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

"Our computers will now determine your liveness quotient. Please hold..."

If you’ve ever suspected that the line between screens and reality has increasingly been blurred, check out the following blog entry, which ran on Huffington Post on 2/4. Written by a Yale graduate student, this piece was posted not as satire but as an earnest guide to differentiating “real life” from virtual contacts with others. I confess that while surfing half-asleep at midnight last night, this completely stopped me in my tracks, as I hadn’t realized that we’d progressed to the point at which college students needed assistance in determining what was “real” and what wasn’t.

The post is also an interesting foray into helping young people assess which sort of virtual contact it is “polite” to acknowledge first, giving it an oddly retro, Emily Post twist. In my late 40s, I am part of the generation that straddles the analog and digital worlds. My generation didn’t begin to interact with computers (or even VCRs) until after college, so have lived approximately half our lives not having to do the apparently arduous work of distinguishing “real” from “virtual.” While some of our peers were clearly more interesting or articulate or better looking, the assessment of “liveness” never entered the picture. Except after, maybe, 17 drinks. We would not, for example, need a Yale grad student to tell us, “The more ‘live’ a person is in relation to you, the more attention they deserve, and the more promptly you should reply to their message.” As Gordon puts it, “Liveness was just life.” It makes me laugh that this truth is apparently no longer self-evident. Laugh, and maybe shudder a bit—or a lot. What tutorials will Yale students be posting 20 years from now?

Gordon proceeds to pitch the virtues of traditional conversation. Because young people tend to communicate via text at this point, perhaps this is a necessary reminder that vocal chords can and do work and utterances issuing forth from them can actually create interesting sounds and verbiage. As Thomas Dolby observed back in the 1980s, "The moment there was any kind of audio attached to virtual reality, it really improved the experience, even though the audio didn't feel like a sound engineer or composer had been anywhere near it."

I don’t know. I find this whole thing capital-S Scary. See what you think.

A Conversation with Your Cellphone

By Claire Gordon

My digital media use can sometimes graze the edge of social acceptability. I might reply to a text during dinner or download music while a friend monologues. Yet there are some transgressions that make my insides seethe -- a friend interrupting our conversation to tweet that hilarious thing she just said, or sitting silently with someone involved in an endless, banal BBM chat, when they could be sending endless, banal messages to my in-flesh face.

Some of these things are obviously rude. If you're irritating the person you're with, you have probably tripped up in the Kabuki of modern etiquette. But as digital and analogue life become evermore integrated, the protocols get blurry.

Why is not replying to a text less rude than taking a moment out of a conversation? Why is leaving someone lingering on Skype more or less rude than answering a phone call?

A simple answer is that one interaction is more "real" than the other, and the breathing organism should always take precedence over the bits and bytes. But the "real" and "virtual" divide is tricky. Firstly, we may all live in the Matrix, and everything both real and virtual is just the doodling of a malevolent cyber-intelligence. Secondly, the "virtual," in these cases, are also real people in real places with real thoughts and feelings. In some instances, like with Skype and the phone call, our competing interactions are both "virtual" in the sense of no one being physically present.

"Liveness" is perhaps a better barometer. The more "live" a person is in relation to you, the more attention they deserve, and the more promptly you should reply to their message.

If the message is an e-mail, give yourself a day. If the message is "what's up?" and he or she is sitting in front of you, give yourself two seconds.

But "liveness" is also a slippery creature. As a concept, it only sprang into existence with the birth of mediating technologies. Before that, "liveness" was just life. It wasn't even the invention of sound recording that spurred the human mind to construct the categories of "live" and "mediated." The difference was obvious: one was life, and one was a 78 rpm shellac disc revolving on your gramophone.

It was the birth of broadcasting that fundamentally jumbled the distinction, with no way to know whether those EM waves radiating from your receiver originated at a plucked string, or a plucked string in a recording studio that was now a disc spinning on the station's turntable. It was in the desperation to make sense of this difference that "liveness" was finally born.

