So much of our daily activities now are supported or enveloped by the use of technologies that we designed in order to make our lives easier. I am reminded of something discussed in the In the Age of AI documentary viewed in class: For centuries advancements in technology have brought with them so much shared benefit, improving our quality of life with inventions like the telephone to allow us to better and more quickly communicate with one another or dishwashers and washing machines that helped in women’s liberation. Technological advancements became so trusted based on historical patterns of forward progress that no one realized once we rounded what we can see now to have been a peculiar bend in the ways in which technology impacts us individually and societally.

the same phone I had and reviled!

My personal relationship with technology does not resemble that of most of my peers due to my upbringing and personal values. My parents limited screen time when I was a kid and I was only allowed to watch things that were prescreened by them. I was not allowed to play violent video games, nor watch popular kids shows like SpongeBob or iCarly. I got my first phone, a flip phone of which I was so embarrassed that I continued to tell my friends that I did not have a phone at all, when I was thirteen for the sole purpose of my parents’ convenience so that they didn’t have to wait in parking lots at myextracurricular events and I could just call them to pick me up. I got an iPhone at fifteen, years after my peers, and I wasn’t allowed any type of social media nor unsupervised internet usage until I was eighteen. Suffice to say I was not exposed to many things for a long time, for better or worse. One positive outcome of my parents’ choices is that I am far less dependent on my personal devices than many of my peers are. While “healthy” seems a stretch when describing my relationship with technology, I hesitate to call it unhealthy when put in perspective of others my age. What I can say definitively is that I am in a constant state of anxious self-questioning, and my technology habits are not exempt from scrutiny.

I often worry about what technology, the internet, and the unfathomable amount of information available to us is doing to society. I strongly suspect that people are getting dumber on average as a result. Not only that, but I think that the world is a safer, more comforting place for low-intellect people than it ever has been. Occasionally I will come across someone who makes me wonder how easy life would be without critical reasoning skills. The internet creates havens for all kinds of thought—good, bad; smart, stupid—and these havens have consequences. We create for ourselves a like-minded virtual community where ideas can be expressed and, by exposing ourselves to some (even like-minded people are gonna disagree sometimes) but very minimized challengers (I don’t even want to engage with people unlike myself), we give ourselves the illusion of contributing to the marketplace of ideas. Similarly to watching horror movies in order to feel the fear and adrenaline we no longer experience regularly as prey, we are all a little egotistical and want to feel smart, so we simulate scenarios in which we can. These stacked-deck sounding boards we find for ourselves allow us to feel smart and be opinionated without facing any real counterarguments or having to do any critical self-evaluation. These echo chambers feed individualism, which is already a problem for Americans, and narcissism.

A very common example of this phenomenon occurs on social media platforms that allow users to post video content such as Instagram Reels and TikTok. Content viewers are so used to the algorithm catering to their specific interests that when something that does not pertain to them comes across their feed they often react childishly. For instance, in a video where a woman is doing her makeup or getting dressed for her day, there will be hordes of men, and some women, commenting that they don’t like the outfit (too slutty, too expensive) and that they wish women didn’t act like that (attention-seeking, pretentious). And I, reading these in horror, wonder why they didn’t just keep scrolling if they didn’t like it. I watched one video, which I can’t find now due to the large amount of media I consume, where an Asian woman shares

her favorite way to prepare eggs with chili oil, a suggestion I took, loved, and will now use forever. I checked the comment section upon finishing her video, hoping to find some credible reviews before I tried it or other cool things people do to their eggs. Instead, the comment section was absolutely brimming with these self-centered comments, one user telling the woman that they wished Asians weren’t always making things spicy because they personally don’t like spicy food, another saying that they don’t like the taste of chili oil and requesting a new video using a substitute, and yet another saying that they are vegan and don’t eat eggs.

The answer to my question about why these people didn’t just keep scrolling is that they were so offended that they were shown something that they didn’t want, likely not even realizing that commenting on something, no matter the sentiments expressed in the comment, boosts the algorithm, both helping the video they didn’t like to reach more people and increasing the likelihood that similar videos will be shown to them later (another instance of those missing reasoning skills). People have become so dependent on AI adapting the world to them that they’ve lost the ability to ignore or interact respectfully with content that does not interest or pertain to them. This AI-bred narcissism can be found in just about any comment section in some form and it’s sickening. There are things to be learned and gained from having poor experiences and having to put up with things you don’t like, and by removing everything from view that contradicts any aspect of a person’s belief or interest profile, you effectively lock them in that echo chamber and they become worse for it, which is a phenomenon I see becoming a huge issue in the very near future.