On one hand, people seem more interlinked than ever before: texting, Facebook and Twitter updates enable us to learn what our friends are doing. It is easy to eliminate downtime waiting for trains or driving in a car by checking one's phone. Technology makes it easier to keep in touch with a wider array of people 'on the fly' when busy. But it is also not unusual to see someone in a restaurant, dining with a friend, who is fixated on a cell phone instead of talking to his or her real life companion. The second there is a pause or a dull moment, it is easy to be distracted by another type of stimulus. Modern technology creates an ADD sufferer's paradise. The more common it becomes to use cell phones, the less rude and strange it seems to not talk to someone standing next to you.
There is something dehumanizing about being ignored while a friend talks on a cellphone, or being able to hear someone's conversation word for word while walking in a store. I have often seen someone waiting ahead of me online chatting on their phone, and refuse to engage with the clerk ringing up their order. This clearly conveys the message 'you are not important enough for me to hang up my phone, since I am now talking to someone I really care about." We try to multitask, but end up cutting other people out. We are exposed to so many different people and types of stimulation it is hard to really ingest...
Even the portrayal of human life on screen has become affected by the Internet. "Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets" (Carr 2008). Instead of focusing on the characters engaged in a dialogue, this type of presentation encourages the viewer to focus on the content around the people on the screen.
Of course, the way people communicate has changed many times over the course of history: writing was once an innovation, and so was using the telephone. The Internet may make people more tolerant, as they cannot see the racial or ethnic identity of the individual communicating to them through email. The World Wide Web may expose users to more diverse cultural images than they would ever have seen, had online life never been created. But it is important to note that whenever a new technology becomes ubiquitous that something is lost as well as gained in terms of the way the brain processes information and the way that we engage with one another as human beings.
Work Cited
Carr, Nicholas. "Is Google making us stupid?" The Atlantic. July 2008.
April 20, 2010.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/
