Disconnected while connected: The paradox of modern life

Life has become bigger than past generations could ever have imagined.

For most of the hundreds of thousands of years that humanity has existed on this planet, we lived in small hunter-gatherer bands of as few as fifty or a hundred people. Even if we only consider the comparatively short period since the invention of agriculture and the beginnings of written history, most people lived in small rural towns and villages. Not only would you know everyone around you, most of them were your relatives to different degrees.

This can seem hard to believe considering the way we live now. If you, like me, live in a city with over a million people, these older ways of life seem impossibly primitive and distant. Even for those who still live in rural towns, the world has far more people, and is far more interconnected, than ever before. Distant events and worldwide news are as present and accessible as your neighbors down the road.

While population growth brings its own challenges, like climate change, habitat destruction and other environmental pressures, that's not the issue I want to address today.

A terrifying multitude

It seems that, for many modern people, being one person among billions can feel overwhelming, sometimes terrifying.

Make no mistake, some people find this crowded mode of existence exhilarating. There's so many people they can meet and befriend, so many places they can travel to, cultures they can immerse themselves in, and different experiences they can have. For those who enjoy it, the world offers an almost unlimited buffet of experience—more than one person could ever see or do in a lifetime.

However, there are many people who seem to be psychologically oppressed by it all. It's as if they can't deal with the vast scale of our society and want to retreat into something smaller, more familiar and more comforting.

These atomized individuals find difference disturbing, even frightening. They turn away from people and cultures that are unlike them. Instead, in order to cope, they seek out groups of people that are most like them, ones that flatter their preconceptions and confirm all the beliefs they already hold. That isn't necessarily bad by itself, but it can easily take on destructive forms.

For many people like this, the comfort of in-group membership can flip into distrust, suspicion, even hatred for people whom they perceive as different from them. Whether it's white supremacists, religious fundamentalists, or more loosely defined bigotries, the pattern is the same: whatever problems they face, they blame on shadowy outsiders who hate their way of life and all that they stand for. This process of demonization feeds on itself, and sometimes it can result in self-radicalized extremists committing violence.

Although the internet has clear benefits and has become indispensable to the modern way of life, it's frequently an accelerant for this process. All too often, it makes the process of radicalization smoother and faster. By granting the perceived safety of anonymity, it encourages disinhibition. It makes people feel less inhibited in saying the most outrageous and extreme things, which they might not dare to do in offline interactions. The victims of this cyberbullying suffer consequences from depression to eating disorders to self-harm and suicide.

READ: The benefit of disconnecting

Technology makes it easier for those with bigoted or violent views to find each other. For instance, Neo-Nazis and other people of similarly hateful ideologies can reach many more people online than they could in the physical world, at less risk to themselves. They can spread propaganda to recruit the lonely, the vulnerable and the disaffected. The manifestos of mass shooters and other infamous criminals can spread like a virus, inspiring disturbed people to commit similar deeds.

Misinformation in general thrives on the internet: from conspiracy theorists undermining trust in science and objective reality, to repressive governments spreading propaganda to demonize their enemies and bolster their own power, to corporate lobbyists and advertisers trying to make us believe what profits them most, to social-media influencers promoting falsehoods for attention. Even well-informed people may find it nearly impossible to find trustworthy and reliable sources amidst this blizzard. It's no wonder that so many people are just giving up and choosing to believe whatever suits them best.

Whatever echo chambers suit us

I believe that tribalism is bolstered by modern information technology, since, now more than ever, we can all live in whatever echo chambers suit us. The consequences, as we've all seen for ourselves, is that destructive versions of political extremism have become increasingly mainstream.

I know from personal experience that if you wish, like-minded people from virtually any sect, ideology or philosophy can be found online. Again, this can be a positive thing in helping people find their own community, but it's all too often a potent force for amplifying social divisions and elevating violent extremes.

What might the solution be? Does one even exist?

It's very hard to come up with a workable answer . Certainly, I'm not proposing censorship. Even if it was moral to restrict free speech for the greater good, there'd be no way to ensure that it's only done in service of the "right" views. Whatever censorship regime you might support, try imagining it in the hands of your opponents.

The unsatisfying but realistic answer is that this may simply be another technology whose issues we have to endure and adapt to. Even if we wanted to undo these developments that have caused so much harm, it's impossible to do that. You can't put the genie back in the bottle.

However, there are some signs that people are coming to their own independent realization about the potential harms of the internet. For instance, some studies find that people are spending less time on social media. I'm one of them; these days, I rarely use it at all. So far, this trend is only a minor decrease, but we will have to see where it goes.

Where the future of information technology will take us, I can't claim to predict. We may yet find a way to use it for our benefit, to help us come together rather than further dividing us. All technology is a double-edged sword; what we need is the wisdom to use it more for good than for harm.