This week during class, someone up the fact that we, as a society, treat our technology like it is an extension of ourselves; we take really good care of it and becoming extremely distraught when one of our devices quits working. Initially, when we were discussing this, it didn’t really strike me as all that profound- we use our phones and laptops for almost everything we do, it’s inevitable with the technological advances we’ve made. But, while I was on my way home, I had a realization; what if the reason we mourn the loss of our technology because of the bond we made, not with the physical device itself, but with the bonds we are able to create and hold onto because of the technology we use.
The relationships we foster in real life (we all made connections with a person at one point in our lives) are much easier to maintain with the technology available to us today. When we used to write letters and make phone calls, we are now able to Snap, text, or Facebook message our friends around the world. Our friends are at our fingertips when they’re thousands of miles away or just down the block and we don’t want to put real pants on.
Not only are we able to maintain friendships, we are able to make new connections via online networks and game chatrooms. We create connections with someone we’re playing Fortnite with or someone who reblogs us on Tumblr. With the easy ways to connect to these communities- almost everyone has a computer, a smartphone, and some gaming device- our virtual friends become our dominant source of leisure time (thank you Morgan Stanley). We’ll spend 45 minutes scrolling through the interwebs to find a GIF we were telling our friend about so we can send it to said friend and continue to talk about that GIF. We use our phones to order food through an app and then add a picture of our meal to Snapchat so all our friends can see what we’re consuming. Even when the class got together to play Journey together, we gathered around a device and played in a virtual world.
So, when we our phones inevitably break, we mourn the device. I don’t think we’re mourning our the physical device. The device is just a conduit for the relationships we foster, and although we feel a sense of loss when our phone breaks and we have to wait three days until we can get it replaced, I believe that we are missing the ability to connect; we’ve become addicted to the ease and accessibility of our friends list. Although our dependency on technology wasn’t the forefront of our discussion this week, it definitely stuck with me.
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