Digital Me

Reader Discretion Notice - This week's blog discusses in detail topics related to violence and mental health. If you'd like to enjoy Mother's Day (bad timing on my behalf!), I'd recommend reading at a later date. Thanks!

It felt like I had been hit by a truck. My chest tightened and my breathing shallowed while my head swiveled side to side - anxiously looking for that small technological block of wonder. As the minutes passed (it may as well have been a lifetime), my eyes started filling with tears.

Where was my cell phone??? I frantically wondered. And more importantly, what would I do without it?

Thankfully, I located my phone and my existential crisis was averted. Although this was not the first time I lost my phone (I recall one bad incident in 2014 where I left it in a cab in DC - god bless the cabbie for coming back), it struck me that my response to each incident was progressively worst.

The iPhone turned twelve years old this year - meaning that sixty percent of my life was spent without it. Yet, I cannot imagine a day without it now. Why is that?

Well, it's because everything has moved to the web. A few weeks ago, I blogged about how the iPhone transformed the way we live and work - taking many of the things we used to throw in our backpack and transforming them into bits and bytes. Innocuous things like alarms, watches and calendars to deeply personal things - like myself.

Even me, Mary Brinkopf, has become digitized. Everything there is to know about me is online - height, weight, gender, complexion, (Facebook/Instagram) work profession (LinkedIn), and my personal thoughts (The Beta Byte) - exist there. I'm even expected to find my significant other online. Essentially, my bones, my feelings and my identity have been reduced to lines of code.

It's not just me. The most important things in my life are becoming digitized - interactions with others. There is a digital barrier between me and them. Cards or party invites in cursive writing that I used to receive in the mail have turned into emails or Facebook invites. Facetime or Skype has replaced face to face meetings with family or friends.

We live our entire lives through these blue screens. First day at a new job, a day at the beach, marriage proposals, weddings, birth announcements, birthdays - all significant events in our lives we communicate through digital mediums. So, it's not unexpected that social media networks like Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Vine (RIP), LinkedIn and TikTok have become the "go to" places for us to find our tribes.

These social forums were meant as agoras - meeting places for like minded people - people who love "The Avengers" or Beyonce. It succeeded there - I visit multiple YouTube channels, Instagram feeds and email chains daily (and it's probably one of the reasons why I go into a panic attack without my phone). But it also brought together some "like minded people" that may not have the best of intentions. People interested in election tampering, pornography, racism, terrorism and violence. In the past four years, Facebook, Google and YouTube have waged battles against the dark side of the human condition.

And recently, TikTok joined that less than prestigious club when the Indian government banned the app for download in the Google and Apple stores for perpetuating "child pornography." The ban lasted two weeks. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) slapped the app with a $5.7M fine for collecting the data of minors. In late April, The Wall Street Journal went as far to call TikTok the "latest reason teens are addicted to their phones."

From my vantage point, this is just the beginning. We've progressed from the "puppies, kittens and rainbow" stage of the internet to seeing firsthand or as close to firsthand the dark side of the internet. These problems and people have always been there - we've either just chosen to ignore them or been entirely unaware of them.

Over the past few years, I've grown disgusted with many of the social media platforms - not because of the impersonal nature of my connections. Rather, because I no longer see the "full" person - I only see what that person wants me to see. A majority of the time - what we see are the happy, not the sad times. As NPR reported in 2017, a drawback of our digital lives is that we often cover up the challenging, unfortunate times.

We publicly refuse to admit there's a problem by not posting or by taking negative thoughts or comments down. We delete the bits and bytes from the internet. We are afraid to tell people that we've failed or struggled. This prevents us from empathizing with and understanding each other.

Unsurprisingly, the side effects of this have manifested in areas like loneliness and mental health. As Vox reported, the number of teens diagnosed with clinical depression increased by thirty-seven percent over a nine year period (2005 - 2014). How terrifying.

However, as Vox points out, there's no conclusive, direct evidence that tech is the cause. From this blogger's perspective, just because there is not a direct link, does not rule it out. The NFL famously claimed for years there was no connection between concussions and later brain injury and we all know how that turned out.

Where does that leave us? In a bit of a bind. There's no stopping the digital train. More and more of our lives will continue migrating to the cloud with our connections to the tangible decreasing. This most likely means that I will become more and more dependent upon my phone (better remember not to lose my phone again...).

So, we need to learn how to bring our full selves onto these platforms - like TikTok, Facebook and Instagram - without fear of rejection, bullying or severe judgment. The operators of these platforms will bear some responsibility on creating those safe spaces either through regulation, fines, choice or all of the above.

Ultimately, the digital Mary should mirror the physical Mary…even if that Mary is not always smiling.