Katherine Phillips
ENG 110 H6
Free Draft, Paper 3
Growing Up Digital and Its Role in Finding Meaning
Growing up is a part of life that none of us can avoid, despite how much we may want to.
There is a general template for our lives, telling us roughly how and when to reach certain points in our lives. Eighteen might be the age when people are considered “adults”, but when do most actually feel like adults or begin to carry themselves as such? In the past, being an adult happened when people would move out of the house and live on their own, had their own jobs, and maybe even started a family. It came down to having to look after yourself and finding your own place in the world, your purpose and your own meaning in the life that lies ahead. With the growing amounts of technology in today’s world, the lines indicating adulthood are getting blurred. It may not be hindering people from moving out of their childhood homes or from providing for themselves, but it is changing how people find meaning in their lives, and in some ways preventing people from finding it at all. When it comes to the topics of boredom and finding meaning in one’s life, the use of technology can create some issues in how we deal with these topics. There are advantages to this technological age, yet there are undeniable disadvantages which have greatly affected how people find their own meanings and purpose in their lives.
As young people start to understand what it means to be an adult, they often look to the adult figures in their lives for guidance or advice. Often times they will seek out a parent when it comes to this. When learning about the technological influence, I interviewed my mom, Julie, on how technology has influenced her as an adult, and how it has changed what being an adult means to her. One of the first topics she chose to share her feelings on was how the use of technology has stopped a lot of people from finding their own meaning. Mostly discussing the differences between kids who are just finding their footing in the adult world and those who grew up around her when she was beginning to navigate the adult world herself. When she was younger, if her friends wanted to go out and do something, they would simply just go out and do it, learning from whatever experiences may come their way. Once they were outside of their homes, there was no way for people to contact them. No cellphones, not a single form of tracking material; if you were out, you talked to the people you were with and that was it. Sharing this about her life, she began to really delve into what it was like to grow up with this sort of freedom. They never had to worry about other people trying to connect with them since it was an idea that was never really on the table for them. Julie shared about her feelings towards the constant contact that young people, and others today, have with one another. Although it is a good thing for many reasons, it has also done a fair amount of damage to the personal growth of young people. It has hindered their ability to separate themselves from the social world around them, in many ways technology has made this connection feel like a necessity to our lives. She brings up some good points about how social media in particular has changed how people find meaning in their lives. Often times now young adults will look at the lives of figures whom they follow or learn about on social media, believing that the posts they see on a regular, if not day to day basis, is actually how those people live their lives. Younger generations who model their lives as such seem to forget about the messy bits of it all, the mistakes that are made and slip ups that happen in a daily life. Julie mentioned often how following someone else’s life so religiously and constantly, takes away from the meaning in one’s own life. As she compared these two times of young generations find ing their places as adults, it was becoming clearer and clearer to me what she meant by it all. The addition of technology to the point in which we have it today, is stopping kids from going out and grabbing hold of their lives. It is stopping them from doing silly things and going on unplanned, and unshared, adventures. These experiences allow for people to have the exposure to what’s around them, which plants a seed that will grow into a meaningful and shaping experience. In this podcast interview Julie also speaks to the idea of boredom. Attesting to how mixing technology with the concept of boredom is not a good recipe for finding oneself and their own purpose or meaning in life. There is so much time that is wasted because of how easy it is to go on a phone to find some form of entertainment. This is very different from the life she lived when she was a young person trying to find her purpose and place in the world. When she was younger and her and her friends were bored they would go out and find things to do, whether it was go away with friends for a weekend or go to a museum or a concert. Instead of going out and living one’s life to the fullest, taking in every aspect they can, they sit behind screens and find pointless, meaningless entertainment because it is the easier choice. In the past when it has come to growing up young adults have decided what was important to them and what was not because they went out and lived in ways that helped teach them about themselves; whereas now young adults are trying to find their own meaning and purpose through the lives of others, with their eyes glued to a screen. There is so much life that passes by the young people of today without them even noticing since they cannot take any time away from looking at their screens, feeling as though they will miss more if they are without the access to their technology.
