Nearly anywhere you look, and for some reason especially on social media, you can find them: articles, photos, cartoons, advertisements, even memes criticizing our frequent use of technology — shaming us for using cellphones, watching TV, basically paying attention to anything with a screen instead of actually interacting with other people.
In a recent art exhibit, Eric Pickersgill’s “Removed,” the artist took black and white portraits of people using their cellphones, but with the cellphone removed so the subjects appear to be staring into the palm of their hands, oblivious to the rest of the world. The lack of color in the photographs adds to the bleakness of the subjects lives without phones, they seem not to care about anything but the now absent phones.
This is only one example of the mass of media disparaging the use of technology in our daily lives, from photos of people on buses and subways with their faces lit by a dim blue glow, to studies which criticize the amount of people who would prefer a cellphone to a car.
The most frequent targets of this criticism are millennials, members of the generation born between the mid-1980s and about 2000. The group is also nicknamed “The Me Generation” or “The Always On Generation,” made famous by the cover of Time magazine of a teenage girl taking a selfie under the title “The Me Me Me Generation,” decrying millennials as “lazy, entitled narcissists” — and that was just on the cover. Articles, including this one, seem intent on guilting this generation into putting down their cellphones and never taking a selfie again, and hopefully stopping us from ever using modern technology again. Technology is, apparently, an evil entity which is destroying society as a whole. But maybe older generations just watched a few too many science fiction movies.
I would like to offer an alternative view — sure, you can be addicted to technology in a way that can be unhealthy, but most of our generation is using technology to better effect than any generation before it. We use computers to hold a fairly complete summary of human knowledge that can be called up whenever we want, and through cellphones this knowledge is available to billions of people. According to the GSM Association, a group of cell service providers, nearly 3.8 billion people worldwide have cellphones, giving people in remote places access to knowledge that was previously far too expensive to access.
But the benefits of mobile phones far exceed this. Mobile phones allow us to be in contact with our friends, family and loved ones whenever we like, no matter where they are. Some, like Pickersgill, would imply that we ignore people when we only pay attention to our phone, but how much of that time on phones is spent talking, sharing photos and otherwise communicating with the people we care about. And yet, we are shamed for using our cell phones in public.
Selfies are an especially popular topic for shaming. Recently at an Arizona Diamondback game, a group of girls who were taking selfies were ridiculed on camera by the Arizona Diamondbacks announcers Bob Brenly and Steve Berthiaume, who seemed much more entertained by making fun of the girls than the game. They made comments such as, “That’s the best one of the 300 pictures I took of myself today.”
Selfies are a way of remembering a moment or sharing your experience with others who cannot be with you. They should never be something to be ashamed of, yet people constantly shame others for them, as if taking a photo to remember a moment is something you should be embarrassed about. Apparently, appreciating how you look is something to be ridiculed now. But selfies should be something to appreciate. People should not be shamed for doing something they enjoy which hurts nobody.
Add to this selfie sticks, which some would have you believe are precursors to the fall of civilization itself, and publicly celebrate when a public place bans them. Rarely do you hear a reason for the selfie stick outrage other than supposed narcissism, just another way of shaming for no real reason. People should be allowed to have memories without being embarrassed by any random passerby.
Social media is a whole other topic, but the shaming is similar to that of cell phones and selfies. Perhaps some will think our generation is too reliant on cellphones and too narcissistic for its own good. But the next time you feel like making fun of someone taking a selfie, or feel like sharing that post mocking people for spending their day with their nose in a phone, try not to listen to those that tell you this is something to be ashamed of.
Think about the why. Maybe they’re talking to someone far away who they rarely get to communicate with, or they want the selfie to remember something important that happened to them today. Or maybe not. Maybe they were just bored, or really liked how their hair looked.
But why should they be embarrassed about that?
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