The Collegiate Laws of Life Essay Contest asked Penn State Students to explore ethical values and intercultural issues, and their talent for expressing their views in writing.
Below, you will find the first place essay from Kyle Wang, responding to the prompt:
“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”
~Albert Einstein.
Has the rise in technology and social media disabled our ability to communicate? Or has it enabled us?
Boiling Frogs
By: Kyle Wang
One of the rare memories I still have from my high school history class is an image of a coke bottle falling from an airplane. By some miracle, I had stopped secretly texting under by desk for a moment to watch the remainder of this video clip. This coke bottle landed in the territory of a Bushmen tribe, who hailed it as a gift from the gods. They quickly find many uses for it, but demand for it quickly engenders jealousy, anger, and violence. In the pursuit of what promised simplicity, they were rewarded with complexity.
Earbuds on and the reflection of an iPhone screen in my downcast eyes, I am reminded of this story today after trawling through Whisper, Facebook, and Twitter on the way to class, dangerously oblivious to those around me. Despite my classmates having more friends online than Penn State has footballs, how intriguing it is that these social media venues serve more as outlets for depression than connection! From a cursory glance, these silent pleas seem more fitting on the walls of a prison or the timbers of a shipwreck. How many desperate statuses and melancholy tweets are screamed into the void every hour, minute, second? From one swipe to another, what have we lost along the way?
My younger brother, “Doomsday_Snuffles88”, uses Skype extensively, an excellent platform that allows people to connect around the world. He regularly chats with a group of friends, some of whom are classmates with monikers as diverse as “GameOfBones” and “Cr1t1c4l_ownag3”, while playing games online. These are his friends. He does not know what most of them look like nor does he ever intend to meet them in person. These are his only friends. They are lines of text, black ants marching across the screen, and disembodied voices occasionally depositing expletives through his headset. On days with power outages, my brother simply sleeps. Unlike the imaginary friends of my childhood, his are powered by the internet.
There is a widespread anecdote about boiling frogs. It is said that a frog will jump out if placed in boiling water, but it will not perceive such danger if placed in cold water and slowly heated until it is boiled alive. Likewise, we did not reap the fruits of the Information Age all at once. It was a slow, almost insidious process, from the convenience of a Walkman to the freedom of a personalized MySpace page we demanded as teenagers. Back then, we still got to recognize a friend’s handwriting and even “hung out”, running about meaninglessly in public places and getting to know one another. Today, we sit in the darkness of our cells with our cell phones, tweeting about the latest on Netflix. Even companies have found it more profitable to divide us; the days are mostly gone where friends sat in the same room playing a video game or watching a movie together – it simply made too much sense for us all to buy our own gaming consoles and subscriptions. We no longer watch concerts, but we watch our 140 character limits. When at last we realized the pot was boiling and the price of this telecommunications revolution, it was too late. In this life, there was no supercomputer refusing to close the pod bay doors and alert us to the possibility that we have lost control of our tools.
The key factor we overlooked lay in the nature of our humanity itself, far richer than strings of words or vibrating vocal cords. Behind our screens and speakers, we have lost context. We have lost the ability to appreciate the beauty of a crinkled nose or the wrinkling of the eyes portending a hearty laugh. Correspondingly, we have buried the desire to know others, and are left with a sense of acute loss. We no longer feel whole in our meager online exchanges that pass for interaction; every moment our feeds refresh, we are fed with distortions. From everyone’s photo albums and blogs, we know they have always been somewhere great or are going somewhere better. We mistake other people’s cries for attention as confirmation of our lack of it. We feel alone so we become alone. As poet John Donne put it so eloquently, “no man is an island”. Over the past few decades, we have tried very hard to make it so, and we have succeeded.
When Einstein commented on the excesses of technology, his words had even further-reaching implications. He was instrumental in developing the framework for what was then the greatest achievement of humanity – the splitting of the atom, creating boundless energy. We all know what happened next. Perhaps we would be in a better place today if we had listened to Einstein when alive rather than quoting him after his death.