By Hanna van Leent
Staff Writer
I travel by train frequently, and therefore meet many screaming, crying and annoying children as I am fighting my way through yet another academic paper. During the last three years that I travelled between Rotterdam and Middelburg, I have seen an increasing number of parents glued to their phones, whilst their children climb the carriages and jump around strangers trying to get their parent’s attention. When the parent then gets disrupted and is forced to lift their eyes from their phone, the child gets told off and the cycle starts again.
With the release of the film “Her” last year, which portrays a man who falls in love with his computer, it is time to evaluate the world of digitalization and mass communication. This will not be a rant against using the Internet, because that is absolute nonsense. The Internet is a great source of information, communication and it is fun to search around, but I think we do need to be aware with what goal we are using smartphones and computers and whether it is disrupting real life communication.
Douglas Rushkoff, Media theorist and lecturer, describes in the TV program “Tegenlicht” how American soldiers who fly unmanned aircrafts in the U.S. via a computer get Post Traumatic Stress Disorder more often than soldiers who face war in reality. This makes me wonder how we keep up with our online personae even though we do not shoot real people online; are we behaving schizophrenically as well? We are switching between an online world and reality more often than the U.S. soldier does. Moving between the virtual world and the real world causes stress, because you are constantly changing between your online persona and your real-life self. This might sound melodramatic, but compare it to the U.S. soldiers who fly drones. They switch from a soldier to a citizen every day without having any consistency for a longer amount of time. We do this more often when checking a phone quickly. We are not fighting a real war via a screen, but we are doing essentially the same as the soldier in an unmanned aircraft – constant switching between immersion in “the virtual space” and the real world.
The same conclusions can be drawn from cyber-bullying, because it is often more damaging than bullying in real life, as the documentary “The Virtual Reality of Cyberbullying” expresses. How does the Internet affect us and our behavior? Is more allowed in the virtual world, and can we be more radical online because no one is seeing each other face to face?
Rushkoff also theorizes that women on real-life TV shows always fight because they cannot make the appropriate facial expressions to emotions. The highly botoxed woman comes across as fake and the other women, having the same expressionless face, will get angry. Not being able to even frown, a miscommunication kicks off. And there it is: the ultimate reality soap women’s fight. Beside this unexpected theory, digital communication faces the same difficulty. We often misinterpret the sender’s messages simply because we do not see the shrug, the raising of the eyebrows and the dilating pupils. Emoticons were invented to solve this problem, but the subtle component of human communication cannot be expressed with the simple human expressions the emoticons portray.
I won’t tell you to permanently switch off your smart phones and unplug your Internet for good. The online world has many good things on offer and this should be exploited. The main issue is to keep communicating with other people in real life and use the Internet with a purpose rather than using it for unlimited entertainment and easy communication, for reality is much more nuanced and real. Since the Internet is the terrain of unlimited entrepreneurship, and you and I are mere consumers for the huge companies that “mine” our data in their Big Data projects, it is important to remember that we choose what we want to see on the Internet. Doing everything the companies expect would make the world too boring. So I challenge you: be the unexpected person on the Internet and challenge these companies by distancing yourself from them, both in the real world and on the web!
Hanna van Leent, class of 2014, is an Arts & Humanities major from Berkel en Rodenrijs, the Netherlands.
