory. This month we’ll consider how tech can support our past, present, and future.
July is about Building Community
Many of us have experienced that helper’s high when participating in a charity or a cause. From citizen science to micro-volunteering to design for good, I want to know which patterns are positive and which are dead ends. I’m sure you do too.
August is about Awakening the Senses
Tech often flattens experience. Even the most visceral experiences, like communicating or shopping or even sharing music, can seem abstract. Technology speaks to visual and sometimes auditory modalities, but can it engage the other senses? Or go further and help us to develop new capabilities?
September is about Extending Abilities
Bridging human and machine intelligence, digital and physical, seems like the next frontier. Should technology nudge us to be better humans? Probably, but what is better? And who decides?
October is for Embracing Identity
We all want to become better versions of selves, and social media lets us explore what that might look like although not always in an authentic way. We play around with possible selves, but we tend to show only our best sides. How can we get real?
November is about Being Grateful
Gratitude is intimately connected with happiness, just as appreciating the present is with mindfulness. We might feel #blessed that we only have first-world problems, but could tech go further to help us be truly grateful?
December is for Exploring Spirituality
Sometimes we do get big feelings online, but it’s rare to feel wonder. How can technology inspire feelings of awe and transcendence? This is uncharted territory for me, and it seems like a good way to reflect on the year.
Do you have an idea for the series? Something you’d love to hear more about? Drop me an email, pamela at subjective.so
✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
That’s all the feels for this week!
xoxo
Pamela 💗
