Technology's Impact on Identity: A Fragile, Reactive Self

-- By LinaHackenberg - 25 Oct 2024

Technology fundamentally disrupts our ability to know and define ourselves. By overstimulating us with endless distractions and isolating us from meaningful human connections, it prevents the internal reflection and external support needed for a stable identity. This essay explores how, in a world dominated by technology, we risk losing touch with who we are. This leaves our sense of self fragile, reactive, and vulnerable to external forces.

Overstimulation

With technology constantly bombarding us with messages, notifications, and advertisements, and making us switch between roles, personas, and contexts, we enter a state of overstimulation. This state does not allow us to pause, process, or reflect. It erodes the internal reflection needed to know and define ourselves, leaving us reactive, shaped by external inputs rather than personal thoughts.

Messages, notifications, advertisements

Most of us carry a phone right next to our body – where we feel it close to us, all the time. It allows us to “go all around the world” ((https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/01/biztech/articles/15compute.html), all the time. Its constant stream of messages, notifications, and advertisements, however, acts as stimuli, triggering a response in our brain, all the time. With our attention constantly drawn to recurring stimuli, uninterrupted thought becomes impossible. This prevents us from exploring ideas, forming conclusions, and integrating experiences into a coherent identity. While stopping us from exploring our thoughts, the stream of messages, notifications, and advertisements constantly exposes us to external input. We observe what others are doing, how they are feeling, what they want us to do and how they want us to feel, forgetting what we want ourselves. The constant flux of input has made us rely on others more than our instincts, trusting their input over our own. We consult them before making the slightest move, because we can, because they might know better. This makes us touch our phone 2,600 times a day (https://pages.dscout.com/hubfs/downloads/dscout_mobile_touches_study_2016.pdf?_ga=2.180416224.67221035.1650551540-199217915.1650551540), not due to OCD, but due to dependency. Being overly dependent on external input, we ultimately lose the confidence to think and act independently, leaving us reactive, disconnected from our inner voice and unsure of who we are.

Roles, personas, contexts

Constant digital exchange, in addition to producing endless input, makes us switch between roles, personas, and contexts. Responding to different people or engaging in various social media platforms, portraying different sides of ours, we are constantly adapting. Parent, child, partner, professional, all roles come with specific expectations and behavior patterns, requiring different versions of our identity. Balancing these, often conflicting, versions of ourselves, undermines sustaining a coherent narrative of who we are. The incoherence leaves us confused and unsettled. The constant switching prevents us from grounding in a stable identity and makes us reactive to others` changing expectations.

Reactive Self

While exposure to input and adapted behavior are not new, technology has drastically increased their pace. As our minds struggle to keep up with the constant exposure and adaption, we become overstimulated. This overstimulation erodes the mental space for self-reflection and thus disrupts our ability to know and define ourselves. Not knowing ourselves, we rely on others to tell us who we are and become reactive.

Isolation

Since overstimulation leaves us unsure of who we are, we require genuine human connections for stability, self-confidence, and honest reflection to better understand our identity. Yet, despite offering “universal connectivity” (https://moglen.law.columbia.edu/LIS/archive/univconn/friedman-catches-on.html), technology often weakens our genuine human connections. Becoming increasingly isolated, we lose the support needed to build a stable identity, rendering our sense of self fragile.

Digital connections

Although preferred by many, digital connections often lack the qualities we require from genuine human connections. Technology expands our social circle, increasing opportunities for connection. Yet, more connections often mean fewer quality relationships – the kind we need for vulnerability. Such relationships do not necessarily require face to face contact, but require time, trust and honesty. To avoid these demands, many resort to digital connections that offer the “illusion of companionship” (https://moglen.law.columbia.edu/books/alonetogether00turkle.djvu) without the investment needed for true intimacy. While this feels easier, these connections lack the depth necessary to provide us with stability, self-confidence, and honest reflection. Instead, they offer superficial feedback, on which we should not rely to better understand our identity.

Real-life connections

As technology erodes our ability to listen and care about the person in front of us, it weakens our real-life connections, rendering their support for our identity limited. Even in physical proximity, our phones create barriers by consuming our attention and diminishing our ability to listen. When we fail to listen, we miss chances to connect meaningfully. Again, distraction is nothing new, but that we can not only think about something else but hear or see it during meaningful conversations exacerbates the problem (https://moglen.law.columbia.edu/LIS/archive/education/02WIRE.html). Constantly exposed to everything happening elsewhere, distant events often seem more important than the person in front of us. We care more about “other things” and less about those present. Consequently, reduced listening and care weaken real-life connections to a surface level, limiting their ability to provide the stability, confidence, and honest reflection we need.

Fragile Self

By selling the illusion of connection and weakening real-life connections, technology isolates us from meaningful human connections. This deprives us of the external support we need to build a stable identity. Without this support, our sense of self becomes fragile and vulnerable, lacking the reinforcement that comes from genuine relationships.

Conclusion

To conclude, technology leaves us stuck between overstimulation and isolation. Overstimulation following constant exposure us to external stimuli erases self-reflection and continuing thought. Without reflection, we become disconnected from our sense of self and reactive to external input as we lose the ability to think and act independently. Simultaneously, our unwillingness to invest in relationships and inability to listen and care renders genuine human connection unlikely, leaving us isolated and fragile. As a result, we lose sight of who we are, leaving us with a reactive, fragile sense of self, easily molded by external forces.

One route to improvement is to tighten the writing, plenty. Your outlining is sufficient at the section level, but not enough to keep your paragraphs disciplined. Each sentence must make a distinct contribution and every word in each sentence must pull its weight. What doesn't must go, at both levels. Almost a quarter of the existing draft can be removed without loss.

Substantively, the most important avenue to increased learning is to break apart the abstraction "technology" and "the digital,." This mistaken essentialism is getting in the way of your pursuing your question. There's nothing that says computers used by people have to disturb attention or create isolation. The physiology of our network (how it behaves and how it structures our individual experiences of the world) is determined by software. If the software works differently, the effect of "technology" can be radically different. If the relation between software and people is different (if, for example, all software can be changed by those who use it) then the direction of control (how software's structuring of the network structures our life experience) will be changed radically: we will live differently, choosing how, not having the texture chosen for us.

This isn't speculation. As I said in class, I have never, in my life using computers for now more than fifty years, seen an advertisement on my computers. The only notifications I receive from the computers around me (and I live literally surrounded by computers, running dozens of computers systems simultaneously, all the time) are carefully crafted by me, over decades of constant tinkering and modification, to ad to my awareness of what I want to know by ambient means, that are customized specifically not to interfere with my trains of thought and reading attention. My means of communication which do not include "social media" platforms, at all, are used to maintain and enhance my personal relations, not to flood me with communications from strangers. Someone with whom I have no existing relationship can reach me by email, as one could send me a letter in the post. But email can be filtered, and mine is by software I have been continuously perfecting for my own needs since 1977. By now it works really well.

Imagine, then, that your computers were behaving differently because the software in them was different. Suppose that what you think of as the properties of "technology" are actually the bugs and features of software systems you don't want to be using and don't have to use. Consider a world in which the social effects of bad software described in your draft have been replaced by the effects of programs that work the way you want them to.

That world already exists. You can live in it instead of the one you are describing at almost no material cost. All you need is to learn some stuff. Do you want to?

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