A Life Less Lonely by Nick Duerden

Author:Nick Duerden
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472957795
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Eight

Technical support

When looking for scapegoats, for potential reasons why we are all feeling increasingly separated from one another, more and more of us point towards technology as the overriding reason. If we weren’t all so focused upon our phones all the time, we might still be focused upon those around us. In the American psychology writer Jean M. Twenge’s 2017 book, iGen, which laboured under the unwieldy subheading: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – And Completely Unprepared for Adulthood – and What That Means for the Rest of Us,9 she suggests that so-called ‘iGen’ teens – those born in 1995 or later, who grew up with mobile phones, had Instagram pages before they started high school, and do not remember a time before the internet – spend less time at parties than any previous generation.

Asking why parties, once the defining event for teenagers everywhere, have become less popular, one iGenner tells her: ‘Now we have Netflix – you can watch series non-stop. [Also] there’s so many things to do on the web.’

Television appeals more than real life does. For those who do still want to socialise, they do so via Snapchat, connected but alone, each adrift in their rooms, nestled into their childhood duvets, the lights on low; the very picture of a very twenty-first-century kind of hermit.

Technology undeniably robs us of human contact, but the truth is that tech is only as culpable as the people who drive it. Much of today’s technology is focused around keeping us all connected, all of the time. If, subsequently, we still fail to make those connections we foster online into real-life relationships, who, ultimately, is to blame? Did the telephone, when it became so intrinsic a part of everybody’s lives during the twentieth century, receive quite as much flak as its smartphone counterpart does today?

Technology, argues Karen Dolva, a woman who works in the tech sector but does so with the explicit aim of improving lives and our sense of connectedness, is simply what we make it to be. A 28-year-old Norwegian who created a start-up to help those who are socially isolated to reconnect with the wider world around them, she believes that the way we have been using so much of modern technology is, simply, wrong. We need to realign.

‘Until now, we’ve been focused on improving our efficiency and making us faster and faster, while our conversations are supposed to be shortened down instead of being prolonged,’ Dolva says.

I think that is the completely wrong way of looking at it. But this isn’t technology’s fault; it’s the people who are making the technology, and the way we are then using it. As long as we remember that we are still in control of it, then why shouldn’t it help make all areas of our life easier for everyone, to help people go to places that they can’t, or to be with their families more?

Her tech company, No Isolation, was founded in Norway in October 2015 with just a single purpose in mind: to reduce involuntary social isolation.

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