Over the summer, I, like many college students, worked at a business in my hometown. During that time, I noticed a concerning trend in my coworker’s habits and attitudes. Instead of listening to other coworkers and joining the social community of a restaurant’s staff, many of my coworkers were slipping discreet earbuds in their ears and tuning out the community around them. On a local scale, my coworker’s technology negated the most essential, fundamental connections in our society – actual human relationships. But on a grander scale across our nation, technology is paving a road of disconnection and isolation.
Workplaces, like the restaurant where I worked, create a small-scale society where community can either develop or dwindle. A business is known by its employees, and those employees shape each other through their community. As new employees come and old ones leave, dynamics in a store or office shift in unexpected ways with the employees’ personalities. Even veteran employees, who stay at one location for years, can influence a business’s atmosphere if they change their behavior. We can look at a business and see a microcosm of society; for business is, in essence, a tiny community that has been thrown together to complete a unified purpose. As our overall culture evolves in a direction toward complete technological dependence, I have begun to see that influence on my coworkers and our community.
Every person with a smartphone knows he has an internal struggle with technology, and from what I have seen in microcosm, we should be concerned about the possible outcomes if this technological dependency is carried out to its end in every aspect of our lives. At my restaurant, the employees who had their earbuds in were less likely to engage with either our staff or our guests, and they were more prone to isolate themselves in music or podcasts. They were more focused and engaged with the technology than with the human coworkers around them, and that isolation often stifled the community for other coworkers because fewer people connected and socialized. This can create a cycle that pushes more people to retreat into their technology instead of participating in community, leading everyone to isolate oneself. My distracted coworkers were also less likely to attend to a guest’s needs and cues, and it was obvious that the distracted employee’s attention was not directed to the person they were serving. Even in a professional setting, where all employees are responsible for the quality of their work, some of my coworkers could not resist their dependence on technology, and they rejected more communal activities and opportunities.
Haven’t we begun to see this trend emerge across wider culture as well? More people have their earbuds in while performing ordinary tasks in their daily lives. They wear them on the subway, in libraries, in shops and restaurants, and even at home. To facilitate conversations and spatial awareness, the “transparency mode” on some earbuds boast that their technology enables the listener to hear people’s voices through the earbud or headphone’s sounds. This might seem like a positive solution to balance technology and human connection, but it is only an illusion. Connection is strongest when people devote their complete attention to one another, or even if two people direct their attention toward another object, like music or book or game, together. If a listener’s attention is divided between the sound in their head and the voice of the person outside it, they are more likely to hear the nearest sound in their ears – their streaming – before the farthest sound – a person – while believing that they are attending to both. When their attention is split, they are less likely to notice an opportunity for connection because they have the supplementary technology, filling in any gaps in the conversation for them. Within the distraction, the depth of human connection is sacrificed for the comforting technology.
The consuming power of digital technology is relatively new to the history of mankind, but that does not make all digital technology evil. When it comes to medicine, science, and other lifesaving innovations, we have much to be thankful for in technology. We should appreciate the advances that technology has provided us because it has done good. Lives that were saved with advances in technology would have been lost without them, and we can enjoy the benefits of technology without abusing it. Although our innovations have brought us relatively new possibilities and discoveries, there are risks of technology that we haven’t encountered yet, and we must be careful not to waste opportunities for connection or forget the importance of being present in our communities.
The next time we feel the compulsion to use our earbuds to cancel out the chatter of a community around us, let us pause for a moment and appreciate that community is still possible in the technological age that we live in. We may find that the cadence of another person’s voice is more mellifluous and pleasing than our favorite podcaster or YouTube influencer. We should be more observant of these communities and be thankful for the beautiful love that exists in human connection. We should reach out for human connection. Take out the distractions. Be open to the possibility of an unexpected chance to form a stronger community with a stranger across the studying table in the library, beside you on the sidewalk, or waiting in line at a cafe.
