“People don’t talk anymore” “Look at that family, they’re all on their devices and they don’t even communicate with each other.” These are common complaints we hear today, among friends and family. And all visual cues seem to give us this belief...looking at the image below what are your first thoughts?
Often when I use images like this in workshops the comments are similar to the one’s above - friends don’t talk anymore, they just text!
Why is that? Is technology really breaking us apart or is it a reflection of something else? If we dive in a little deeper and set technology aside for a moment, where do our thoughts stem from and what drives them?
There is a school of thought that says our belief system drives our thoughts and ultimately our behavior. So what are belief systems and how are they driving behavior? Belief systems are held in our sub-conscience and are a series of long fast held beliefs we have about ourselves. Belief systems are often created through our life experiences during the formative period of our lives, strong emotional experiences before the age of 15.
When things happen to us as children we often internalize the experience that somehow we are responsible and at fault. So for example, if parents go through a divorce and maybe a parent is not consistent in their time to visit the child or is missing for an extended period of time, unless there’s a healthy adult who can help the child process through the emotions of loss and sadness, he may internalize the experience as if he were somehow responsible. Internal dialogue may go something like this: “It’s because of me he’s not coming. If I didn’t make him mad he would come. It’s me. If I was good enough he’d come.”
Having enough of these experiences or even one experience with a strong emotional connection will leave a pattern of behavior in the brain to default to this false belief every time this experience is triggered through a similar emotion later on in adulthood. Today with neuroscience there is evidence that strong emotional experiences will trap memories and patterns of behavior in the brain. These false belief systems are stored in our subconscious and may drive thoughts or ideas we carry without us realizing it.
Our perceptions of the world we live in are formed through our belief systems and become the filter through which we view the world and ourselves. Information we receive, especially new information, moves through our filter first before we create a thought. So if my filter carries this false belief when I experience something, I will attach my false belief to the thought that is formed. Because these are subconscious, these are hard to identify and we often aren’t aware of the false belief we carry.
So back to technology. I like to look at technology as an amplifier. Not just an amplifier of the physical realm - sound, images, experiences - but of the subconscious as well. Technology has a tendency to amplify our experiences, including our thoughts. So when we engage in using technology we share our thoughts, which include our subconscious beliefs, without being aware of it. I like to think of technology as an amplifier of belief systems we already carry, not the creator of them. Some tools, like Twitter, have been used to show ills in society that have always existed, but only came to light with strong experiences. For example, when the Hunger Games was first released, there was a barrage of tweets where people expressed their anger and often racist feelings around one of the main characters being black. It’s not that these people suddenly began to feel this way when they used Twitter, they always carried these feelings deep in their sub-conscience. Twitter just allowed those false beliefs to surface more readily. Technology has away of facilitating our lives in all areas, whether we like it or not. What we do know is change will only come if we look at those things that we fear most.
So what does it mean then when we see a group of people sitting around all on their devices and we think - “why can’t they put down their phone for one minute? People don’t even talk anymore”? Does it bring up our fear around being disconnected, or concerns we may already harbor about families not being connected the way we’d like them to be? Technology only amplifies this fear. The reality is, if a family is not connected when they use technology, chances are they weren’t very connected before technology either.
Technology is just a medium and we are the creators. Our perceptions are limited to our beliefs, our understanding and experiences. Rather than run from technology, if we embrace it more we may realize its capacity and realize that people who are around the table may be more engaged with each other than before. One of them may have researched information about the movie they just saw, shared the link and now they are all discussing their ideas based on the information they just learned. We will never shift our perceptions, all of our perceptions including the prejudices we carry in our subconscious, until we open ourselves to new experiences and develop new understandings about ourselves and situations around us. The same is true with technology. Our perceptions about technology are often formed from a lack of experience and understanding around what is technology and what are its capacities. This does not mean that we should not have limits, we should, but that is true for life in general - not just technology. So how do we change our perceptions around technology? Play more, learn more, discuss more and be willing to experience more.
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