The other day this person was discussing an article titled ‘How tech is used to distance and dehumanise others’ with me.

He had read the title and saw a cartoon that published along with this article. It was a portrait of a family sitting together and having their ‘family time’ but all the family member were on their separate devices. Without fully reading and understanding what the writer of the article had to say he assumed that it described the way technology has changed all of us for the worse. How technology is the reason behind people not talking to each other properly by simply drooping their heads to their mobile screens or by plugging their earphones to cut themselves off from the rest of the world.

He later continued to preach about how marvellous their generation, the boomers were. Sadly I am still unsure as to how this information would enable to make our future any less dimmer than it is expected to be.

When I read this article, I realised that this man failed to understand was that this writer had tried to say. This writer was able to beautifully explain that how this distance has been embedded onto our nature since long ago. He wrote about the 19th century and I quote ‘human beings chose to hide behind their newspapers while taking the public transport,’ Therefore technology is not the reason but the method being used to ‘distance’ ourselves from others. He explained how instead of widening our horizons we are collecting and creating groups of likeminded individuals. How together we ‘confirm our biases’ and deny what we think is wrong despite evidence showing otherwise. He spoke of how we forget to thank others, how we release hate monologues, false news unauthorized and this often leads to many political conflicts and crises etc. The writer urges to adopt more people-friendly and humane uses of social media and other communication technology.

It is only natural that the writer would highlight the negative effects of the continuously advancing technology for it is his duty towards society to let them know about the consequences of various developments 

However, can you see the difference in what the man said about his article and what the article actually said? This man is an example that we often only take in the information that we want to hear and cancel out all the rest.

In my opinion, this is a cycle. A revolutionary machinery is discovered, some people use to unethically, to their advantage and promote heinous acts that damage our society while other rise up to stop these people and take the media and use it to work towards world peace. This cycle can and only stop when we realize that the problems lie within our mindset, our ideas, decisions and actions rather than the methods we use to express them. In this case, technology.