Technology has been rapidly changing how we operate as a society, whether focusing on the job market, or on the way people interact with one another. There has been so much change in the last ten or fifteen years or so, that it is easy to see where the shift to a more complex time starts to take place. To have so much information and entertainment of any kind accessible at any moment, spawns a new era for how people view themselves and how they approach aspects of their life. One situation that has been affected by the flourishing of technology is how we find meaning in our own lives. Richard Restak is the author of a piece titled, “Attention Deficit: The Brain Syndrome of Our Era”, where he tells of how in this day and age people are doing so many things at once and are not able to complete tasks in a focused manner because of the technological distractions from the world around us. In our society now, it has become an unspoken understanding that we are supposed to be constantly busy and entertaining ourselves by whatever means we must. If someone has “free time”, it is ingrained in us that we have to fill that time with something good and productive. A majority of people feel that if they are not constantly working that they are wasting precious time, time which they think is better spent doing anything over nothing. Since we have such an abundance of information that we can get a hold of at any time, it is very easy for people to find things to do to fill their free time with. There is, in fact, so much for people to do that they often will do too much or get carried away, sacrificing other aspects of their lives. Many people give up their sleep or time they could be spending with others, whether family or friends. What happens most often, is that people sacrifice parts of themselves in order to continue working with this information and technology. Giving up parts of who they are, or who they could be since they never take the time to learn about themselves. When we expose ourselves to so much material at once the “rapid information processing requires profound alterations in our brain. And such alterations come at a cost – a devaluation of the depth and quality of our relationships” (Restak, 378). Restak’s point about how this is affecting our relationships with others is equally as applicable to our relationship to ourselves. If people do not take the time and put in the effort to get to know themselves, then they will never be able to find their own meaning in their lives or their own purpose. Discovering both of these factors requires time and energy to be put into yourself, whether that shows in a physical way or a mental way. It is important for people to understand that by filling up all of one’s time with activities in some ways it is taking away some of the depth in which one could learn about themselves. To learn about oneself relies on the person’s ability to take time for themselves, to go and live in a fashion that is for themselves. People search for “relief from fatigue and ennui (…) in mere excitation of our nerves, as in speeding cars or emotional movies” (Restak 380). There is a constant need or pressure for stimulation, feeling as though one is missing out if they are lacking in excitement. Without these needed breaks in the busy lives people lead, the mind and body become overwhelmed and overloaded. These breaks allow individuals to take a step back and focus on what’s important, providing them with a chance to find their own purpose or meaning in their lives. People spread themselves too thin and it impairs their ability to take in the true meaning of what they are doing which affects the meaning they find in their own lives.
Being an adult is scary enough on its own, but when there are added pressures, like peer pressure, the whole idea gets harder to navigate. In the past when kids have entered the stage of adulthood, they make mistakes and learn from them without too many people knowing about it. Mistakes are part of the learning curve, it is all part of becoming a self-reliant human, sometimes things get a little bit muddy. In Bill Wasik’s work “The Mob Project”, Wasik writes of his flash mob experiments that tested how far people would take an experience that lacks a purpose or a meaning beyond the superficial value, simply because it was entertaining to them. Wasik talks about how through his experiment he was able to see how people are affected by the bandwagon effect, meaning that they follow another’s opinions or beliefs because it was a lot of other people are doing. This effect worked out well for Wasik’s experiment because without this affect the experiment would not have worked and we would not be discussing this article. When it comes to the bandwagon effect a large aspect is the idea of peer pressure. Going along with what others are doing simply because it is what’s popular in the moment. Often times this kind of behavior arises out of boredom. People are often so afraid of being bored that they will fill their time with activities or things that lack any meaning to the individual in any way. With time being used in such a fashion, it hinders the individual’s ability to spend their time doing something that really could be meaningful to them. This pattern of behavior is something in which Wasik is taking advantage of in his experiment. He is even falling victim to it himself through this experiment, he started doing this simply because he was bored, and continued simply because he found it entertaining. There is no rhyme or reason behind this experiment, no greater meaning that Wasik is withholding from the audience or reader. The article by Wasik is very ironic because he is only doing this out of boredom, and he is also creating this experiment because he has seen people do similar social experiments and wanted to be a part of them, which is being a part of the bandwagon effect. Wasisk continues to have these experiment sessions because he believes that if there are enough of them, he will have more success and therefore he doesn’t run the risk of being bored anymore.
