Stunned by technology
My family never had a television in our house until I was six years old. When we finally got a television, our lives changed. I was only allowed to watch TV for an hour a night, but that rule soon evaporated when my siblings and I put a lot of pressure on our parents to spend more time in front of the TV. The consequence was less family-oriented entertainment at home. We developed an affection for television and it somehow became a member of the family. We talked less as a family. I never knew how difficult my dad’s life was as he worked two or three jobs to try to make ends meet. My mother could have shared much more of her medical knowledge that she gained as a nurse working daily in the operating room. She had no idea what was going on in the lives of my two older brothers and, as the youngest, could have benefited greatly from information that was never communicated to me.
The Internet has joined television as an accomplice in the crime of destroying family relationships. It is difficult to disciple our children because we are not living in a relational context. Entertainment is less and less family-oriented. The children have their own televisions in their bedrooms. We put televisions in family vans and kids listen to their i-pods so they can have a total “self-centered” experience. They do not know what is going on around them and fail to build meaningful family relationships. A parent who wakes up to the fact that he barely knows his child may have to hit the i-pod with a hammer to correct the problem.
We now have relationships with news anchors, radio personalities, and TV stars. People who watched Friends thought they had more friends than people who didn’t watch Friends. We call these famous celebrities by their first names as if they are best friends to us. We accumulate a thousand friends on Facebook and we feel good about ourselves because we have so many friends. We live in a surreal world with pseudo friendships and when on occasion we are forced to face the true reality we are left shocked and confused.
Most high school students don’t know their father, and if they do, they have no relationship with him. I teach at a Christian high school where most of our students have parents, but many have no idea what their father does at his job. Families no longer sit, eat and talk together. Instead, each family member carries his dinner tray to his own television or her own computer. We no longer talk to the neighbor over the fence. We no longer sit together on the front porch. We live in a world of selfish isolation. We wonder why others don’t talk to us or interact with us. We do not realize how our own isolation has made us inaccessible.
We’ll pay $200 an hour for a counselor to try to help us with our broken relationships. We do better for a while, but eventually we’re back to our own tech addictions. We don’t communicate with our children anymore and when they ‘behave’ to try to get our attention we medicate them and turn them into little zombies and they passively go back to their video games and their i-pods and we’re happy that they’re finally leaving us alone so that we can pursue our own selfish interest.
It didn’t start with television or even radio. It probably started with Gutenburg’s printing press. You’ve probably met a bookworm who doesn’t interact with people because he prefers to live in a fantasy world provided by the book. He had a friend who occasionally took a seven or eight hour drive across the country to see his relatives. He said it was the loneliest journey. His wife read a book the whole way without saying a word to him.
The Internet teaches us, like television, to have a short attention span. As a teacher, I have to change the subject every twelve minutes because my students’ attention span is conditioned by the thousands and thousands of hours they have watched television. They watch for twelve minutes and then see an ad. I teach for twelve minutes and then tell a joke or move on to another activity as I adjust to their mindsets. Now we rush from one website to another in just seconds. The new generation lives off sound bites here and there. They have great difficulty engaging in creative or critical thinking. There is already very little originality. The musical and poetic artists of our culture are not producing much creative and original material. How many songs do you listen to that are remakes? It’s like we can’t think for ourselves anymore, so we have to go back and grab material from the past.
Many of my students have difficulty putting sentences together. Writing a succession of sentences to form a paragraph is a challenge for them. In fact, for many of them it is almost impossible to link several paragraphs to develop a theme. I don’t want to tell you how many in a class of thirty sophomores have never read a whole book! Even the most powerful political leaders in our country must rely heavily on technology (teleprompters) to help them communicate rationally and thoughtfully. Compare the speeches of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams with our modern politicians and you’ll discover that the speeches delivered two hundred years ago are far more complex than the astonishingly inferior teleprompter speeches of modern times.
We no longer write thoughtful letters. The average email is six sentences of four or five words each. We are communicating much more, but the communication is very superficial. We text and Twitter and barely get past three or four letter words. We love LOL and we are TGIF. Is this really communication or are we like cavemen growling at each other? Are our abbreviated conversations promoting shallow minds?
Governor Palin is making a lot of political noise with her tweets. There is no possible way to develop any kind of political idea in depth on Twitter. You can only submit sound bites and sticker-type statements. This may very well make a politician appear superficial when in fact she is not.
We need to recover those deep relationships with family and friends. But, these relationships are based on language and communication skills. It seems that our modern ‘bumper sticker’ communication is more destructive than constructive. It feels like modern technology is producing shallow minds and shallow hearts, and these in turn are producing shallow relationships. Shakespeare would cry.
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