When you interact online…
Each social interaction stimulates your amygdala striatal system, causing your brain to crave further neurological excitement. This is the same part of the brain that is stimulated when an individual has a substance addiction.
On average, we check our phones every twelve minutes, and these neurological processes reoccur for varying lengths of time.
We are computational thinkers, whether we like it or not.
Some psychologists call this behaviour ‘absent-minded’, a habit of ‘emotional connection to a proxy companion.’ James Bridle’s ‘Chasm’, calls it a behavioural display of ‘computational thinking’ — that is, ‘the belief that any given problem can be solved by the application of computation.’
These can be solutions to very minor problems — that aren’t problems, (such as a cure for mere boredom). Regardless of their purpose, the use of personal technologies has increased incomprehensibly quickly in the last twenty years, dragging up the cases of mental health issues alongside it.
This correlation begs the question: Are we more at risk of an identity crisis at the hands of social and personal technologies? Is the very thing that was supposed to help improve our social connectivity now driving us apart?
I’m focussing on this aspect largely because I am just about old enough to have briefly experienced a time where social technologies were categorised as entertainment, considered more of a rare luxury than a fundamental human right. I don’t recall any ‘in-between’ period where social technologies first began to slowly emerge — I feel as though I woke up one morning and social media was suddenly embedded into our cultural fabric.
We have watched technology slide along a spectrum of purpose.
It’s provided solutions that range from helpful to completely bizarre.
We once sought technological guidance to help us learn, travel, work, and be entertained.
Nowadays it’s becoming far more personal — we can have AI relationships; we video diary our day; we have personalised playlists made for us, and we are reminded to drink water.
There is even the terrifying possibility that someday our memories will be digitalized, which according to Scientific American, ‘will yield benefits in a wide spectrum of areas, providing treasure troves of information about how people think and feel.’
I’m not sure I want my memories digitalized, and I am equally doubtful that this will achieve any insight into human emotion without causing a ton of problems first. Were all of these things a real problem in the first place? Have these technologies so-called ‘fixed’ these problems?
As Bridle recognises, there is a paradoxical irony that is our deep-rooted emotional tie to an entity whose fundamental mechanisms we do not understand. If we are ‘falling into the chasm of computational thinking’, like Bridle says, then we are attempting to become more cyborg than human.
Cyborg.
‘A fictional or hypothetical person whose physical abilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by mechanical elements built into the body.’
I can’t help but consider the cyborg as a physical and metaphoric symbol of ‘computational thinking’ taken to its logical end. With this in mind, and if ‘our technologies are extensions of ourselves’ then surely our online identities are our cyborg selves?
They are simulated fictional characters we have created in the image of ourselves, interacting with other fictional characters on the same virtual plane.
The danger here, is the state of psychological insecurity that we experience when we too-far segregate our real selves and our virtual selves. The human and the cyborg. A face-to-face conversation and a text message. A real life verbal compliment and an Instagram like.
The more polarised these opposites become, the more our cyborg self becomes a false veil disguising our true human identity, and we run the risk of confusing realities. Yet these technologies are neurologically pleasing, thus addictive. This can have detrimental — albeit unintentional — affects on the brain.
Instagram likes are social currency.
According to Barnell, we allocate value to ‘likes’, allowing others to ‘value us with social currency.’ Through this process, we self-quantify, and base our social value on these numbers. It is no wonder then, that there is a correlative link between mental health issues and prolific social media use among 18–24 year olds.
Our saviour here is remembering the value of real-life interaction, and considering online interactions should simply remain as ‘an extension of ourselves’, not our whole selves.
The cyborg is performed.
Falsifying aspects of our life for the sake of social recognition is pretending to be someone we’re not. If we start abusing the fantasticality and versatility of the virtual, we can mediate and sugar-coat our memories, driven by the need for the acquisition of social currency.
Technology does not have sentience. Although it may seem like it, your social media doesn’t know you. Social media is a naïve entity. If you tell the internet you are a 111-year old woman with a degree in computer science it will believe you. If you tell the internet you are five years old; the son of Robert Plant; speak 40 languages, and can play the flute…it will still believe you. We have the freedom to be anyone we want online.
‘This is the world we were all afraid of; but it’s also sort of the world we wanted’
Apocalyptic literature and film resonate with these ideas, encapsulating dystopian worlds based on technological concepts already that exist today. We find dystopian arts entertaining because they exaggeratedly echo elements within our current climate which already exist.
Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror gave us ‘Nosedive’ — perhaps the most realistic episode of the series as it depicts a society solely hierarchized by the status of characters’ social media profiles.
Stephen King’s 2006 novel Cell sees phone users becoming out-of-control zombies, reviewed as a ‘peek into an alternate reality where these digital comforts took full control of our lives.’
I even took a module called ‘Robots and Cyborgs’ during my second year at university — our relationship with technology has become so profound that even the study of it has been implemented into humanities curriculums.
Admit confusion and name the unknown
By becoming aware that we really are living in a New Dark Age, we are making the first step towards pinpointing where we stand in this ever-changing period of vast change. Admit confusion and name the unknown.
We should accept our cyborg selves, and embrace their computational potential to positively influence our real human identities because what we do have, is agency. Computational thinking is a spectrum, and it is how we use personal technologies that determine where we lie on this spectrum. Personal technologies may be terrifyingly over-intrusive to the technophobe, but in their essence, they are neither good nor bad. It is us, the technological puppet masters, the cyborgs, who have the agency to utilize it for positivity.
The paradox of disconnected connectivity
During an online interview, James Bridle claimed ‘it is one of the central paradoxes of our age, that we know more and more about the world…yet the world seems mostly characterised by division,’ and I don’t think I’ve experienced a point in my life where this comment has seemed more fitting.
Just as we were becoming aware of the collateral damages technology has on our mental health, it is this very software which could also save it. Mental health guidance once told us stay away from social media, yet in the very next breath, the same therapeutic forces encourage us to dissolve ourselves into the virtual world.
Simultaneously, as we become more desensitized to the epistemological ominousness that are the 2020s, we must be observant of the world in its chaotic state. Bridle suggests darkness can be ‘a place of freedom and possibility, a place of equality’ as ‘uncertainty can be productive.’
Despite the darkness then, we can increase our productivity in humanitarianism.
The question is, will we realise the value of what we’ve lost, and start looking up from our devices?