Coined by the BBC in 1934, "liveness" became a nifty discursive distinction when an ontological one didn't really exist. As Von Phillip Auslander writes in "Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture," "liveness" never really referred to co-presence in space and time. The word instead evolved with emerging technologies, so that today phrases like "live broadcast" and "recording live" are meaningful and not paradoxical jibberish.

"Liveness" is experienced more as a feeling or an affect than an objective reality. But with such a flimsy definition, who's to say Gchat is more or less "live" than the guy sitting next to me on the subway?

Skype, for example, is very "live" for my mother. Too "live," in fact. But Facebook? She could go for weeks without checking. This is not a "live" experience for her; it's about occasionally dropping by, getting overwhelmed, signing off, and sending me an e-mail a few days later criticizing one of my photos.

"Liveness" is a very subjective thing.

Mushon Zer-Aviv, the designer and media activist, has invented a far more concrete framework by which to judge our social existence: content vs. conversation.

To define content, he uses metrics devised by Danah Boyd: persistence, replicability, searchability and invisible audiences.

When you tweet something, that tweet lasts forever (persistence); it can be easily retweeted, tweaked and retweeted, or slapped on a t-shirt (replicability); it can be found with some speedy Googling, and if deleted, scooped up from the darkweb (searchability); and no matter who you think your followers are, that tweet may eventually end up on the interface of an employer, creepy dude, or your born/unborn children (invisible audiences). If your communication fulfills some of these criteria, it's probably content.

Conversation, on the other hand, is ephemeral, unreplicable, unsearchable, and your audience is known, often right in your field of vision.

Why is conversation better than content? There's a lot of schmaltz I could spread for an answer -- that conversation is more authentic and less performed, more intimate and less displayed, magical in its fleetingness, and more existentially affirming in the ability, on occasion, to actually make eye contact.

It is in the world of conversation that ideas are really exchanged, opinions shaped, and laughing out loud makes a sound. These kinds of conversations may take place in chat rooms or on comment threads, but if nothing else, the existence of a Caps Lock key will forever doom many exchanges to CONTENT!!!!!

As Zer-Aviv rightly points out that in this framework Chatroulette qualifies as conversation and a parade of genitalia probably shouldn't qualify as anything. But there is something in the essence of Chatroulette -- two strangers serendipitously matched for a small spell of time -- that has the glimmery feel of conversation, even if one of those strangers takes off his pants.

Facebook and Foursquare, like video games, may be more instantly gratifying in the way that they dole out hits of rewards. Content can also be creative and socially valuable. But conversation, "real" or "virtual," "live" or "mediated," may be able to offer something even better than the Mayorship of your local discount liquor store.

Son of Apocalypse How?

[N.B., Here is the new version of this piece, which I just sent to Salon.com.]

As we head into the last year of the decade, I’ve been thinking about what they’re going to call our roll into the 21^st century. You know, those who write the history books, the pundits, the same guys who come up with lines like “Tiger is a Cheetah.” What will the era ultimately be named? 

Undoubtedly we dwell in the Information Age, a time of pervasive digitization, and that seems to offer an easy appellation. But maybe it’s more the effect this development has had on our hearts and minds that defines the tenor of the times: our stepping back from human relating and stomping toward our digital devices like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead.

As we seem to become increasingly detached, I wonder about the arc of this ostensible advance. Could it signal the beginning of our impending obviation on Planet E? Is human life meant to off itself not with a grand, Jesus-strewn apocalypse, but, ironically enough, through its very own efforts at “development”?

Some say we are moving toward a time (roughly circa 2050) when human presence on Earth will be edged out, as technology rushes headlong to a point of “Singularity.” Futurist thinker Ray Kurzweil defines this era as a time when technological advances begin to unfold so rapidly that normal humans cannot keep pace and are cut out of the loop. At that point, Strong Artificial Intelligences and cybernetically augmented humans will become the dominant life forms, thus showing human history the door. Perhaps this is the backstory to Cormac McCarthy’s Road.

I can buy that eventually technology may trump biology but find it hard to believe that such a threshold could be crossed within 41 years. Then again, Kurzweil’s predictions have come to pass before, and technology evolves infinitely faster today than could have been fathomed as we flipped through our floppy discs a decade ago.

