(The comment occurs first, and the reflection follows.)

 

COMMENT:

[On the Objectification of the Human Person through Technology]

[Many qualities that set humans apart uniquely from other animals are being eroded more and more by technology, of which, of course, we humans ourselves are the makers. Many products of technology that we have developed in order to serve us are actually leading us instead into a form of servitude to them. Leading us into emptiness and/or isolation and/or loneliness. That which we make in order to enhance the quality of our humanity is slowly but surely devaluing and diminishing the joy of that very humanity. Below are ten simple, common examples.

 

Technology Example 1: Cars

I see cars everywhere that hide their drivers and passengers behind black glass. In effect this reduces the occupants visually to being no more than just part of the cars, just passing objects. It is impossible for the drivers, the passengers, and me to relate person to person. No eye contact is possible. No smile. No mutual acknowledgment of the other’s existence. Nothing but large and potentially lethal objects seem to be passing by.

 

Technology Example 2: Cell Phones

Cell phones are available now with cameras and recording capacity. This results in your never knowing if or when your privacy is being invaded, and it can easily compromise one person’s trust of another person. -Trust.

 

So many people on cell phones talk so loudly that you often can’t concentrate. And why is it, anyway, that they seem to talk more loudly to the person they are on the phone with than they would if the person were walking beside them or sitting next to them? Often I wonder if they let us in on their conversations because they know we cannot determine the pointlessness of them since we cannot see or hear the other person. Maybe in this way they think they can look smart. -Annoyance.

 

Then there are those who go around looking like what we often still call “crazy,” because they are talking but apparently to no one. At first you look, because you think someone is talking to you; but then, when you see the little microphone attached to their clothing, you realize you’ve been duped. And I am sure that some callers enjoy your little mistake, for they give you the sense, with their nonchalant manner, denial of eye contact, and quick little spasm of the head and hair upward that you appear provincial, they sophisticated. -Discount.

 

Finally, we can have no interactions with cell phone users while they are on their phones, for it would be rude of us to interrupt. During those times we have to wait and they are in control. -Submission.

 

Technology Example 3: Headphones

People who wear headphones while listening to music or other recordings when they are on the bus or otherwise out in public often seem to be saying “don’t bother me” to the people around them. At least that is what it conveys often to me. The good that might come from potential human interactions between you and them gets traded instead for a long play-list of musical and other recordings.

 

This trading reminds me of a great line from Psalm 106. The line refers to an incident found in Exodus, in which the Israelites, impatient to wait any longer for Moses to return from the mountain where he has gone to talk with God, make an idol in Horeb (where they are) and worship it. “They fashioned a calf at Horeb,” the line goes, “and worshiped an image of metal, exchanging the God who was their glory [“human interactions” in the example] for the image of a grass-eating bull [the long play-list].”

 

Technology Example 4: Voice Mail

Voice mail allows the caller to avoid having to spend time with the person called. It can be an efficient way to get lots more done and quickly, but it, too, prevents human interaction. Sometimes with voice mail we even succeed in avoiding confrontation. Leaving a message can result in our having a certain control in that (a) the person called doesn’t have an opportunity to respond on the spot (when it might be best), and (b) we can design any scenario we desire. It’s a one-way experience. And voice mail often results in a kind of relating “by remote control” rather than in a genuine exchange between two humans.

 

Technology Example 5: E-mail

E-mail works basically the same as voice mail, except that you can give a lot more detail, you can calculate and manipulate your words more easily, and by using the “copy” feature you can make others (even a large body of people) privy to your communications as well as secure a captive audience. The copy feature easily puts more pressure on the primary receiver of the e-mail because, knowing that more people are involved, it is likely particularly important to him or her to look good. When this happens, back and forth sender/recipient e-mails can take on quite an artificial and stilted flavor. The copy feature also allows the sender of the e-mail a possible moment in the sun of grandiosity, namely an inflated (and quite possibly false) sense of importance to others regarding both message and sender.

 

E-mail can provide a temptingly easy and painless way to escape from facing potentially negative situations squarely and directly, like admonishing, disagreeing, or saying other difficult things, from which we would grow far more personally if we experienced them in the person. Such avoidance e-mails deprive both parties of the healthy dynamics of healing and growth that can come with the more human side of face-to-face negotiation and reconciliation.

 

E-mails are fast and they’re cheap and you can get quick closure with them. But, again, the interpersonal exchange from in-the-flesh, person-to-person contact—i.e. experiencing our humanity directly—is completely lost with them.

