Living, Loving, and Learning in the Digital Age

           The Internet is an awe-inspiring invention, a tool to connect socially and intellectually and a forum by which the entire world has an opportunity to work together to further advance the human race. Most reasonable people would agree with that statement, yet most people young and old have a sense of conflict about where humankind is going, guided by this technology. It may be a loss of tradition, a change of focus, or more sinister opportunities provided by the Internet, but present also is the classic mentality of the old to be distrustful of the  new-fangled life-changing contraptions the kids today have. I can see both sides of the argument. Socially, many of us put less work into being less personal with online correspondence, yet many who would not have the chance to communicate normally with the world now have the opportunity. Intellectually, we skim articles and our attention spans have consequently shortened, yet the vast amount of information available to the world helps spread education, equality, and entertainment. So what does it mean for we who have never lived without the technology that is now impossible to escape and can we form meaningful relationships while taking advantage of the wealth of information available to us?

           Those who lament the loss of some activity or trait that makes us more “human” such as reading a physical book, writing an actual letter, or communicating face-to-face must realize that like humans themselves, the definition of “human” is free to evolve. As told by the BBC Prehistoric Life series of articles, three million years ago, the closest human ancestor, known as a hominid, first began to get enough nutrition from meat to actually develop the size of their brains. Those who therefore worry about modern developments in technology such as the inevitable computer chip addition to the brain making us “less human” must remember the original humans are barely recognizable as humans and therefore not a viable “pure” model to compare modern humans to, modern humans being much more advanced intellectually, socially, mechanically, and in many more significant ways. Humans have more trouble evolving to accept the many more people we come in contact with and must remember and interact with every day. From an evolutionary standpoint, our ancestors interacted personally and frequently with a small number of people in their villages, most of whom they were related to. Nowadays because of dense cities we live in as well as modern media, we are expected to know about, interact with, and think about hundreds more people than we are evolved to remember. The number of people we are actually able to know and keep track of has been coined as "Dunbar's Number" based on the research of Oxford Professor of evolutionary biologist Robin Dunbar who has determined that 150 close relationships is all the average person can keep meaningful track of, and this number for a community comes from the societal traditions of our ancestors. Whether it is celebrities we know much about but who don’t know us, acquaintances or strangers we see and interact with on impersonal levels, or the hundreds of Facebook friends we communicate with in an abstract and new way, we are not perfectly evolved for these modern human relationships.

          I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. As a social being I like to see what is going on with my friends and family in the form of messages, pictures posted, and status updates. At a certain point however I get overwhelmed by the amount of collected data about my friends and I, not to mention the number of friends I have collected myself. I fantasize about deleting my profile and communicating with whom I want to with email, texts, phone calls, and the dear old US Postal Service, yet something always brings me back to the ease of social interaction that Facebook provides. The most recent time Facebook lured me back was when I turned nineteen this past Thursday and found myself ambushed by wall posts, pictures, and messages wishing me a happy birthday and hoping I do my best in the Big Apple. Being away from home in a place where most people don’t know my name, let alone my birthday, this attention on Facebook was profoundly comforting. Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan, authors of Your iBrain: How Technology Changes the Way We Think  would likely argue that this comforting attention I got from the Internet medium of Facebook was feeding my ego and self-worth, an argument I would not necessarily dispute. A common characterization of my generation or “Generation Y” is that we are self-absorbed, crave attention, live off of praise, and cannot take criticism. Part of my conflict about Facebook has to do with what I am gaining from it and what I am losing because of it. If I am gaining a sense of social acceptance from the internet in a world that is becoming less and less personal and more and more plugged into a different reality, aren’t I only gaining back a sliver of what has been lost? Why can’t I be satisfied with the sense of self I cultivate based on what I’ve read, what I care about, and what my values are? Since in the end the only person you can really trust and rely on is you, shouldn’t we all focus on growing ourselves and exercising our minds, instead of worrying about other people’s opinions and judgments of us? The only answer I have is that the digital age and the different reality it brings must be introduced into all of our lives differently, either embraced or tolerated, because it is here and we all have the choice to make of it what we will.

          What can be gained on a personal and a global scale from technology and the Internet should be appreciated as the result of many people’s hard work and design. It is a useful tool to keep in touch socially and delve deeply into many relevant articles from reasonable sources. For those with the appropriate expertise, it can be used to propel the human race into yet another stage of technological advances which may allow us to solve many of the global scale problems whose solutions may come to define this point in time, such as climate change, cancer, and global poverty. Since the Internet makes the world such a smaller place where people can communicate and collaborate so easily, such global scale problems are made apparent and also are made solvable.