With the growing technological world, it is becoming easier and easier for the public to be persuaded and molded to feel a certain way by those individuals who post articles and stories. Forming and sharing people’s own opinions and expressing their feelings is a crucial part of who an individual is. It allows for them to create their own positions, to discover the meaning behind it and to weave that meaning into their own lives. When this aspect of information interpretation is removed, we lose an opportunity to find more about who we are and to deepen our self knowledge. There is an article written in 2014, by The Long + Short titled “LabRats”, that discusses the impact of social media and the closeness of everyone, and how this is drastically affecting how people are taking in the world around them. In the past ten years, one of the biggest social media take overs has been through Facebook. It is a giant platform where roughly 1.37 billion sign into everyday. With this kind of outreach and spread, the posts and articles that are put on Facebook, let alone individuals feelings, have an impact on many, many more people. Over time Facebook realized how crucial it is to tell “‘advertisers quite how powerful they are’” ( Hogg). Once these advertisers saw how much influence they could have over people who use Facebook on a daily basis, it became easy for them to target certain audiences and persuade people to look at certain articles or sites. These companies began to see how they could change how their audience feels about the content. When using the internet, the chances of seeing a pop-up ad that will get your attention is high because the search engines keep track of what you are looking at often on your computer, thus shifting your attention to their products. Many sites will create these pop-ups in order to continue to be “relevant [which] is tricky business, and works best if the company knows what the customer needs before they do” (Hoggs). When websites have this power over the audience, it can become very difficult to maintain one’s own thoughts and ideas as these influences are being constantly thrown at them. Even without the influence, these distractions or articles are often worded in a way that will immediately persuade one’s opinions toward the matter. This article tackles the rights and wrongs of whether or not companies should have access to so much information about their users and their interests, whether or not it crosses personal boundaries. There are many factors that come into play when this topic is discussed, and one of the biggest issues is that of the bandwagon effect. Wasik discusses the bandwagon effect in his paper, yet it is also highly applicable to this sort of situation. If a certain article or bit of information gets enough publicity and acquires a big enough following of people, this group can have a very large impact on new readers or viewers. People will see how others are reacting to the situation and in many cases, will continue to follow the generally shared feelings since they want to feel that they are a part of a bigger belonging, and for fear of standing out. Some people completely lose their own sense of self on the internet because they go along with this effect so much. The bandwagon effect completely changes how one will read a situation, therefore taking away from the meaning an individual could take away from it. When people are exposed to the manipulation and contagious behavior that exists on the internet, it takes away their ability to form their own meanings in the information they are exposed to. As young generations are becoming more responsible for themselves and are becoming adults in a time where this internet influence is becoming stronger and stronger, finding one’s own meaning can get lost in the maze of manipulated knowledge. Finding this meaning is crucial for a young adult and when it is constantly being influenced by others opinions and exploited by companies, it spawns the perfect grounds for one to lose themselves and simply become a part of something bigger that they don’t quite understand; something that lacks any trace of personal meaning or depth.
Growing up in a time where technology is expanding its reach on the people of the world can be very useful and in a lot of ways, it has made lives much richer, yet these advantages come at a great cost. The technological takeover is creating a mess as it spreads, inhibiting many many people from remaining more independent and creating their own meanings in the world around them. In a lot of ways, the internet is making it much harder for young generations to become adults in the sense that it is changing how they view the world around them and how they go about finding their own purposes in life.
Work Cited
Hogg, Claire Dwyer. LabRats . LabRats , The Long and Short Magazine, 10 Nov. 2014, thelongandshort.org/machines/ab-testing-facebook-social-experiments
Restak, Richard M. “The New Brain: How the Modern Age Is Rewiring Your Mind.” The New Brain: How the Modern Age Is Rewiring Your Mind, Rodale, 2003, pp. 372–386.
Wasik, Bill. “My Crowd Experiment: The Mob Project.” Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers, edited by Barclay Barrios. 3rd ed., Bedford/St. Martin, 2016, pp 474-491.
