Is Technology Really Making Us Lonely?
We blame technology for making us lonely. In part it is. But it’s really a Three World Problem we’re facing. Here’s what this is and why.
Some experts and pundits suggest we are in a loneliness epidemic. Others that today’s communications technologies, from smartphones to social media, are leaving us more disconnected than ever. Is that really the case and if so, why are we lonely when we’re so connected?
We live simultaneously in not just two, but three worlds today. The real life, physical world, the world inside our heads and a liminal space in between these two, the digital world. We’re used to living in two worlds as we have since we became conscious as a species. But we are not used to the third world that lives between these two. This is new for our brains.
It is what I call the Three World Problem.
While it is easy to lay the blame at the feet of social media and communications technologies as a whole, the reality is a little more nuanced. And complicated. All technologies are inherently human because we imagined them to be. Then we build on them, making them better and sometimes, worse. We are after all, a tool making species.
One sociologist, Nathan Jurgenson doesn’t seem to think it’s the technology at all, that our lives are so blended together between the digital and the physical that we can’t really separate them. He has a point. But I think it goes deeper than this.
The internet once was a place we went to. Until the rise of smartphones and cheap data everywhere along with broadband, getting online was expensive and took a fair bit of technical knowledge. This is no longer the case. We have, as anthropologist Amber Case has proposed, already become cyborgs. Although Case did see us as living in two separate worlds then, which we sort of did. But we no longer are.
Jurgensen argues that our lives are augmented by our digital world, which means we do not live in two separate worlds. While he makes some key points I think he has neglected the first world that we all live in and that is the one inside our heads.
Today we do move seamlessly betwixt and between the digital world, we are no longer augmented by these tools, they are a part of who we are and the realities we make as individuals and societies. This is evidenced in part as to why mis/disinformation has played a critical role in elections.
We rarely realise just how much of our modern societies rely on the internet, that it affects everything from how we pay for products and entertainment to geopolitics. So why then, this epidemic of loneliness?
Perhaps it is less to do with the technology itself than it is about the stories we tell ourselves and one another. Humans are information creators. Be it literature, music, art, software. We take information in, think about it and then create something that can become a story. Whether it be poetry or government policy.
The stories we have told each other created religions, theories, philosophies. They also help us create our cultures; norms, traditional, behaviours. What a nation is and how to govern ourselves. Until just the last few decades, the stories we used to create our cultures and our societies, took a while to spread around the world to other cultures and societies.
Change moved slow. Now it moves through glass fibres, satellites and the aether of cell towers, WiFi routers and modems. Telling one another stories has become easier and faster than ever before in our history.
We are also telling stories using multiple information formats. Prior to this current digital era, one had to use different forms of communication technologies to tell stories. A newspaper, a radio station, a TV channel. All of which engaged our brains in different ways and often left us space to talk with others about the story we heard, saw or read.
What we had a fair amount of was time and space. To consider, absorb, debate and well, just think about. We have now collapsed time and space.
Digital information technologies have collapsed time and space. We are simply flooded with stories and many of us lack the filters to cut out the noise. We don’t read articles anymore, we read and make judgements based on headlines. We are served stories in 90 second clips or short messages on messaging platforms.
When we bring all of what we have seen into the real world, which we do, we may struggle to form a coherent story, or at least one that those we are with in the real world will understand. Or we find like-minded people in the real world and bond over memes and TikTok clips, but we don’t really think about the stories in any depth. We feel that we don’t have the time.
This is also where mis/disinformation come into play. Toss that salacious sauce into the information salad we’re gobbling down everyday and we’re very quickly meandering about in a garden where we can’t really see one another.
So many views can be held at one time by just a few people in a room. We see families split over politics; communities and countries too. We form para-social relationships with people in online groups, but they cannot make up for real-life interactions, which is where we truly build the most meaningful relationships.
When humans find they cannot easily relate with and connect to other, we tend to withdraw. While some may find some comfort in purely digital relationships, ultimately, they still desire human contact in some form. This too is evidenced in how many online communities, as they grow, seek to hold real-world meet ups. Sometimes they’re hybrid, if global, mixing online and real-life.
While no technology is neutral, what, why and how we use a technology is decided by humans. Communications technologies are useless until humans input the information. Algorithms don’t know what they’re creating, not even Generative AI. They’re daft twits acting based on what we do.
We are lonely because we aren’t quite sure in our minds, how to distill and interpret all the stories coming at us. Our brains are switching between different ideas, dopamine hits and the collision of so many ideas that push back against our norms, customs and traditions.
This leaves us at times finding it difficult to know how to relate to others around us in the physical world. It is not the fault of the technologies, it is our brains trying to figure out a new way of operating in three worlds that are ever more intertwined. We are going through a time of significant world changes, in large part due to the availability of vast amounts of information and creating new stories about how we see our world. So can we fix this?
Humans are incredibly adaptive animals. It’s one of the main reasons that we’ve thrived as a species. To adapt, we will use what we have always used to survive. Culture. As we go through sociocultural shifts, which can be rough and some can be unexpected (like a loneliness epidemic), we figure out ways to deal with social issues.
Amber Case has evolved her original thinking and sees this three-world problem, though not exactly described as this. She created the Calm Tech Institute. Perhaps the first organisation to see the complexity of where we are.
In the meantime, find ways to take back your time, to give yourself time and space, to think. You might be amazed at how little you need to get reoriented. The Three World Problem is part of the dynamic of living in a world where we’ve collapsed time and space in an information sphere.