IDENTITY
Losing touch?
The influence of mobile phones and other devices continues to be a subject of intense debate, not least at Dulwich. But with ever-more immersive apps and games and advances in technology offering augmented and virtual realities, might our identities be reshaped in more profound ways than we currently imagine? Aidan Williams (Year 13) and Louie Murphy (Year 13) ask if we are on the brink of a reality crisis
Y oung people are the future. We are responsible for shaping the economic, political and social climate of the next century. But with skyrocketing house prices, the gargantuan looming threat of global warming and the elephant in the Oval Office, things aren’t looking too good for millennials and our younger siblings. Surely, then, it’s easier to run away – to bury our heads in the proverbial sand? That’s exactly what we’ve been doing. Psychologist Sally Andrews and her team found in a survey in 2015 that the average young adult spends more than five hours a day on their phone – roughly one third of our waking hours. Andrews concluded that, ‘A lot of smartphone use seems to be habitual, automatic behaviours that we have no awareness of’. Indeed, social-media companies use ingeniously simple techniques like the
‘endless scroll’ and the ‘notification’ to gain and retain our attention without us being cognitively aware of it. And we’re more than happy to trade the doom and gloom of the real world for bite- sized info-nuggets of entertainment news and Twitter-based controversy. But we’re also content to replace real life conversations with phone calls, texts and emojis. Does this mean we’re less able to face the real world? In some ways, yes. In fact, when on our phones, we can become completely unaware of the real world. In San Francisco in September 2013, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, a man shot and killed another man on a busy commuter train. The CCTV footage proves, however, that seconds prior to the shooting the man pulled out a .45 calibre pistol and held it quite conspicuously, yet nobody noticed.
Without exception, all other commuters on the train were looking at their phones and because their attention was elsewhere, not one person noticed a man literally waving a gun around. It therefore seems logically sound to assume that, if such extreme circumstances can go unnoticed by the general public, our most basic social interactions will be, and already are being, negatively affected by both our distracting handheld devices and other, more reality-altering technologies that we see in development today. The novelist Jonathan Safran Foer presented a controversial opinion on the issue in The Guardian : ‘These inventions [the telephone, the answering machine, online communication, texting] were not created to be improvements on face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished, substitutes for it. But
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