"City of Strangers"

As previous posts on this blog have noted, the decision to set Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical Company in today’s world has specific and interesting dramaturgical consequences for our production. Our central character, Bobby, is turning thirty-five, and most of his friends are around his same age. What does this tell us about who they are?

Bobby and his friends spent most of their childhood and teen years in the 1990s – a decade of relative peace and prosperity. Just as they hit early adulthood, 9/11 happened and upended our world. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began when Bobby and his friends were in college. Not long after they finished college, the Great Recession hit. The children from an era of peace and prosperity entered young adulthood in a world of fear and insecurity.

And where do we turn for comfort in times of uncertainty? We turn to relationships, of course. Relationships provide stability, they provide reassurance, they provide, well – company. But just as Bobby and his friends found themselves in a world where they needed the comfort of relationships more than ever, our world of relationships was upended by rapid changes in how we interact with each other. Text messaging started to take off when Bobby was about seventeen and really exploded when he was nineteen. The iPhone was introduced when Bobby was twenty-four. Facebook overtook MySpace as America’s most popular social media site when Bobby was twenty-six. Tinder was launched when he was twenty-nine. These developments were all intended to bring us together, and they do have the potential to help us stay connected, but with FOMO, trolls, and ghosting they also contribute to anxiety, depersonalization, and a sense of isolation. Even when one has 1043 “friends.” We touch our phones more than we touch each other. What does this say about us? Has social media turned us into a city of strangers?

Perhaps they have. The very people who were instrumental in the social media revolution have themselves begun sounding the alarm. Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive, tells Bill Snyder of Stanford, "The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works: no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth. It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other.” Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, in a conversation with Ezra Klein, expresses his concerns about the outrage loop that social media creates: “When you open up the blue Facebook icon, you’re activating the AI, which tries to figure out the perfect thing it can show you that’ll engage you. It doesn’t have any intelligence, except figuring out what gets the most clicks. The outrage stuff gets the most clicks, so it puts that at the top.” And The Guardian notes that Nir Eyal, tech entrepreneur and educator and author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, concedes that he had a device installed in his home that shuts off the Internet at a certain time each day – presumably to help him avoid the very addiction that he has taught others to create. (An interesting side note about all three of these tech luminaries – they are all in the same general age range as Bobby and his friends.)

What are some of the specific negative effects of excessive use of social media? It turns out that the more we use social media, the more isolated we end up feeling. In one study of people in the 19- to 32-year-old age range, reported on by NPR, those who visited social media platforms 58 or more times per week (or about eight times per day) were three times more likely to feel socially isolated than those who visit such platforms only nine times per week (or a little more than once a day). Brian Primack of the University of Pittsburg, the lead author of the study, has also demonstrated through his research with L.Y. Lin that there is a connection between social media use and depression. Research by Holly Shakya of UCSD has shown that general feelings of well-being are negatively affected by heavy social media use, as well. And when it comes to dating and relationships, the Tinder Effect - the tendency of dating apps like Tinder to warp our perceptions of romantic reality - has been described by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, professor of business psychology at University College London, this way: “it is nomophobia, Facebook-porn and Candy Crush Saga all in one.” Is that any way to start a lasting, intimate partnership?

What can we do about all of this? Tech is part of the fabric of our lives. Yes, it’s harmful, but it also has the power to create social movements and positive change (not to mention enabling us to keep in touch with lifelong friends who live hundreds or thousands of miles away). How can we avoid the addictive properties of our media and use them effectively in our lives?

Tristan Harris, at least, is doing more than just sounding an alarm about the potential negative effects of the tech revolution on our lives. He is working on answers. He has formed a movement to counter the negative effects, to help us all learn how to use technology effectively without being sucked into its potential to dominate our lives. You can check out this movement, Time Well Spent, to find out more. The Take Control page on the website provides simple, useful tools for minimizing the distractions of tech that can be so damaging to our brains and our relationships. Perhaps the steps suggested there can help us all to begin leaving tech addiction behind us and moving closer together once again.

Sources:

Center for Humane Technology. 2018, www.humanetech.com

Chamorro-Premuzic, Tomas. "The Tinder Effect: Psychology of Dating in the Technosexual Era." The Guardian, 17 Jan. 2014, 

https://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2014/jan/17/tinder-dating-psychology-technosexual

Harris, John. “Take it from the Insiders: Silicon Valley is Eating Your Soul.” The Guardian, 1 Jan. 2018, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/01/silicon-valley-eating-soul-google-facebook-tech 

Hobson, Katherine. “Feeling Lonely? Too Much Time on Social Media May Be Why.” NPR, 6 Mar. 2017, www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/06/518362255/feeling-lonely-too-much-time-on-social-media-may-be-why 

Klein, Ezra. "How Technology is Designed to Bring out the Worst in Us." Vox, 19 Feb. 2018, 
https://www.vox.com/technology/2018/2/19/17020310/tristan-harris-facebook-twitter-humane-tech-time

Lin, L.Y., et al. "Association between Social Media Use and Depression Among U.S. Adults," Depression and Anxiety, vol. 33, no. 4, April 2016, pp. 323-331. Abstract. PubMed, doi: 10.1002/da.22466.

Shakya, H.B., and N.A. Christakis. "Association of Facebook Use with Compromised Well-Being: A Longitudinal Study," American Journal of Epidemiology, vol. 185, no. 3, 1 Feb. 2017, pp. 203-211. Abstract. PubMed, doi:10.1093/aje/kww189.

Snyder, Bill. "Chamath Palihapitiya: Why Failing Fast Fails." Stanford Graduate School of Business, 12 Dec. 2017,
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/chamath-palihapitiya-why-failing-fast-fails