The role of technology in our lives has, undoubtedly, skyrocketed over the last 30, 20, 10, even 5 years. The immense success of Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and others has been enough to captivate a great many thinkers. However, with such success comes plenty of people questioning the efficacy of such things as well as how much they actually benefit our lives.
As detailed by James Williams, the sheer fact that our phones exist and are capable of the things they do is cause for alarm. His example of the iTrainer - a device specifically designed to make people impulsive and weak willed - comes alarmingly close to the manifestation of the modern smartphone. The fact that it's always on us with buzzers makes us constantly aware of it, the addictive nature of the programs on it make us never put it down, and the increasingly high speed nature of information/entertainment through the device affects how we think about the world and hold memory.
If the modern mobile device is so harmful, then was it intended to be so, or did it originally have a different goal?
Although more modern advancements in hardware and applications have undoubtedly been designed to make us more engrossed in our phone for company profit (see Social Media Addiction,) that doesn't mean that was the original or intended goal. It's long been stated that Facebook was intended to make people more connected. In original iPhone launch panels, it seems as though it was designed with simplicity and interconnectedness in mind. So then, what happened?
I propose that modern social media platforms largely serve to do two things: to provide entertainment and information. Usually, both of these goals are packaged into one product: posts. Thorugh posts, we not only gain information on what our friends and loved ones are doing, but also entertainment from that same avenue. Further, information can come in form of ads and entertainment through games and other mediums.
It's the idea of posts as information that I think we can focus on to break the obsession with social media. Enter Buddhist ideology.
In Buddhist teachings, there's the concept of the "Unanswered Questions" (Avyākṛta in Sanskrit.) These were several series of questions posited at the Buddha that were metaphysical in nature, often being contradicting or paradoxical in nature. In essence, these were questions that could not be given a reasonable or physical answer. When posited with such questions, the Buddha would either remain silent or provide a metaphor demonstrating the absurdity of a metaphysical question.
According to this ideology, there are questions that do not require answers, and that we should be comfortable without knowing the answers to. Although mostly limited to the speculative and metaphysical space in Buddhist teachings (seeing such questions as wasted time,) I think this notion could also be applied to the constant need for information in our daily lives, especially through social media.
Rather than weighing ourselves down with a constant need to know what's going on in the world or to the people in our lives, we should be able to accept that it's ok to simply not know things. A need to constantly knowing everything all the time has helped to lead us to an addiction to our phones and to our social media feeds, which we know can be used to manipulate us or simply make us mindless in some form.
Breaking the cycle of addiction can come from fighting this other, but related, source of contention. To not know things, and to accept that, can be freeing to us. Fighting a constant need of information can help break one of the drivers of our social media obsessions, and then this allows us to use these platforms for more potentially meaningful things. Instead of a constant need to know what people are doing, we can be entertained and connect with what is being done on a more personal level.
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