 

Technology Example 6: Myriad Gadgets and Gimmicks

There must be at least hundreds of gadgets and other products, and gimmicks, that are successful in making the impersonal or unreal appear personal or real to many people. Children are often put in front of a TV for hours each day, receiving indirect interaction from a talking box, while their human care-providers are somewhere else doing something else. Video games and other electronic entertainment has us experience human emotion through animated characters, while the persons who can offer us genuine and real affection are in some other place and time. Computer zombies seem only rarely to leave their make-believe worlds for an embrace or a smile that comes from a real person. Spending time with humans and receiving touch from humans get replaced so thoughtlessly by plastic and metal; preference for soft and warm turns to acceptance of hard and cold. (Any correlation with our culture’s exaggerated emphasis on sex and on women’s breasts these days?) Can these consumers really keep straight the essential difference between what are genuinely human forms of expression and what are not; between what is genuinely human and that which is only human-like?

 

Technology Example 7: Automated Phone Attendants

Automated phone attendants try their hardest to sound real and friendly and happy but they are nonexistent entities.

They tell you while you wait how important you are to the company you’re phoning, but they do everything technologically possible to avoid making actual contact with you.

 

They read you a list of options too long to keep track of, which grates at your self-esteem. They offer options you can’t hear—and you can’t ask them to speak up. If no option accommodates the purpose of your call, you feel frustration and maybe anger. You often are unsure of what to do and are not given sufficient time to think about it (all the while trying to remember the reason you called!). The opposites of flexible and rigid collide. More frustration.

 

They even tell you what to feel—thanking you for your patience, for example—even though they don’t know what you are feeling. And if you are feeling great irritation, frustration, or anger… what then?

 

They tell you they appreciate your business but they won’t talk to you.

 

Then they package it all up in a type of wrapping paper they call “for quality assurance purposes”—a phrase which tells me they are also sheep-like, for I swear every company I have dealt with on the phone uses the exact same phrase. Do other wordings ever occur to them? Do they think we cannot handle the variety? Seemingly universal, too, is the phrase “please listen carefully as our menu options have changed.” I doubt the matter is as much that options have changed as that the company is trying to manipulate you into listening carefully; yet it seems to me that this is something our ears do rather naturally and without prompting, especially when our handset is pressing against one of them and we at all costs do not wish to err).

 

And if you should actually get a live person at last after your neck has kinked from holding the phone too long, human qualities might have been so programmed out of the person that you can’t get them to react at all to your complaints or irritations, which only increases your irritation and anger. They commonly will say they’re sorry and then go immediately into a cold, non-relational dead silence. Have you ever noticed that they often display no more feeling than the automated attendant whose place they have just taken? Both automated and real attendant are, for all practical purposes, the same.

 

Oh… and how many times have you forgotten some of the details you called about because you had to wait too long or because the incessant fast-paced music with interminable words while on hold jumbled your thoughts something awful despite your efforts not to “slide into the groove”?

 

Technology Example 8: Mass Mailings

Those who develop mass mailings dehumanize by coming up with always more clever manipulations of the English language that deceive you but help them achieve their goal, which involves almost exclusively getting money from you, getting your vote, or getting your signature: they want you for these, not for who you are.

 

They deceive you by envelopes that say such things as “Urgent” or “Important Document Enclosed” or “Critical Date-sensitive Material Open at Once” or “Congratulations, You’ve Just Won a Prize,” and so forth, when, in fact, the matter wasn’t urgent, there was no important document enclosed, there was nothing critical, and you didn’t win a prize. It seems to me they play with you like a child might play with a yo-yo. You open the envelope, trusting the integrity of the sender, only to find out you’ve been duped. And they didn’t lie, of course, for the matter was urgent to them, the document was important to them, the matter was critical to them. And the prize? Why… it was also for them!—namely, to get you to open the envelope, consider the contents, and hopefully do what they want.

 

You receive these mailings even though you registered with a “do not send” service. And you can’t easily stop the mailings. If you can find a number to contact (lately I have noticed there is no phone number included in many mailings), they usually inform you that you’ll be receiving three more mailings before the process stops, as these mailings have already been sent to their mail service. Only then will you receive no more mailings.

 

If you’re lucky, the mailings won’t resume again in six months or a year; otherwise you start the process over. The burdens and inconveniences involved are yours entirely. You pay the consequences for another entity’s actions (actions which you did not solicit and had no say in).

