Technology can’t make you a better person
No matter how much you wish it could
Nicholas Carr penned a great article today in the Boston Globe, contrasting the “harmonious world” dreamt up by Mark Zuckerberg against the man in Cleveland who murdered a grandpa and posted the video to Facebook.
Technology was supposed to bring us peace and harmony, says everyone:
In an 1899 article celebrating the laying of transatlantic Western Union cables, a New York Times columnist expressed the popular assumption well: “Nothing so fosters and promotes a mutual understanding and a community of sentiment and interests as cheap, speedy, and convenient communication.”
What happened?
IF OUR assumption that communication brings people together were true, we should today be seeing a planetary outbreak of peace, love, and understanding. Thanks to the Internet and cellular networks, humanity is more connected than ever. Of the world’s 7 billion people, 6 billion have access to a mobile phone — a billion and a half more, the United Nations reports, than have access to a working toilet.
More people have mobile phones than TOILETS, yet we’re still in social disrepair. Perhaps technology isn’t cut out for solving the hard things?
In a series of experiments reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2007, Harvard psychologist Michael Norton and two colleagues found that, contrary to our instincts, the more we learn about someone else, the more we tend to dislike that person. “Although people believe that knowing leads to liking,” the researchers wrote, “knowing more means liking less.”
If you’ve ever had a girlfriend or lived with a roommate, this seems extremely intuitive. People grate on each other. Worse, since information is free and individuals spend more and more of their time sharing online, they are increasingly learning more about the people around them. Thus, they are disliking them more and more — leading to fragility and anger.
The effect intensifies in the virtual world, where everyone is in everyone else’s business. Social networks like Facebook and messaging apps like Snapchat encourage constant self-disclosure. Because status is measured quantitatively online, in numbers of followers, friends, and likes, people are rewarded for broadcasting endless details about their lives and thoughts through messages and photographs. To shut up, even briefly, is to disappear. One study found that people share four times as much information about themselves when they converse through computers as when they talk in person.
Carr’s closing is everything:
The problem with such geeky grandiosity goes beyond its denial of human nature. It reinforces the idea, long prevalent in American culture, that technological progress is sufficient to ensure social progress. If we get the engineering right, our better angels will triumph. It’s a pleasant thought, but it’s a fantasy. Progress toward a more amicable world will require not technological magic but concrete, painstaking, and altogether human measures…At a personal level, we may need less self-expression and more self-examination.
Technology is an amplifier. It magnifies our best traits, and it magnifies our worst. What it doesn’t do is make us better people. That’s a job we can’t offload on machines.
Read the entire article here, follow Nicholas Carr here, and buy his books!
