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Key points
- Concerns about technology’s effects did not originate with the digital age.
- Technology develops faster than the society onto which it is imposed.
- When the technological world no longer mirrors the real world, discrepancies and incongruities become noticeable and raise anxieties.
The digital age has brought many new means of communication, but also concerns about society’s direction of travel and the impacts of technology on the individual. Such concerns are now central to discussions regarding the effects of the digital world. Much research has analysed the relationships between digital usage and mental and physical health problems, but what are the underlying reasons driving digital anxieties? Why are we frightened of this technology, and do we have good reason?
Concerns about technology’s effects are far from new, and certainly did not originate with the digital age. The longevity of the association between technology and anxiety suggests an intractable problem, but also allows the use of previous thinking to illuminate the nature and source of digital anxieties. In fact, a key driver of technology-related anxieties has long been identified as the incongruence, or discrepancy, between the structures of society and the impact of technology, and many psychosocial theories help explain the nature and effects of this incongruence.
One of the few things that psychologists, behavioural scientists, social scientists, evolutionary psychologists, and even politicians agree upon is that the evolution of technology outpaces the evolution of society. That is, technology develops faster than the society onto which it is imposed, and society is left playing "catch up" to deal with technology’s effects. The attractiveness of technology’s immediacy and speed draws people to its usage, and then they find themselves in a new world for which their society has ill-prepared them. The discrepancies between the demands of the real-world and digital world, and incongruities produced by wanting to use technology but being afraid of its poorly understood effects, may be core to the development of digital anxiety.
This suggestion concerning the origins of digital anxiety echoes many previous discussions about new technologies, which grow when the developments of technology and society become out of step with one another. An illuminating analogy underscores this longstanding worry. Plato was concerned about the deleterious impact of writing on cognitions and the epic Homeric tradition of storytelling (Phaedrus, 257c-259c): “If men learn this [writing and reading], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls...They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written…by means of external marks … And it is no true wisdom … but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing.”
The same concerns are expressed 2,000 years later about digital technology in a well-balanced review by Marsh and Rajaram (2019): “… relying on the internet may convey a sense of ownership over external information and reduce the depth of processing that is necessary to make information stick, likely exacerbated by the very speed with which hits are returned in response to one's search terms.”
The reasons such concerns always seem to be raised about technology were discussed at the dawn of the digital age by Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society (1964). Ellul believed that the defining aspect of technology (and this would include digital technology) is "the technique"—the sum of the thought-out methods designed to provide efficient solutions for the current set of societal problems. However, rather than aiding the problems, Ellul claims that "the technique" comes to dominate the society from which it emerged, until the technique: “… eliminates or subordinates the natural world.”
The question begged is: why does technology evolve faster than the world from whence it came, leaving many in a state of incongruence anxiety? Many commentators agree that this is because technology ("the technique") is developed specifically for efficient and speedy reduction of problems. Digital technology speeds up communication—although it is a moot point whether communication quality is improved, as expressed by Sherry Turkle (The Flight from Conversation): “We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.” The immediacy and speed of technology generate its own popularity and, hence, usage.
B.F. Skinner noted that such immediacy is extremely reinforcing, and others have noted that such immediacy gives a sense of control and mastery. Senses of speed, immediacy, and mastery contribute to people embracing technology, and enable technology to evolve more quickly than society (law-making is an immensely slow and tedious business!). However, technology gives a deceptive sense of mastery—not over the "thing-to-be-mastered," but merely over the alleged means of mastery. It is worth remembering that such "false mastery" may be a powerful tool in a marketing arsenal—beware promised solutions to problems, when all that is provided is a distracting toy—meaning technology loses its prime purpose of dealing with society’s problems, and becomes an end-in-itself.
When the technological world no longer mirrors the real world, then the discrepancies and incongruities become noticeable, and the anxieties multiply. This is made worse when the structures of the real world, set up to deal with the effects of the technological universe, have been outstripped. To explain these effects, we can utilise the psychology of Carl Rogers, who noted that incongruence between two sets of beliefs, such as about the real and digital worlds, can be a hotbed of emotional and psychological distress.
Rogers suggested distress results from discrepancies between beliefs about the real-self and the ideal-self, but an expanded concept of incongruence may have a dual application when explaining the origins of digital anxieties—a "societal" and an "individual" sense of incongruence. Society has often evolved means allowing people to tackle conflicts between competing sets of values or norms. However, when these conflicts are associated with forces beyond society’s experience, such as are produced by a rapidly developing digital technology, people are left adrift with fewer rules by which to guide choices.
When "the technique" has displaced and diminished the very societal rules that may have helped, it leaves people with choices between real-world and digital-world norms, but with no help or direction in making them—we can see the incongruities, and that anxiety will readily ensue. This conflict is made worse at an individual level, as there is an incongruity posed by wanting to use digital technology when that technology is known to produce problems—in Rogers’ terms, the "real" is at odds with the "ideal." Again, this incongruence will lead to anxiety.
Thus, a double incongruence exists: a clash between real and digital cultures, and a clash between values of wanting to use digital technology and not. As a result, the origins of digital anxiety are to be found, not only in the direct effects of that technology on individuals’ psychologies, but also in the manner in which such a new, fast-evolving technology cuts through existing societal defenses.
