The Nature of Our Digital Lives
I found a long piece on The New Atlantis about the societal effects of our increasingly digitally mediated relationship with the world.
Full Disclosure: I am fully immersed in the online world. I write online, voraciously consume blog posts, regularly check up on distant/unavailable friends via Facebook, and keep in contact with my family via message threads.
In my working life, enrollment of clients for health care is largely accomplished via online sites, most clients prefer either emailed or texted document access, and - during the Covid shutdowns - I even kept in contact and did presentations via Zoom.
My family shares projects - party planning, ancestry research, and photo/video sharing - online. For us, the ability to retain contact with far-flung friends and relatives has been a boon.
And, yet, that ability to have SOME contact, but bypass the actual physical presence of others, is not without a cost. We are a society that has become even more anxious about loneliness, isolation, and inability to connect digitally (there are even programs to rescue people from that disconnectedness).
The limitations of technology to bridge the gap between people, absent physical presence are obvious. Many students, during the Covid shutdowns and with no way to attend school without access, suffered learning loss - not just failure to gain a year’s learning, but actual LOSS of previous learning. Some lost up to 2 years academic growth.
That academic loss probably cannot be recovered. Schools are notoriously bad at helping students who are behind their class to ‘catch up’.
Part of that was inability to benefit from online opportunities. The reasons varied:
Lack of equipment, old equipment that wasn’t up to the challenge of handling the software, and slow/nonexistent internet connection.
Lack of parental supervision - when parents needed to work, they often had to turn to family members to assist. While they may have been wonderful at child care, few were up to the task of spending long hours monitoring students’ classwork. If several in the family were also trying to access their classes, it might be near impossible for them to do.
Libraries, a common backup for access to the online world, were generally closed during Covid.
Many teachers, with little experience with the software and hardware demands, found themselves being shut down, incapable of interacting with students, or just resorting to lectures, one of the more ineffective means of teaching. The task of switching to online teaching required a high degree of expertise, something that many teachers felt they were too old to pick up.
Local internet companies, already struggling with keeping up with demand before Covid, had slowdowns, outages, and interruptions of service.
Other writers have spoken of the limitations of technology - for example, Richard Louv talks of Nature Deficit Disorder, the situation where a child, given the opportunity to be outside with the natural world, chooses to remain inside with their technology. This is no longer an uncommon situation. Many minors resist leaving their tech behind, and focusing on the physical world around them.
Most children in previous generations spent large quantities of their free time outside - playing disorganized sports, riding bicycles, hanging out in the fresh air, fishing, playing in the snow - the activities that were common were endless. Heck, just lying in the grass and watching the clouds was not unusual.
Adults got a fair amount of time outdoors - gardening (both food and flowers), hanging up laundered clothing, walking everywhere - again, this was not uncommon.
What is unnatural is the movement from air-conditioned house to air-conditioned car to air-conditioned school or business. It’s moving around within a bubble, with little ability or inclination to touch the living Earth.
Now, I do understand why Southerners just don’t want to MOVE in July and August - it’s freakin’ HOT!
Same with January and February most years in the North. My dog doesn’t even like to leave the house long enough to do his business in the yard when it’s snowing or raining hard.
But, sunny days? Fall evenings spent outside, just sitting and relaxing? No news, no TV, no radio.
And, definitely, no technology.
Just soaking up the fresh air.
For most people, a rare event.
Maybe it ought not to be. I’m going to actually schedule some time each week for myself to make that time.