Digital Tech Will Connect Us
Far from an antisocial habit, staring at our screens all day has brought many of us closer together in recent months. But will we keep it up IRL?
Somehow, our social calendars runneth over in quarantine: drinks, cocktail hours, pub quizzes, group workouts, game sessions and film nights, all via video-calling services that we’d rarely used or never even heard of.
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” says New York-based tech ethicist David Ryan Polgar – over Zoom, naturally. Video chat services have long been available. What we didn’t have was “this gaping hole in our feeling of equilibrium”.
Back when we got our fill of human interaction every day, we’d text, not talk; come evening, we practically craved social distancing. But now, we find ourselves with an “emotional deficit”, an urgency to connect – and a talking point.
But tech can only go so far. “I never finish a Zoom call and think, ‘That was really the same thing,’” says Polgar. The “Zoom boom” has brought with it the “Zoom hangover”: mental burnout after one too many video calls. They’re still a “weak facsimile” of IRL face time, says
Polgar. Hence our inventiveness: we’re trying to add “feeling”. Haptic feedback to simulate a handshake, or a hug, is one prospective touch. Backgrounds of busy pubs and bars to give the sensation of being out will also be popular. And we’ll even design our real-life interiors for online socialising: proud possessions coincidentally visible. (“Oh, this?”)
How we use tech could flag whether we’re in a bad place through “digital phenotyping”: inferring your internal state from your behaviour on your devices, like the time of day or night that you’re using them, or your typing speed. And videocalling can facilitate swift intervention. “Digital tools for mental wellness are also going to explode,” says Polgar.
Therapy on your own couch may partially diffuse the “powder keg” of isolation and economic uncertainty. But again, Polgar counsels against it fully replacing human contact: “There’s still something to a handshake, to a hug.”