Love + fear: When it comes to technology, we have all the feels
Human interaction can be complex on its own, but add a bit of technology and that complexity intensifies. Just in the past month, we’ve witnessed extreme reactions to technology in our lives, feeling both warm and fuzzy as well as fearful and panicked.
First, we fell in love with a machine, as witnessed in tears and tributes when the Mars Opportunity passed away (or essentially stopped working, but that seems so very cold to say). The reactions on Twitter were immersed with sadness and grief, and even a call to create a fund to actually go to Mars, pick up the dead rover, and bring it back for a proper memorial on earth.
Through it all, people realized how, well, kind of ridiculous it was to be so sad over a machine. Yet we couldn’t help it. Irrational or not, these feelings make us human, and we experienced some very big feelings over Opportunity’s passing.
We might wonder, as more machines enter into our lives, what will our relationships looks like? If you have ever told your child to thank Alexa, you know what I mean. How will we choose to react? Will we treat machines like the machines they are or will we approach them with kindness? And what effect does that have on us? Because while our choices may not hurt a machine’s feelings, the way we act says something about our own humanity.
In the case of Opportunity, the good news was that we held onto our own humanness, maybe in a way that surprised us all.
But these same emotions that enabled us to fall in love with a machine and even grieve its death also overwhelmed us with fear as we witnessed the viral spread of a mythical evil character, Momo, who is supposedly telling our children to take horrible actions by inserting herself into online videos.
And while yes, there is real and awful content on the Internet, and, yes, there are horrible people in the world, the Momo character does not actually exist. Let me say that again, Momo, the creature we are so fearful of, does not exist.
Rather, she is a figment of our imagination. More specifically, as highlighted in an analysis by The New York Times, she is a fear of parents about what “their kids are doing on the Internet, and what the internet is doing to their kids.”
The article also draws comparisons between Momo and the “hidden messages” in record albums played backwards that our parents feared in the 70’s and 80’s. I might add that my own mother tells stories about how her parents feared Elvis and rock ‘n roll.
As we know, this fear of media is not new. In fact, Socrates spoke out adamantly against the alphabet (which in media theory is considered an early communications “technology.”) According to Socrates, “[Writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” Sound familiar?
From the alphabet to texting, we’ve been triggered again and again, and we will continue to be triggered as AI, VR, voice assistants and other advanced technologies become pervasive in our society.
According to cultural anthropologist and university professor, Genevieve Bell, the fear of technology is represented in the story of Frankenstein—a story that illustrates technology not only becoming self aware, but ultimately forming a relationships with humans. It’s this intersection between machine and human that frightens us so deeply, according to Bell.
Technology that doesn’t interfere with our human relationships, such as the fax machine, doesn’t incite this same panic. This seems to be the definitive factor. We can love and grieve Opportunity because she was reporting data back from a distant planet. She posed no threat, she did not interfere with our humanness. But Momo is different. She is the embodiment of the evil part of technology, the part that threatens to come between us and our relationship with our children. She feels out of control, powerful, and unstoppable — a fear we have overall about technology.
Yet, at the same time, relationships are what we crave from technology, as Microsoft researcher danah boyd’s work with teenagers has pointed out. It makes all of this so very confusing (as if human relationship weren’t confusing enough). And while today we may be seeking connections with other humans using technology as a channel, we may be witnessing glimpses of a future in which we seek connections with machines.