For many, digital devices and culture now consume a huge hunk of our daily bread. Just 25 years ago, few individuals could boast a computer in their homes, practically no one had cell phones, and a “hi-tech” household sported a cumbersome cable TV box and a 20-pound VCR it took an hour to convince to record one sit-com.

Today it’s a rare person who doesn’t own both computer and cell–frequently both in one–to which they’re often fanatically devoted. Some have designated these times the Attention Age, as we create and consume media and information like water, funneling it along the channels of our social media canals like gondolas through Venice.

This Brave New World seems to be riddled with paradox, however. Walt Whitman once advised, “Only connect.” And people are apparently connecting more often than ever before. With all the cell-phoning and texting and emailing and Smart Phoning, we seem to have sprouted digital umbilical cords with those closest to us. Yet this form of relatedness can feel woefully inadequate. Like fast food, it projects a semblance of nourishment. But can we be said to be deeply communicating via a text message? A tweet? A thumbs-up response to a Facebook post? At the heart of our hyper-presence lies an eerie absence, a self-perpetuating void we try to overcome by slapping our friends’ virtual backs on Facebook and sending quick texts and forwarding emails to let them know we “care.” Yet ultimately, the result can feel like drinking skim milk when we long for a rich, silky cream.

But if we are indeed moving toward absenting Mama Earth of our humanity, perhaps this is how it’s meant to be. Maybe what I might call the “Age of Detached Connection” is a step in the evolutionary progression toward the Global Android Village. Perchance this is a weaning process, and the Internet has become the transitional pacifier before we cut our cyborg milk teeth. And just maybe the Jetsonian children of tomorrow will honestly prefer a Zhu Zhu Pet to a living, breathing hamster, and we who pine for heartbeats and hamsterly élan vital will be considered hopelessly superannuated.

But it’s hard to blame them. Children have lived their whole lives with screens and keys. And with all the simulated connection in cyberspace, it’s easy for any of us to imagine we’ve got it going on. People “meet” without ever laying eyes on each other; they “talk” without ever opening their mouths; they “hang out” without ever hugging or touching or gazing into each other’s eyes. If it weren’t so life-forsaking, it would be pretty damned convenient.

Teenagers seem particularly ripe for this technological plucking. A recent NPR report noted that the number of teens pursuing driver’s licenses has decreased by millions. In the late 70s when I raced to get my license on the morning of my 17^th birthday, it was generally considered a rite of passage, as eagerly awaited as legal drinking age and high school commencement. But many kids now have such well-stocked rooms, loaded with Blu-Ray and DVD players, gaming systems, computers, musical instruments, Wii, cell phones, and iPods, that they feel little compulsion to leave, save for the dreary obligation of school. They can game online with people across the world, so that in-person friendships assume less importance, and friendly relating takes the form of a specific, targeted activity. This is quite different from my memories of getting together with other kids just to “hang around,” an amorphous term that implied a distinct lack of goal orientation. A lot of great creative projects emerged from that free-parking time.

But with its easy-to-navigate alternate reality and predictable set of responses, technology can be an irresistible Siren. Its largess of anonymity offers the opportunity to be more honest in some ways and more deceitful in others. Within its maws, each one of us gets the chance to create an entirely separate identity, an avatar that may bear little resemblance to the one we appear to have in 3-D. Added to these de facto identities are literal avatars populating such metaverses as Second Life (and its corollary, Teen Second Life), the highly nuanced virtual community that offers the options to socialize with other avatars, spend “money,” own “land,” display art, perform live music and theater, practice religion, and even have online sex. As of October 2009, more than 16 million residents had passed through Orientation Island.

Each of us citizens of cyberspace creates his or her own holograms, abstract models of what human connection looks like in screenless reality. And of course, for many, this adaptation to our timidity in social situations is great news. We have successfully engineered a series of high-tech workarounds for human discomfort within the 3-D landscape of flesh, blood, and emotion. But is creating such skewed identities really improving the scenario? The act of holograms’ colliding with holograms still can’t provide the soft nurturance and engagement of the senses that our still-human brains and bodies require to support healthy life.

