Can Technology Cure Our Loneliness? A Buddhist View

Several weeks ago I attended an event billed as a “block party.” Part of the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) conference, it was themed “The Machine Wilderness.” “Re-envisioning art, technology, and nature” is just my thing, so I entered the stretch of cordoned-off street ready to engage with like-minded people and hopefully make a few new connections. Indeed, lots of art and some interesting installations sat on display, along with people evoking discordant sounds from odd instrument hybrids that made me long for John Cage’s composition 4’33”. As I walked around, feeling open to conversation, no one spoke to me or even met my eye. The crowd felt like monads drifting in space. Eerie. Just about everyone held a camera or smart phone, and most were so hellbent on documenting the event that they barely even participated in it.

Machine Wilderness robo-birds. They paid more attention to me than anyone else...

You could almost hear them plotting their Facebook or blog entry about all the whiz-bang art they were cool enough to be seeing. And despite our physical proximity, no one was present. Perhaps presence wasn’t the point. Perhaps the point was to be seen as someone who attends an ISEA conference. This wasn’t a block party, it was a blocked party. 

And thus we return to one of the core questions of the day: are our online lives bringing us closer or making us feel more isolated? Last summer Stephen Marche wrote an Atlantic magazine cover story, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?,” in which he made a number of trenchant observations about the effects of social media on our lives and psychological well-being.

But the most fascinating insights I’ve found have come from researcher Sherry Turkle, founder of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, who’s authored a trio of books about human relationships with digital technology (Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, and Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet). In her books and TED talks, Turkle asks some critically important questions about how we are employing our devices to mediate--and avoid--our immediate reality. E.g., how are we increasingly using technology to avoid being present with ourselves and our oft-messy emotions?

Sherry Turkle, talkin' TED

Turkle, a clinical psychologist, argues that some of the loneliness people are feeling actually derives from a lack of practice at being spending time with ourselves. While we sometimes use technology as a defense mechanism, to shield us from our vulnerability and fear of intimacy, it can backfire. She asserts that we need to develop a solid foundation in self-intimacy before we can give ourselves to others in healthy ways. Thus, texting or using social media doesn’t allow us to acquire the skills we need to stand on our own two feet. Using others to prop up a fragile sense of self becomes a seductive loop we enter instead of burrowing inward to discover our own truths.

The thing is that many people fear solitude, even for a few minutes. As Turkle notes, “Being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved.” This is where technology provides a convenient babysitting service. It’s a whole lot easier to relieve our distress by jumping online and distracting ourselves than it is to do the hard work of sitting silently with our angst and getting to the root of it. This is where meditators have a big advantage. Our ability to walk unflinchingly through the corridors of our own minds makes us less afraid. We know what’s there. We understand that mind states come and go like clouds. Our minds are not phantoms in the attic, but old friends we know well. Emotions are not to be feared, but understood.

Turkle speaks in purely secular terms, but from a Buddhist perspective, the question becomes more about presence and attention. Turkle refers to people’s feeling entitled to choose where they put their attention. Thus, they feel perfectly warranted in using their phone in every situation--even during a funeral. Despite being deeply disrespectful to everyone around them (and bifurcating their own emotional process), using a device enables them to pay attention to whatever they deem most interesting. The spiritual problem here is that our human experience is not meant to be cherry-picked. In this bardo of waking life, all kinds of phenomena come our way, many of them not so pleasant. A Buddhist might argue that the reason we chose to incarnate was to experience all of life’s flavors, so that we could one day benefit others with our experience and compassion, as a Bodhisattva. When we shut off that experience by using a personal device as a bullet-proof vest, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to be fully alive.

 I can still remember one of the most checked-out sights I’ve ever seen. It was the spring of 1999, and my girlfriend and I were on vacation, enjoying brunch at a tony LA restaurant. Glancing over to the next table, I saw 6 well-dressed women gathered together, ostensibly preparing to share a meal. Within a few minutes of being seated, every woman had whipped out her cell phone and was chattering away with someone not in the room. At the time, most people in our home town did not own cell phones, and I looked at these women as if they were utterly crazy. Why would you want to call someone else when you had 5 friends and a fancy meal right in front of you? Today I still can’t answer that question. And yes, despite the ubiquity of digital devices, it still seems more than a little crazy.

