Technology is receiving quite a bad rap lately. It’s easy to blame it since it cannot defend itself. I think we have a tendency to do that; blame the defenseless. It’s especially funny that we’ve created these incredible tools yet we’ve demonized so many of them.  A true Frankenstein story. We often create these things then judge them as monsters, as evil, as the problem laying waste to us. We rarely ever have the intention of designing a monster. I’d say we are the creatures, why else are we so inclined to find one? We are the monsters, unintended byproducts of instant gratification and addictive behavior, and symptoms of internal evils that we often fail to face. We look for external causes for what is going on internally because it is so much easier to face the tangible than the intangible because we can point to it and say “there it is!” We long for an evil to exist outside of us or a villain that explains our suffering, but sometimes we don’t need to look past ourselves.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine who had just returned from a backpacking trip where he’d had no service. He told me of his many revelations in the wilderness and the clarity he experienced but then described how he felt when he finally checked his phone. No messages, no snaps; heartbreaking. He’d hoped for anything from his friends that indicated they were thinking of him. I think he had another revelation as he described this experience because he found the situation humorous after saying it out loud. Like amnesia settled in and he forgot the clarity of the wilderness, then he forgot the amnesia. Initially, he felt abandoned without notifications as if no one cared about him. I asked him if he thinks that’s true, “do your friends not care about you?” He knew it wasn’t true. His mistake was confusing his connections; a mistake I think most of us make in this Age of Communication. Meaning, the technology should be the tool that we use to increase our connection with others. Instead, we’ve made the people into tools that help us connect to our devices. Stay with me because this next part bites. Driven by our want for belonging, we’ve built relationships with our creations that were intended to cultivate stronger relationships with the people who use them. We are no longer humans. We are tools; tools using each other to connect with the technology we’ve created and we seem deeply confused about our relationships with each other.

Another friend of mine requested that I cover how we essentially post our highlights to social media then compare our real lives to others’ highlights as we grow subconsciously envious and distant from others. I feel as though that subject gets enough coverage, so I’d like to drive home another point. We’ve grown up in an Age of Information and Communication, but without the guidance of a previous generation that has navigated this new landscape of mass communication, we have maladapted to this era. We are the first to be able to communicate across cultures with incredible ease and yet we feel more and more divided in our own homes. This is the Age of Misinformation and Miscommunication. What are we actually saying with the highlights of our lives? That “this is where we belong,” but it is seemingly driven by a sense of unbelonging. So instead of feeling as though we truly belong, we provide an appearance of belonging.

I sense a reform in social media, though. More influencers are stepping up and exhibiting raw and vulnerable material, and encouraging the use of technology to actually help their followers instead of contributing to the oversaturated content streams of eye-candy and comedic relief. There is nothing wrong with the occasional indulgence in either, but I think we have used technology as an escape for long enough.