by Shawn Harris
My high school’s technology purge began suddenly. On an otherwise ordinary morning in 2019, specially appointed staff members went rummaging through our dorm rooms, looking for phones and other Internet-capable devices. At the same time, ‘social media spies’ created fake accounts and scoured Instagram for students from our high school. During an emergency assembly held immediately thereafter, the dean of the school issued a grave warning: anyone caught with either a device or a social media account could expect punishment ranging from suspension to expulsion. My high school was not located in an autocratic dictatorship; we were in the heart of Queen’s vibrant Flushing neighborhood. But my school, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish yeshiva, adhered to the guidance of the spiritual leaders of the ultra-Orthodox community, who, in the midst of fighting a decades-long battle against communication technology in all its forms, proposed banning smartphones from ultra-Orthodox spaces.
The rationale for such a ban, as expressed by leading rabbis in the community and echoed in my dean’s speech, was twofold: first, access to the Internet entails access to pornography and content that could be described as “blasphemous.” Second, the use of technology “degrades the human image.” Examples of blasphemous or degrading behavior include the desire to ignore the person in front of us in favor of constantly checking our phones for updates, or the breakdown of civil discourse in favor of online rancor. To the mind of many authorities within ultra-Orthodoxy, these issues are serious enough that they warrant the total denunciation of technology. While draconian purges and penalties are a somewhat heavy-handed way of tackling the harms caused by our media culture, I’m unable to dismiss the concerns of my childhood rabbis as fanaticism. The questions they raised that morning have occupied my mind ever since. Does digital media erase some aspect of our ‘humanity’? By reaping the benefits of digital convenience, are we giving up something essential to human nature? And if so, what could it be?
Stephen Marche’s 2012 essay in The Atlantic, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” centers around these questions. Marche considers this problem through the lens of Facebook, the then-ubiquitous social network that had over 845 million users and had become the first website to receive more than a trillion page views in a month, which he argues laid the groundwork for the social media we know today. Facebook, Marche claims, is not a convenient and innocuous way to connect with friends but a force that threatens to redefine who we are and how we perceive ourselves—and not for the better. He explains that from “before we even pour a cup of coffee” until we go to sleep, Facebook encourages a constant process of image curation and “happiness” seeking (Marche 69). This consistent performance of happiness is destructive. Citing a University of Denver study which correlated the high valuing of happiness with general life dissatisfaction, Marche argues that “the more you try to be happy, the less happy you are” (68–69). In addition, Marche warns that social media usage stunts our introspection, thereby diminishing self-knowledge and self-fulfillment. Solitude is a vital part of the human experience, traditionally understood to stimulate “self-reflection and self-reinvention,” but “by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, [Facebook] threatens to alter the very nature of solitude” (Marche 69). Social media changes the purpose of solitude, from a means of self-reflection to an engine of self-presentation (March 69). Self-reflection is pushed further away by the easy perusal of others’ digital identities, and we fill our alone time with the curated identities of ourselves and others.
While Marche argues that social media impedes our ability to achieve meaningful self-knowledge, essayist Jonathan Safran Foer, in his 2013 New York Times article “How Not to Be Alone,” suggests a broader criticism of digital technology’s impact on our interpersonal relationships. To Foer, the convenience provided by technology’s speed has stunted our ability to feel complex emotions. “Our personhood,” he claims, “is carved . . . by the flow of our habits” (Foer). Put another way, our actions define the nature of our being. By emphasizing fast and impersonal communication, we become beings who are fast and impersonal. Whereas Marche’s focus is primarily inward, on what participation in social media does to one’s self-actualization, Foer turns his view outward, claiming that increased engagement with our devices leads us to apathy and distraction, turning us into people who are “more likely to forget others.”
