When I was walking down my street I saw a mother and a child going the other way. The mom was running and listening to music, unaware of the child’s screaming at a black screen inside the stroller. This is a prime example of how technology weakens bonds and simplifies emotions. It fortifies the idea that either you are happily staring at a screen or you are depressed without it. These are exactly the problems Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, a realistic fiction novel about people created by technology, and ‘Alone Together’ by Sherry Turkle, an excerpt about human relations with robots and the internet. Both authors warn the reader that as inventions get more intricate, the interactions people make with the world around them will lose true meaning.
The advancement of technology in everyday life promotes the slow deterioration of human emotion and thought. To begin, an increase in the use of technology creates an emotional gap between coworkers, friends, and even family. Turkle describes the situation by saying, ‘People are lonely. The network is seductive. But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude’ (265). As society gets ripped apart from the seams, people look more and more to the internet for emotional solace. This is only part of the problem, as then they too rather prefer the flashy screens over a family dinner. A cycle that never ends can never be a good thing, as it separates families and friends slowly, replacing them with fake families like in the Sims and online friends. Huxley’s idea of soma, a happy drug, is not a distant concept from the inner workings of the internet. In Brave New World, the author proclaims ‘And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and longsuffering’ (237-8).
When a person takes soma they are drugged into a state of happiness, with no worries in the world. Huxley’s fear of an invention that allows humans to be oblivious to others around them has come true but in another form – social media. Websites such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook all create a fake sense of connection, when in fact everyone is the loneliest they have ever been. People need to interact more with the real world to understand more emotions than happy and sad; because when people lose these emotions they lose a core part of themselves. Equally important, the added presence of technology into everything has taken the experiences and emotions that someone makes when he or she completes a task or see a new thing and has made them utterly useless.
In ‘Alone Together’ the author makes it clear: A true experience is not as good to people anymore as an online video or a robot is. In the text, Turkle remarks that ‘A ten-year-old girl told me that she would prefer a robotic turtle because aliveness comes with aesthetic inconvenience: ‘Its water looks dirty. Gross’ (265). A little girl would much rather have a fake robot than seeing a real-life Galapagos tortoise, which is usually a once in a lifetime experience. Many people will never get to experience the emotion of seeing something this good in a lifetime, and if there are robots of these tortoises all over, what is the point of the excitement? People will lose that sense of experience forever. Huxley takes this point further by stating ‘[And] everybody happy and no one ever sad or angry, and every one belonging to everyone else, and the boxes where you could see and hear what was happening at the other side of the world, and babies in lovely clean bottles—everything so clean’ (). In the novel, everything is so clean and easily accessible, which according to him is the perfect future. This is the problem though, people will lose excitement and grief and suspense if they have everything at their fingertips. Why go to a foreign country when you can see pictures from a box? A clean life with everything available for you is not as emotionally complex as a messy one. Furthermore, modern day relationships with other humans are threatened by robots and machines.
The main argument of Turkle’s article is exactly this, even stating ‘I find people willing to seriously consider robots not only as pets but as potential friends, confidants, and even romantic partners’ (271). Many people nowadays believe that robots are family, too, like pet robot dinosaurs or vacuum cleaners with a cute face. It further restricts human emotion, as you cannot feel strongly about a box of metal compared to a partner. Emotions passed through these machines are not meaningful, they are programmed to do these things. Huxley tackles this problem differently, creating a world where humans are engineered by technology to have useless relationships. In the novel, Huxley explains ‘I know you don’t. And that’s why we went to bed together yesterday—like infants—instead of being adults and waiting’ (). The side effect of a beautiful technological world is useless relationships, and therefore useless emotions. In Brave New World, one of the characters named Bernard commented on his depressed life due to a lack of an emotional bond with a significant other. This is because of technology – it separates people and substitutes itself in their place, taking out the emotion and feeling people have between one another.
Consequently, people all over the world are separating emotionally due to the invention and progression of the technology we make. In ‘Alone Together’, Turkle is warning us about the connections we are breaking and emotions we are forgetting today, and in Brave New World Huxley threatens us with the world to come. Feelings are a core part of everyday life, and without complex emotions, nobody can truly express themselves. People need to step back from their screens and look and the things and people around them. They are real, they are there, and it is up to the individual to create complex emotions that drive the populus forward.