 

And what about the companies you make purchases from who take the liberty of giving your street address to other vendors without your permission? They are selling your address for money, and with it selling a part of you. They are making money off you.

 

Your ability to trust people and companies and systems erodes just a little bit more with each new deception in mass mailings.

 

Technology Example 9: E-cards

Even greeting cards that come as e-mails can be problematic. Many of these cards might be cute and clever, but the bottom line remains that while in a sense the senders do spend time on you during the process, they fall far short of actually spending time with you or talking with you, both of which are far more challenging and richer in quality in terms of your humanity than the time spent using the computer to compose and send. The senders save money and time and bother but unwittingly lose something of the best of our humanity: direct human contact. Also, we might easily forget that these electronic cards could have come from just about anyone, it seems—so basically impersonal, sterile, and formula-like they are—and that it’s the personal interaction that didn’t come that would have been unique and really special.

 

Technology Example 10: Internet

The Internet can drain you completely of energy and spirit with its frequently overwhelming number of dead-end possibilities or hits, especially if you find navigating through those hits difficult to resist.

 

The pop-ups are an insult to intelligence. They are an example of masterful attempts to control by advertisers in that we must deal with the pop-ups whether we want to or not. Usually pop-ups offer us the height of tastelessness and the epitome of the worst of capitalist greed, with their interminably flashing lights, odd noises to catch our attention, and failure to rise to the creative heights of which human imagination is possible. Not to mention that they are placed directly in our way on the screen.

 

Experiencing pornographic photos and videos via the Internet satisfies no human desire except one, and that desire is satisfied only vicariously, if at all, without genuine feeling, and always incompletely.

 

The Internet presents us with millions of people stating as fact things they actually do not know for a fact. This results in many readers sharing with others as so-called truth what is not backed up by facts. These readers spend too little time examining and scrutinizing the origins and verifiability of what they read on the Internet, and instead simply believe it and spread it. Unfortunately, this results also in people coming to believe, in effect, that truth is relative and really no more than just anybody’s guess. But in fact (in my opinion) truth is real, it is critically important to our survival, it is beautiful, and it is an indispensable part of the very bedrock on which freedom rests and depends. Many are led to disinterest in pursuing the possibility of coming always closer to knowledge about the truths of our existence. They surrender to indifference and to being tossed about on a mighty sea of doubt, surrounded by the forces of inactivity. The effect of this indifference, lack of hope, and inaction regarding human problems leads ultimately to tragedy, for it works against the advancement of the human cause and the common good.

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When and how did reality—the authentic here and now—become so distasteful to us? How did just looking at a fellow human being and giving a quick smile or hello to acknowledge their existence become so desirous to avoid? What’s inside our fear? At what point did only the loudest music in our ears and unending sex for our bodies become the only two ways that remain for many people to still be certain they are capable of feeling? When did genuine relating and relationship become so difficult, so tense, so short-lived? When did knowing who we are begin to scare us? How did liking who we are become an issue? How did we come to disdain the way we were made and begin to slide into self-destructive behaviors? When did we become estranged from who we really are? And what will we be the day when the technology that we have made and that keeps so many of us afloat—fails?

Not infrequently we make technology for the sake of technology, not for the sake of humankind. Humankind becomes merely the excuse for making the technology. “If it’s there let’s make it and use it,” you hear many people say. But I suggest that we ourselves are the ones who end up getting used.

 

And how many people say yes to a particular technology most of all because they don’t know how to say no? Are they afraid of feeling embarrassed or of being taken for backwards or ignorant if they say no? How many people just simply are afraid not to follow the crowd or do not believe they have the courage to leave it?

 

In a very real way technology has become for many of us an idol, a god. An unfeeling, uncaring being who (that?) didn’t make us but somehow got us to make it. It!

 

Those characteristics of technology that are damaging to human dignity are fast encroaching on our ability to feel and to know what feelings are; to exchange real feelings; to offer relationship and other interpersonal exchanges that are genuine; and to give genuine affirmation to others. I mean affirmation which can only come from us humans alone, and only in non-material forms (not in material objects). Our willingness to use or put up with the negative side of technology—of which we are the makers—wreaks havoc on our weaknesses and insecurities. It wreaks havoc on our earnest and legitimate desire to control our environment and realize our destiny. And it leads us to an ever greater participation in the dehumanization and objectification of the human person.

 

The reflection below sums up the foregoing. rt]