This link between online connection and in-person apathy can be seen as inherent to communication technology’s very nature. Foer finds that most modern communication methods were developed as “diminished substitutes for an impossible activity” (Foer). When we are unable to talk to someone in person, like a friend across the country, we might call them via telephone, and when we are unable to reach them, we might leave them a message or a text and so on. But Foer worries that we’ve come to prefer these ‘diminished’ forms of communication, even when we have more ‘human’ options. As our channels of communication become more narrow and emotionally empty, our identities will follow this model. As we become accustomed to “saying little,” we “become used to feeling little” (Foer). This preference for diminished substitutes, where something of quality is willfully exchanged for something lesser, echoes the Denver study in which people end up less happy the more they value happiness, a trend that Marche argues is deepened when happiness is perceived and presented on social media.
While Marche’s focus is on self-perception, he does consider its diminishment in light of relationships with others: the increase in narcissism and loneliness that he observes represents “a fighting retreat from the messy reality of other people” (69). When our sense of self is unhealthy and insecure, we recoil from exposure to the real presence of others. Furthering this thought, Foer invokes philosopher Simone Weil, who claims that “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” (qtd. in Foer). As we’ve lost capacity for attentiveness, our generosity has also weakened, and we’ve become “miserly” in our attention and care for other people (Foer).
This loss brings to mind the Talmudic teaching, often quoted by my rabbis, that one who supports a poor man financially is rewarded with six blessings, but one who verbally comforts him receives eleven. Giving an ear to a poor man’s troubles is considered (nearly) twice as generous as giving him money. I can’t help but wonder: if technology encourages us to avert our gaze, to bury ourselves in our “favorite iDistraction” (Foer) so as to avoid engaging with another person, how many blessings are we missing out on? Is this the degradation of the ‘human image’ that my rabbis warned against?
But even as both Marche and Foer sharply criticize digital technology’s erosion of empathy and self-knowledge, neither proposes the kind of technological asceticism that my high school put into action. On the contrary, both authors take pains to distance themselves from the anti-technology movement: “Being ‘anti-technology’ is perhaps the only thing more foolish than being unquestioningly ‘pro-technology’,” Foer asserts. Likewise, Marche writes that nostalgia for a pre-social media era is “pointless . . . . hypocritical and ungrateful” (69). Presumably, for Marche, this hypocrisy and ungratefulness stems from the major conveniences and benefits that technology affords modern society. How can we turn our backs on the advancements that have led to such improvements in quality of life? Foer acknowledges the utility of diminished substitutes even while decrying our preference for them. And in the midst of making his case that Facebook creates loneliness and narcissism, Marche quotes John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago, who asserts that “‘Facebook can be terrific, if we use it properly’” (qtd. in Marche 68). Marche and Foer maintain a nuanced view of technology, recognizing its potential to provide both societal improvement and social implosion.
Where, then, does that leave us? Faced with the realization that constantly checking our messages might reflect a defect in basic parts of our humanity, and that our stylized online personas are slowly replacing our real personalities, we might feel compelled to do something (anything) to avert disaster. We might feel driven to enact some sort of purge or ban, or to mount a frenzied resistance to this reshaping of our very selves. But technology proves tenacious, with its conveniences and benefits lending it strength to withstand such efforts. What remains after we cut past the ban-the-phones hysteria is a stark realization, one that Marche and Foer point toward but do not say explicitly: living today requires that we carry the tools of our destruction with us in our pockets. While that realization is uncomfortable, inconvenient, and downright scary, we owe it to ourselves to dwell on it, to come to terms with the effects our media culture has on our shared experience. If we comprehend the extent to which we’ve become stingy, unwilling to bestow our attention, unable to confront the humanity of even our friends, then we have a hope of rebuilding what we’ve lost. If, however, we cannot stand to face ourselves even to see how diminished we’ve become, we risk being degraded beyond recognition.
Works Cited
Foer, Jonathan Safran. “How Not to Be Alone.” The New York Times, June 8, 2013. www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/opinion/sunday/how-not-to-be-alone.html.
Marche, Stephen. “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” The Atlantic, May 2012, pp. 60-69.