What Do We Do With Technology?
We can’t imagine our lives without technology. Of course, you know that, but can’t we, really? Would you die going outside without your smartphone, have a sleepless night without another Netflix show, or miss a vital element of your everyday routine not checking notification while reading this piece? Probably, you will. It’s the only explanation of people’s behavior today.
So, will technology ruin our planet or at least civilization? I’m not sure (not mentioning AI here), but maybe it’ll slow down the progress.
But still, we are not animals. And we must have an opportunity to fix our relationship with technology. Why is it so difficult?
I think the main problem is in those who don’t want us to fix it.
I always used to compare technology to cigarettes in terms of addiction, and I’m not planning to refuse using this comparison. Also because it helps to discuss this topic from all sides with some obvious examples.
Philip Morris ≠ Facebook?
Are there still people who believe that smoking doesn’t kill? Of course, not. But there are still around a billion smokers all over the world. And it’s been almost 100 years since people knew that smoking is dangerous. It’s also prohibited for cigarette manufacturers to advertise their products for a long, but is it solving the problem? The global consumption of cigarettes started to decrease just now. And the World Health Organization states that approximately 100 million people died because of smoking. So slow!
So, how can we talk about solving the problem with technology giants if their harm couldn’t even be proved?
I need to stop here and to make a point. I realize that we can’t fully compare technology companies and cigarette manufacturers, because if the former still has some positive sides of their activity, the latter is pure evil, to my mind. But why am I again comparing? I want to talk just about the wrong sides because we all know the advantages of the technology from ads: unbelievable even by the standards of 20 years ago the amount of information, social connections, more ways to express ourselves, etc.
And what are the bad things? It’s the only one — the way technology is constructed. It’s built to gain your attention and to make you addicted.
Maybe you’ve heard the comparison between the social feeds and the slots of the casino. It works that way. Social feeds, algorithms for recommendations, notifications, they all are created to make you feel intrigued. And it’s the intrigue that makes you continue scrolling, to watch one more video, and to react on notification, all the same.
If you are reading about it for the first time, maybe I’m not the best start for this topic. And if you’ve heard about it, then it’s all the more no need to explain. I’m just sure it’s a problem, and I want to solve it.
It’s somewhere in the middle
My main concern is in another field. I think about how we are going to deal with it. It’ll be more convenient to explain in my example.
I’ve got a PC when I was nine years old. The internet appeared in our house when I was around 13. Finally, my parents bought me a first really good smartphone when I was 15. Though it’s early, comparing to my parents and their generation, it wasn’t so soon comparing to my mates.
But still, these things weren’t just toys for me. Unfortunately, I didn’t deepen in programming and that kind of stuff, but my skills were much higher than most of my mates. I even tried to create sites with my friend, but it failed. I played games. I read a lot of news and articles, watched videos and movies. I stopped watching TV when I was around 16 because I knew that everything I need was on a laptop or even on a smartphone.
Different aspects of technology took a lot of my time.
Then was the period of my life with a lot of self-development thoughts and books. Mostly there were books written by European or American authors, who had already faced this technology addiction problem. However, I think quite a few people even thought about it as a problem in my country. But I was opened to new ideas, and I got some doubts about technology also.
I won’t tell what was in the middle, but now I’m very biased toward the technology, despite the fact I’m using my laptop a lot. I don’t have social network accounts, I refused reading RSS, and I have some tools that help me to manage with addictive, in my case, things (like gaming media or sites about books). And somewhere deep in me, I understand that it’s not the right decision because I’m losing a lot of opportunities.
My girlfriend, who still uses Facebook and Instagram, frequently tells me about different events, job offers and other kinds of things, that, I believe, would be difficult to find somewhere else.
And here’s the concern. On one side of this conflict, some people use technology, mostly social media, a lot. It’s YouTube, social networks, news apps, and others. But when the person starts to think about this as a problem, as I did, there’s a chance that this person would decide to reject using technology. So, we have two maxims: technology in all spheres of our live and modern version of Ludditism. And both of them are not right.
What can we do about it?
In the last versions of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, some new tools appeared, which are called Digital Wellbeing. Their main goal is to help users to control their usage of gadgets. Isn’t it a paradox? Both Google and Apple are making money on making people using their products as much time as they can force them, and suddenly, they started caring about wellbeing?
To my mind, it’s just a reputation thing. They’ve added these tools only to show that they are aware of the problem. Programs with the same functionality were in the App Store and the Google Play for years, and nothing has changed. Google and Apple see that it does not affect, so they can’t harm themselves. Consequently, I don’t think it can be an option for solving. And we also can’t lean on those companies. Creating addiction is rooted in their philosophy.
I don’t think there are real solutions, for now, at least for the time it’ll become the global problem. The only outcome I see is a probability of not existing those giants like Google or Facebook. If we have a decentralized network without some big companies that can have a considerable impact, the internet has a chance to stay useful.
But if the leading platforms are those things that were created to steal our time, this field of technology is lost.
And I also don’t believe in the possibility of existing with these services. For example, imagine that you are trying to continue smoking (for any reason) not being addicted to it. It’s impossible because mostly nicotine and other things make your body and your brain to want it. The same is with technology.
I want technology and the internet to be a part of our lives. I believe that they are one of the most significant innovations of our time, but now the internet is mostly owned by wealthy companies who want to make more money with it. You can still be a part of the internet, ignoring some of its elements, but it’s inconvenient.
We don’t need maxims to deal with the problem, because the solution is somewhere in the middle.