Is this the time to stop and admonish, to prophesy doomsday if we don’t mend the error of our ways? Or are we bumping up against simply “what is,” based on some foregone conclusion about the fate of human life on Earth? Can individual humans have an impact, opt out of such a strong tidal wave, the Macy’s Day technological marching band? And is such a backlash even desirable, or would it serve as a roadblock in the development of consciousness? What would The Tao say about attempting to push against what feels like a river—though one so desiccated that it may be antithetical to life itself?

Perhaps our very weaknesses as human beings have flung open the door for another “life form” to enter and develop qualities that have eluded us. This calls to mind some of the classic sci-fi android films, such as A.I., Westworld, and Blade Runner, in which the drones can more readily show empathy and compassion than their human counterparts. In the heartbreaking trajectory of A.I., a young droid travels the world for more than 2,000 years, feverishly searching for the love of a mother who abandoned him. In Blade Runner, the cyborgs express the height of compassion by sparing the life of the main character, a human intent on killing them.

Have we come down with the ultimate spiritual ailment? That the human race needs to outsource our love, to create machines capable of its expression because we have so botched the job? If a machine can love better than we can, then really what is left for us to do besides strum a few chords on Guitar Hero and tweet about it? At which point, it might just be time for Armageddon to sling around a few locusts and smite us with ulcers.

###

Apocalypse How?

For the last week, I’ve been mulling what might be an apt name for the last decade, our roll into 21st-century America. What will the era be dubbed in the history books? Over the last 10 years we have become increasingly digitized. So, yeah, patently we dwell in the Information Age. But I’d argue that it’s more the effect this progression has had on our hearts and minds that defines the tenor of the times. A distinct detachment, a stepping back from human relating and a greater affinity toward machine relating. Does this signal the beginning of our impending obviation on Planet E? Perhaps human life is meant to off itself not with a grand, Jesus-strewn apocalypse but, ironically enough, through its very own efforts at “development.”

Some say we are moving toward a time (roughly estimated at 2050) when human presence on the Earth will be edged out, as technology accelerates so rapidly that we will reach a point of “Singularity.” Futurist thinker Ray Kurzweil defines the Singularity as a time when technological advances begin to occur so rapidly that normal humans cannot keep pace, and are “cut out of the loop.” He posits that Strong Artificial Intelligences and cybernetically augmented humans will become the dominant life forms, essentially marking the end of human history as we know it. Perhaps this is the backstory to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

I can buy that ultimately technology may trump biology but find it hard to believe that such a transition would be feasible within 41 years’ time. Then again, Kurzweil’s predictions have come to pass before, and technological development progresses infinitely faster today than could have even been fathomed a decade ago.

For most people, technology now consumes such a huge proportion of our lives. Just 25 years ago, few individuals had a computer in their homes, no one had cell phones, and household “high-tech” translated into a cumbersome cable TV box and a 20-pound VCR it took an hour to convince to record one sit-com.

Today, the techno ante has been upped, and it’s a very rare person that doesn’t own both a computer and cell phone, to which they may quite possibly be slavishly devoted. People create and consume information instantly and freely, and share it on the Web via social media such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and YouTube.

This Brave New World seems to be riddled with paradox, however. People are supposedly connecting more frequently than ever before. And certainly with all the cell-phoning and texting and emailing and Smart Phoning, we seem to have created digital umbilical cords with those closest to us. Yet, anyone who’s ever watched the infant-screams-while-mom-cell-phones phenomenon knows that this form of connection can feel woefully inadequate. Like fast food, it has the semblance of nourishment, but can we be said to be deeply connecting via a text message? A tweet? A thumbs-up response to a Facebook post? Within our hyper-presence there is a certain distinct absence. It’s as if we are trying to make up for the emptiness we feel by slapping our friends’ virtual backs on Facebook and sending quick texts and forwarding emails to let them know we “care,” but the end result feels like drinking skim milk when we long for a rich, silky cream.