 I also can’t get used to modern family life, which may include parents emailing and texting during family meals or a child’s baseball or recital, while their kids mimic them by walling themselves off with their own devices. What Turkle dubs “alone together” behavior cheats us out of the preciousness of family time and all that is learned in its conversations and shared experience. And while these can be painful at times, isn’t enduring challenging situations part of our growth as human beings? If we constantly outsource such pain to an electronic device, not allowing ourselves to develop muscles essential to being human, aren’t we missing one of the key points of being alive?

 All of this shutting out places us in a precarious position: we’re both lonely and frightened to death of intimacy. We want to have in-person conversations, but if they veer off in unpredictable directions, we can’t control our reactions as we can when using email or text. Kids are especially unnerved about this prospect. And thus, fear makes us settle. We settle for relating with avatars in cyberspace. We settle for engaging with everyone else’s highly mediated selves, while we struggle to mediate our own on a daily (or hourly) basis, much more so than we were ever asked to do in the past. And so we become holograms at play with other holograms, preening our pixels and wondering why we feel empty and alone, malnourished at our emotional and spiritual core.

A digital pool for Narcissus. ISEA Conference.

This quandary also involves the notions of acceptance and equanimity. Are we truly able to accept our lives, who we are and where we are? Or must we be constantly escaping, attempting to manufacture fictions that trick us into believing things are something other than they really are. Social media is Narcissus’ largest pool, allowing us to present to millions the self as we want it to be and imbue ourselves with characteristics we may lack. Never mind that Narcissus’ name means “sleep” or “numbness.” I recently heard about an app that will take an average woman’s photo and turn it into someone with a tiny waist and huge breasts, specifically to impress friends on Facebook.

We also seem to have lost the sense of what it means to be present in our own lives. In a recent NPR story about Facebook's mobile app, emarketer.com analyst Debra Williamson spoke about how she checks Facebook when standing on line. "That's my own personal time to get caught up in the world around me," she noted. Really? Has Facebook become "the world" we need to be present with? What would happen if she simply stood on line and took in the human life that is quite literally surrounding her?

With popular sites like Second Life, we can even create entirely new identities and existences for ourselves and dwell in them as many hours of the day as we’d like. Before the Internet, such behavior would have been equated with addiction, nodding off into a land of illusion. Today it’s been awarded a certain legitimacy for being online. Sure, escapism has its place, as a way to relax and unwind. But if we’re on a path of conscious living, a little goes a long way. Some would say that this falls under the advice of the fifth precept: avoid intoxicants that cloud the mind.

As the Buddha taught, life is inherently uncomfortable. We may try to deny or outrun dukkha, but eventually it catches up with us. While we relish the fantasy of the loner who needs no one, the eternal bachelor who never experiences the pain of a breakup, the addict who avoids her pain courtesy of work or meth, these strategies ultimately fail. As animals, we all need each other. As humans, we all experience suffering. Erecting a technological smokescreen may seem like a clever fix, but what happens when hiding behind it no longer works?

Digital technology is perhaps a more seductive medium than we’ve ever experienced. It’s revolutionized our world in a way that makes some of us want to jack in constantly and others want to become Luddites. But Buddhism being about the middle path, how do we use it to benefit us judiciously? Because digital technology is still in its infancy, we are still learning how to synch our cyberlives with 3-D reality. But, as with any other medium, we need to approach it with consciousness and balance. Spending all of one’s time in front of a screen simply isn’t healthy. We need to put ourselves in the company of real people so we remember how to relate with them.

For those who spend copious time before a screen, it’s also important to simply recognize when you’re in nonvirtual space and acknowledge fellow humans in human ways. To be aware that, despite our virtual walls, many people these days are lonely and would welcome even brief connection. Families need to find a way to share cell-free time with each other every day. And of course it’s important to respect our neighbors who are trying to be present with the experience they’re having and don’t wish to be distracted by the noise and light devices create. Funerals and wedding ceremonies are sacred space; you gain a whole lot more from simply witnessing and feeling them than a circuit board could ever provide.

Links
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/308930/ http://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together.html http://alonetogetherbook.com/ http://www.npr.org/2012/10/18/163098594/in-constant-digital-contact-we-feel-alone-together