Has Technology Killed Love?

/

The internet has become one of the biggest parts of our lives today. It's so ingrained in our culture and daily routines that we have access to it all day and every day in the form of our phones, our computers, even our TVs. We have the internet when we're at work, at school, hotels, our homes, on planes, buses, and even at restaurants. The internet is so ever present that we get angry and frustrated when we don't have this amazing thing that somehow connects every person in the entire world together.

So why does the internet have such a profound presence in our lives? What does the internet and constant connection to the world and the internet do to us, our thoughts, and our behaviors? This is a topic that I've had many thoughts on and is one of the reasons I wanted to write this blog in the first place.

There are largely two primary things that the prevalence of the internet has done to us and our psyches:

1. It has created an enormous amount of connectivity among the human race and

2. It has significantly decreased our ability to maintain attention and delay gratification.

I'll go in depth into both of these points in this post. I am going to specifically discuss how they relate to relationships and human interaction.

The internet is the most amazing thing that has ever happened to the human race since, I don't know probably the agricultural revolution or something. It's huge. The internet is a connection of every single computer on the planet. Just think about that for a second. All of the computers on earth are now connected with each other. If we assume (which is not really true but just go with me here for a second) that every person on the earth had a computer that would be 7 billion computers that were connected to one another. Now I know what you're thinking "psh ya idiot there are kids in third world countries who don't have computers." Yeah sure there are some people on the earth that probably don't have computers but 1. even if they don't that's still a ridiculously, gigantic, incomprehensible number of people who have computers that are all connected to one another at all times and 2. you wouldn't have even known or cared about those kids in those third world countries if it weren't for the huge amount of computer connections that are on the earth.

The exponential advancement of technology has in turn exponentially increased the amount we are exposed to others around the world.

Things that have been happening for centuries and millennia are all now suddenly coming to light because our safe bubble of western civilized society has become very much popped. "Why are there so many transgender people/gay people/incidences of police brutality now a days?" Well truthfully those sorts of things have been going on forever, but are just now being brought to light because of how much more intimately connected we are with one another at all times.

In that same vein of thinking, we have become aware of exactly how many people are out there which means relationships have fundamentally changed. We are less likely to "settle" knowing in a much more profound way that there are actually billions of other fish in the sea that we could find equally attractive, likable, and that have similar values and interests. The internet has even changed how dating works. Now we have dating websites that use algorithms to figure out our "perfect match". We have apps at our literal finger tips at all hours of the day that we have access to thousands of pictures of people in our area that we can swipe right or left on to determine their attractiveness and suitability to us in milliseconds. We have social media on which we can see and present the best versions of ourselves to others, creating a distorted idea of who we are to the point where we lose a little bit of our identity because we're not really sure if who we are on Facebook and Instagram matches up with who we are in the real world.

So back in the day, or even a few decades ago, we would meet someone (usually through family, school, or work), fall in love, get married and stay with that one person for the rest of our lives. Every relationship or marriage has problems, and working through those problems was kind of part of the whole thing. But fast forward to 2017 where if we get into a fight with our significant other we have hundreds of other people literally in our pocket we can talk to. The fact that we know there are so many other people in this world, and that we have the means of communicating with them in the blink of an eye (or the flick of a thumb) means we're willing to put up with less from our partners. Instead of working through problems we can easily leave and start over elsewhere. And isn't that the exciting part of relationships anyway? The beginning when we get all those butterflies and feelings of uncertainty and excitement with endless possibilities? Why wouldn't we just replicate that feeling as often as possible? Well turns out many people do.

A study by Rosenfeld and Thomas from Stanford and The City College of New York respectively conducted in 2010 finds that since the internet revolution, there has been an exponential increase in people in relationships meeting online. This study unfortunately did not go into how long the people in those relationships were together, nor the number of relationships people have been in. However because so many relationships start online, it's become easier and much more efficient to begin relationships with others. Since our brains are constantly wired to try and maximize efficiency, we start seeing problems in relationships as "inefficient" and try and find the fastest and easiest way to get to all the good parts of relationships, and the internet has become a catalyst for us to do that. Instead of sitting down and talking and working through an argument, we find that cognitively exhausting so we just give up and start talking to someone new who isn't going to start a fight with us. People rarely get into arguments when they first start talking to someone their interested in because we don't want to lose the possibility of a good connection with that person by scaring them off by starting an argument due to the fact that we know full well they can talk to a thousand other people too.

The very nature of the internet is constantly evolving and shaping our psyches. Virtually all of the information in the entire world is at our very fingertips. Dictionaries, phone books, even the Dewey Decimal System, have all been made obsolete because of this incomprehensibly vast mass of knowledge that we have access to 24/7. We are perpetually bombarded with reinforcing this instant gratification that we have on the internet. You know that feeling of frustration you get when the internet is out or the bandwidth is tied up? when you have to wait a few extra seconds - even a minute - for your page to load it becomes the biggest hassle in the world! This is because we've conditioned our brains to process new information immediately. As soon as I click that link the page should open and I should be reading that article. We are rewarded with indulging in instant gratification so much so that we have often forgotten how to delay gratification. The same is true for how we interact with people.

An article in NSU's Innovate: Journal of Online Education posted in 2007 indicates that the increased integration of the internet in learning actually can decrease the ability of, or at least discourages students from sustaining concentration on a singular task. This means while we can spread out our attention on many different things at once, we can't focus on one thing for too long or we get bored and restless.

The same can be said about relationships. People have been growing more and more bored and dissatisfied with their partners, causing an increase in break ups and even divorces. When there are millions of other partners that you can see online who all look attractive and interesting, (because of their inflated sense of distortion on social media; i.e. no one puts unattractive or uninteresting images of themselves online) and when you can talk to someone who is completely new and interesting to you in a matter of mere seconds, that disincentives people to stay in long lasting committed relationships, because with long lasting commitment comes fights and disagreements. Yet we don't see all of the other major benefits of long lasting relationships like increased health and feelings of self-worth, among a huge sense of stability.

So does this mean that the internet effectively has killed love and even the institution of marriage? No of course not people will always have a desire to love and be loved by another. But it has changed the landscape of what we consider monogamous love and marriage and has made it more challenging to have a successful relationship last for a long time while being happy more of the time than not.

Love is complicated, but the way I see it, it is equal parts two things: 1. Putting your partner's needs, wants, and desires above your own, and 2. Commitment to that person. Ideally these feelings and behaviors are reciprocated by your partner. Love is the ultimate selfless empathetic act, even if originally derived from selfish reasons. Even if we want to be in a relationship with someone because we want to feel loved and desired, the fact that we stay committed to that person and make them feel loved and desired is literally giving up part of ourselves to share with that person. I personally think that this is the most beautiful thing human beings have and the increased prevalence of technology and the internet will never destroy that.