Blog Post #1 (Chris Autry)

It goes without saying that human beings lie at the pinnacle of social development among every creature residing on Earth. Since the beginning of recorded time, human social interactions have progressed in complexity, and our brains have grown to adapt. The relentless progress of technology – namely, our tools for communication, has decreased the spatial and temporal ‘requirements’ for our daily social interactions.

I recall video chatting with a friend while he was studying abroad in China. The physical distance between us was insurmountable: some 7900 miles through the center of our planet, but this was a moot point, as communication took place instantaneously. Even simple tools have given mankind the tools to accomplish such feats: the telegraph relayed messages cross country in the blink of an eye when it would have taken several days for a train bound courier.

Unlike the past, where one would telegraph a message and then said message would be rendered to its recipient, we have multiple channels of communication to the targeted individual. If you wanted to contact a parent: you could email, fax, phone, Facebook, Skype, text, or instant message them. All of these channels are both time and distance invariant thanks to the infrastructures we’ve built to sustain them. Nearly every individual has multiple forms of instantaneous communication with which they can be reached.

These technologies allow us to work remotely, catch up with friends, and have seemingly created a state where people are hyper aware of their social surroundings. As Frontline’s Digital Nation has alluded to, it is easy to be sucked into one’s digital life. As anyone who has lost their phone can tell you: disconnected, detached, and remote are all feelings that come to the forefront. Now, imagine a week without an internet connection. How has the need for these devices and technologies affected the human social psyche? Though these systems and infrastructures are redundant, it shows just how reliant we are on them.

Reflection on this posits the following question: Can the brain keep up? Communications technology will merely become faster and more complex with the progression of time, but as the Stanford study in Chapter 2 of Digital Nation showed, the brain cannot keep pace in a multi-tasking environment, especially when one or more social interaction is taking place. This is affirmed when one looks at the danger of driving while on the phone: two simple tasks, when combined, can have disastrous outcomes. It’s apparent now that the brain is not ‘wired’ for this type of activity. So now the crux of the problem lies in whether the developing adolescent brain can develop to work in this high speed social landscape, much as people in the past adapted and integrated the telephone, train, and early technologies into their lives as Kern stated.

It’s easy to see, stepping back and observing a time span much larger than the scope of Kern’s book, that the human brain has re-wired itself to cope with the rewiring of our world. Brain size has increased when one compares a modern human to an early proto human or Neanderthal. Social interactions have driven this development. An individual changed from having a handful of close relations within their own camp and walking distance, to having thousands of combined friends across social networking sites, virtual reality, and IRL.