But if we are indeed moving toward absenting Mama Earth of our humanity, perhaps this is how it’s meant to be. Perhaps what I would call the “Era of Detached Connection” is a step in the evolutionary progression toward the Global Android Village.

And with all the simulated connection occurring in cyberspace, it’s easy to get fooled. People “meet” without ever laying eyes on each other; they “talk” without ever opening their mouths; they “hang out” without ever hugging or touching or looking into each other’s eyes. Young people now use the term “talk” to mean texting, emailing, IMing, or gaming with—not anything that involves sound utterances. A friend of mine recently complained that she used to at least be able to monitor her kids’ phone conversations, but now with everything done through texting, she has no clue about even the tone of the “conversation.”

Teenagers do seem particularly ripe for this technological plucking. A recent report on NPR noted how the number of teens getting driver’s licenses has decreased by millions. In the era when I first got my license (on the very first day I was eligible), it was generally considered a rite of passage, as eagerly awaited as legal drinking age and high school commencement. But many kids now have such well-stocked rooms—filled with Blue-Ray and DVD players, gaming systems, computers, musical instruments, Wii, cell phones, iPods, etc.—that they feel little compulsion to leave, except for the dreary obligation of school. They can also play games online with people across the world, meaning that in-person friendships assume less importance. Again, it is noteworthy that their friendly relating takes the form of very targeted activity. This is quite different from my memories of friendships, when you got together with other kids just to “hang around,” and generally lacked goal orientation. As I recall, a lot of great creative projects emerged from that free-parking time.

But technology can be a slinky, seductive temptress, with its easy-to-navigate alternate reality and predictable set of responses. It affords a great deal of anonymity, which offers people a greater opportunity to be honest in certain ways and more deceitful in others. It gives users the chance to create a whole separate identity, an avatar that may bear little resemblance to the one we appear to have in 3-D. I’m speaking metaphorically, about the de facto identities we all construct as cyberspace residents. However, there are also the literal manifestations of this phenomenon in such arenas as Second Life (and its corollary, Teen Second Life), a metaverse in which one wanders a highly complex virtual world, socializes with other avatars, spends “money,” owns “land,” displays art, performs live music and theater, practices religion, and can even have online sex. As of October 2009, more than 16 million accounts were registered.

Anyone who spends time in cyberspace has essentially created holograms, abstract models of what human connection is generally believed to entail. Is this an adaptation to our inherent reticence in social situations? Are we simply engineering high-tech workarounds for human discomfort within the 3-D landscape of flesh, blood, and emotion? Is creating a skewed identity really helping the problem? Obviously, the act of holograms colliding with holograms doesn’t provide the soft nurturance and engagement of the senses that our still-human brains and bodies require to support healthy life.

Is this the time to stop and admonish, to prophesy doomsday if we don’t mend the error of our ways? Or are we bumping up against simply “what is,” based on some foregone conclusion about the fate of human life on Earth? Can individual humans have an impact, “opt out” of such a strong tidal wave—the technological march ever forward? Is such a backlash even desirable, or would it serve as a roadblock in the development of consciousness? What would The Tao say about attempting to push against what feels like a river—though one so desiccated that it is possibly antithetical to life itself?

Perhaps our very weaknesses as human beings have opened the window for another “life form” to enter and develop qualities that have eluded us. This reminds me of some of the classic sci-fi films about androids, such as A.I., Westworld, and Blade Runner, in which the androids can be more capable of showing empathy and compassion than their human counterparts. In the heartbreaking trajectory of A.I., one of my favorite films, a young android travels all over the world, in a span of more than 2,000 years, feverishly searching for the love of the mother who abandoned him. In Blade Runner, the androids express the ultimate in compassion by sparing the life of the main character, a human who is intent on killing them.

Can this be interpreted as the ultimate spiritual ailment? That the human race needs to outsource our love, to create machines capable of its expression because we have so failed at it? And does that bring a certain rightness to the notion of an Apocalyptic slate-wiping?