Are We Digitally Overwhelmed?
Are we overwhelmed by so much technology in our lives? Or are these feelings a sign of something more hopeful?
Bronwyn looked at her phone screen. 82 emails, 130 notifications from social media apps. Task reminders, texts. She flopped back into bed, pulling the covers over her head. It was only 7AM and even the wafting scent of the brewing coffee couldn’t entice her that morning.
Fear of missing out (FOMO), technostress, digital detox, digital escapism, connectivity overload, all terms society has created in just the past two decades or so. All signs and symptoms of a culture that is feeling overwhelmed by technology. Or perhaps it’s something else? Maybe it’s a good sign?
We are in a time of significant sociocultural change as we navigate living, working and playing in the digital and physical realms at the same time. How we process information, especially with the rise of answer engines and Generative AI (AI), our forming of relationships, identity construction and navigation of social spaces. These are all changing.
In part, this does strongly suggest being digitally overwhelmed. For some people this has caused depression, anxiety and other social disorders from these pressures. On the one hand, we may feel frustration and hopelessness, lost in this murkiness of digital miasma.
While the terms may have changed as a result of revolutionary new technologies, we’ve been here before. During the Victorian era of the mid to late 19th century, neurologist George Miller Beard coined the term “neurasthenia” to describe the the symptoms of modern life such as anxiety and depression.
There was the term “railway spine”, a 19th century term of the mental trauma caused by experiencing railway accidents, which were quite plentiful at that time.
We rarely, perhaps really never, have known exactly what the impact and implications of new revolutionary technologies will have on our societies. We can probably make better educated guesses today.
So all these terms we have as descriptors and symptoms of a potentially digitally overwhelmed society, might also be viewed in another, important way. For sociocultural systems can’t change the technology that changed us until we have had time to see the effects.
We are now understanding the impacts and effects on youth having smartphones too early or in the classroom. Of the interruption on our sleep patterns staring at blue screens into the wee hours. Of how online vitriol and divisiveness and misinformation translates into the real world. Society is not amused.
School boards, State and Provincial governments have launched law suits against Facebook, TikTok and other social media platforms for alleged harms done. Western governments and even China, are bringing in new laws and regulations around privacy and data governance. Civil society groups are forming to petition platforms as well.
This is what anthropologist Claude Levis-Strauss might have termed as “bricolage”, or the way in which a culture assembles and reassembles its relationship to elements within culture. Today, one might argue, we are beginning to reassemble our relationship with digital technologies.
There’s increased interest in taking on analog activities, from book reading clubs (real books), to urban farming, building off-grid homes, forest bathing (it’s a real thing), hiking clubs and so on. Most ban or discourage the use of digital tools when engaging in them. While eReader sales have plateaued, print book sales are increasing.
There is increased interest in dumphones and eInk phones and tablets that are monochromatic. The reason people want them is that they like the opportunity and ability to be connected, but want more control in how that connectivity is done and managed.
What culture is starting to do, now that we better understand these tools, is to start putting in place new cultural norms, behaviours and customs, to in effect, reshape these technologies. It is one of the several reasons that technologies go out of favour in societies. And as I’ve written before, culture is the ultimate arbiter of all technologies.
We may offload some of the information overload we feel today, but we will never completely eliminate it. Information overload has been a factor of societies ever since we printed more books or scrolls than one could ever read in a lifetime.
What it may be better to do, is to recognise these issues and see them as a sociocultural reaction. For technology startups and existing technology companies, especially social media platforms, they would be wise to understand the way society is reconfiguring its relationship to many of their products. There is opportunity in times of significant sociocultural change.
Regulators and lawmakers around the world are seeing these shifts. Enough so that industry associations and lobbyists will struggle to truly have influence, as we are already seeing with the Google anti-trust suits and others underway.
So this is a rather hopeful moment, one with interesting challenges and opportunities, ahead. The invisible hand of culture is at work. We are attempting to find balance in our new digital world.