Silent Society: Is modernity killing our social nature?
To suggest that modernity is making us less social is to be blind to what modernity represents.
On the train to work everyone is preoccupied. Not a single soul remains unattached from some form of modern technology. They’re all on their smartphones, tablets, and MacBooks, watching the latest Netflix series or sports highlights from the weekend — all while simultaneously checking the news, weather, Facebook, and email. There’s a man both watching a movie on his laptop and checking his email on an iPad this very moment, and I’m not even the slightest bit amazed by this feat.
To be quite honest, I’m not immune to this phenomenon myself. As I type away furiously on my iPhone to provide commentary of this bizarrely common scene that I watch unfold during every morning and evening commute, I too have unwillingly succumbed to the sins of my peers. But are they even sins? Alas, I can’t help but pause this thought for a second, as that Facebook notification I got 30 seconds ago is getting cold and desires my immediate attention – if you can call something one holds for less than a minute attention.
All of this is occurs during a 20 minute train journey. We the people of modernity seem so consumed in personal consumerism and having the latest modern technology, but was it ever any different? Did people ever have friendly, sociable exchanges of conversation and banter with their fellow passengers on the way to work in the ’90s? ’70s? ’50s? ’20s?
I’m not sure if we ever lived in such a ‘non-tech’ Utopia, the one that older members of society often wax poetically about. Just because they’re partially removed from the latest trends doesn’t mean there wasn’t a time when they were in the thick of them. I can assure you that upon the inventions of the typewriter and the telephone, there were those who feared that ‘the youth today’ would eventually forget how to ‘properly’ communicate with each other.
Fast forward to today and progress brings the same doubters. However just because the latest trends in modern technology may seem antisocial, doesn’t suggest that we’re disconnecting ourselves from each other. In fact in reality it’s quite the opposite. The reach of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter provide the capacity to connect quite literally billions of people (there are approximately 3.2 billion internet users worldwide) to one another. So the fact that I’m not conversing with the guy sat next to me – in favour of someone on the other side of the world – is less antisocial when truly considered.
Time often insulates our perspectives and disallows us from seeing the bigger picture; which is, I’d argue, that this is our new way of staying connected and social. We’re not less social than we use to be, we’re increasingly more social than ever before. What we’re witnessing is a growing demand that continues to create an endless stream of new possibilities. This, in a bid to satiate our inherent social nature as humans to connect and communicate with our neighbours, both near and far.
So as I sit here on this seemingly silent train heading into work, I embrace the deafening noise of billions of voices that it represents.
