sense even after all practical barriers have been removed. It feels as if there are barriers because of our core point here: we do not really have direct access to one another.
We cannot feel what another person is feeling over Instagram. We cannot understand what our friend is thinking over Pinterest. We cannot embrace each other over Skype. You cannot really know and care through a screen.
Misinterpretations and misunderstandings are a more innocent result of technology’s lack of direct access. A more nefarious result is intentional secrecy. It’s been proven that everyone lies on online dating profiles, but generally just a little bit — an inch of height here and a few pounds there — nothing important. And it’s not as if people can’t lie in person; they certainly can. But they can’t lie nearly as much in person as they can online.
The secrecy afforded by technology has become something of a novelty. We’ve never been allowed to be this anonymous with one another before, and we’re starting to see anonymity as a fun pastime.
Just nine months after its launch, a mobile app called Secret raised $35 million in funding. Secret is exactly what it sounds like. It allows you to tell your friends (and friends-of-friends and neighbors) your secrets, while remaining anonymous. The company that created a similar app — Whisper — was named one of “the World’s Most Innovative Companies in Social Media” by Fast Company in 2014. Secret’s tagline says it all: “Share anonymously with friends, co-workers and people nearby. Find out what your friends are really thinking and feeling.”
Find out what your friends are really thinking and feeling. It’s a mind-boggling statement, when you think about it. It implies that somehow, despite our unprecedented levels of access to one another, we actually know less about what we are all really thinking and feeling.
These anonymous apps are not the only social media that make our interactions flimsier. The king of the fleeting interaction and fastest-growing app of 2014 — Snapchat — allows messages to be viewed for only ten seconds or less. Sobrr, one of the fastest-growing seed companies of 2014, enables “users to create ephemeral online friendships through messaging and photo sharing. These 24-hour friendships expire unless both parties agree to continue.”
Are these apps fun and entertaining? Yes. Are they popular? Definitely. Do they function in a way that’s inherently dysfunctional for communicating about anything that matters? I’d say so. Are they helping us build satisfying relationships? Not really.
Mediated interaction can be treacherous. In essence, it gives you the sensation of having more people around you than are physically present. Social networks can convince you that you have people in your life. This makes it all the more disturbing if you then wake up one day and find yourself profoundly lonely.
Luckily, the way to overcome the obstacle of mediated interaction is relatively simple: we need to view mediated interaction as something we use in service of in-person interaction. Technology should not be shunned — quite the opposite! Used in the right way, connecting via technology can help you have more closeness in your life. It just depends on how you use it.
The first step in using technological connectedness in service of closeness is adding layers of communication back in. Even when we’re doing our best to be honest and straightforward, connecting through an intermediary — a chat client, for example — removes layers of communication that people need in order to get to know one another well.
The value of voice tone, body language, facial expression, and emotional signals should not be underestimated. By some accounts, nonexplicit communication makes up 93 percent of the messages we receive. If you have a choice between simple words and words plus voice tone, go with the more layered choice. If you can add facial expression in, go for it. The more layers the better.
I also recommend reserving technological connectedness for maintaining an already close relationship, as opposed to using technology to create one. It’s extremely difficult to do the work of knowing and caring if you and the other person are not in the same physical space. But devices do remove many of the limitations of distance, travel, time zones, and overall busy lives. If used in the right way, they can help keep your hearts and minds close while your physical selves are distant.
Obstacle 2: The Lessons Technology Is Teaching Us
The second way in which technology is getting in the way of closeness is that it’s changing the way we think. Many of us — particularly those of us in the Millennial generation — feel that computers and mobile phones have helped to educate us about the world. While we may believe our computers and phones are just gadgets — nothing more than glorified toys — this really is not the case. Computers are not just gadgets. Computers are our teachers.
The more we interact with our personal technology, the more we develop what I call a “technology mind-set.” This mind-set does not stop influencing us when we put down our phones. When we are constantly learning lessons about how to interact using our devices, those lessons spill over into our face-to-face interactions with people. Unfortunately, many of the lessons we’re learning are not helpful for creating closeness with real people in real life.
The primary lesson we are learning from technology — one that is particularly unhelpful in creating closeness — is the principle of efficiency. Google defines the word efficient as “achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.” This principle is core to making a good personal technology product. Think of how efficient interacting with your iPhone can be. You have to do exceptionally little to get what you want out of your phone. When we’re required to perform an extra step to find the thing we’re looking for, the annoyance we often feel is palpable.
Efficiency is a wonderful principle for making great tech products. The issue is that nothing lives in isolation. As we integrate these products deeper into our lives, the central principle they were built around — efficiency — seeps deeper and deeper into our minds. The more we expect perfect efficiency from interactions with our phones, the less patience we have for interactions with people.
My hometown in Silicon Valley has embraced the values of technology more completely than anywhere else, but we are not alone. People may not realize it, but the values of their iPhones have influenced their own values — and by extension the way they think about relationships. Interaction should be useful. It should get you closer to something you want — something beyond the interaction itself. And if you think it’ll be a waste of time or energy, you shouldn’t bother.
These values have prompted many of us to be much more wary of “unnecessary” human interaction. People might slow you down or just add a layer of annoyance to your day — like an extra step to open your camera on your phone. In the business of making successful devices, this is probably the right way to think. But what is this mind-set doing to our relationships? What is it doing to our hearts?
If removing unnecessary interactions left us with more time and energy to pursue meaningful interactions, this way of thinking would not pose much of a challenge to relationships. It could even improve them! Weeding out the most superficial interactions could leave more energy for deeper, closer ones.
But if that were the reality, we’d see an increase in the number of deeper relationships being reported . . . and we don’t. A comprehensive study published by AARP The Magazine in 2010 found that 35 percent of adults over the age of forty-five were chronically lonely, as opposed to only 20 percent in the 1980s.
And the numbers are even more dramatic for Millennials — those born between 1981 and 1997 — since they are the generation most entrenched in personal technology. Also in 2010 the Mental Health Foundation published a “Lonely Society” report, which found that “nearly 60% of those aged 18 to 34 questioned spoke of feeling lonely often or sometimes, compared to 35% of those aged over 55.” The report called the generational differences “striking.”
The reality is, the types of human interactions that generate closeness and reduce loneliness are not terribly efficient. . .and measuring the success of a human interaction by that benchmark helps to keep us lonely. We will need to unlearn some of the lessons technology has taught us in recent decades