Hello?
*ring ring*
HELLO?
*ring ring*
Is anyone there?…
This is an all too familiar scenario, right? Trying to arrange a date, a coffee, or to find out if there was reading for the seminar you have in 20 minutes. Despite us all having a phone, we are patched, pied, or left alone at the edge of this digital-social universe. Be it an iPhone 6, 14, or 86 coming soon, Samsung, Google, Huawei, or the trusty Nokia Brick. Or a laptop, desktop, iPad loaded with a uni email, personal email, Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, iCloud, then maybe your personal social concoction of Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, iMessage, Whatsapp, work number, home number, personal number, and many more.
Our ability to be connected is more advanced than ever. On our little planet of 7.95 billion people there are over 8.58 billion mobile subscriptions in use: we are out-populated by our little black screens. There are 7.9 billion email accounts worldwide – think of all that two step verification. This results in 347 billion emails being sent and received every day, pinging through the air replacing the trusty messenger pigeon. We are living in the height of our technological development; long gone is the need to encode a message in morse code, dial a landline, or fax a tax document. Thanks to the Silicon Valley Bros, yes Zuckerberg I’m looking at you here, we have entered a new age which combines our most innate human desire to feel connected with the vice of our generation – technology.
Our drive to connect with other people and form relationships is not just a whimsical motivation or casual coincidence. Social connection is an essential human need which has provided many advantages for survival, and we can thank our hominid ancestors for this. Put simply, we found strength and safety in numbers – no wonder we are drawn to that corner of the internet where we can indulge in sub culture groups and fan bases. Anthropologists have claimed that the reason why humans developed such large brains compared to our friends in the animal kingdom was so that we could deal with the growth and complexity of social interactions and social networks. They showed that a species’ group size was the strongest predictor of the size of an animal’s neocortex (the outermost part of the brain). The bigger the group, the bigger the brain. The act of navigating the tempest of numerous social interactions, relationships, and networks was so cognitively demanding we had to develop bigger brains to accommodate it. Just like we update our apps to send and receive messages quicker, we upgraded to bigger brains in order to connect.
Neuroscientists have used a form of MRI scanning to better understand how our brain functions to support us socially. Researchers have found that there are two distinct brain networks: social and non-social thinking. Our social brain network is always activated, regardless of if we are engaged in a social or non-social task (texting vs doing a sudoku). But what’s most interesting is what the brain does when we’re not doing anything, when we’re just lying in bed and our social brain network remains engaged. When finished with a non-social task and the sudoku is complete, the social brain turns back on almost instantly like a reflex. Our brain’s default mode is social. This results in that sinking feeling in your gut when being left on read or the phone going to voicemail.
I felt this recently. When going on my first. Ever. Date…Yes, a baddie like me was left waiting on Byres road by a boy in a band. It happens to the best of us. While frantically ringing my mother in utter despair at this feeble “man’s” (a generous term I’m aware) inability to answer the phone – my mother, an epic LOTR fan, came out with a belter:
‘IT WOULD BE QUICKER TO LIGHT THE BLOODY BEACONS!’
If you are a deprived soul who is unconscious of the beautiful work of Lord of the Rings, I take great pity on you as the lighting of the beacons of Gondor is a cinematic masterpiece. As the beginning stages of the final battle looms, large bonfires lie dormant across the mountain skyline of the cities of men ready to blaze a bright burning light to communicate the need for aid. Pippin (one of the good guys) sneakily lights the beacons, and within a montage of what feels like minutes the message is sent and received. Aragorn (the sexy fella with the long hair and even longer sword) bursts through the doors to proclaim ‘GONDOR CALLS FOR AID’. How is it with all these modern means of communication at our literal fingertips, that the ability to contact someone feels impossible? It inevitably feels like it would be faster to embrace a more primitive and effective means of communication and light the beacons of Gondor than to send a message on Hinge.
This new sense of connection paradoxically creates a desire to be disconnected. In a study done for Student Edge with Vodafone, of 1000 people 25.9 said they had their phone on Do Not Disturb most of the time, and 17.6 said their phones were turned off all of the time. Homosapians – the creators of societies, the builders of pyramids, and splitters of the atom – have been reduced to quivering wrecks by a simple red circle of pixels on the top right corner of our apps with a number slowly rising inside.
While there is a tiny, weeny, little, baby possibility that this isn’t a universal problem and that maybe people just don’t want to answer my calls and don’t like my Hinge, I am utterly unwilling to admit that. So, in the meantime I’m going to sit with my iPhone 13 on Do Not Disturb and ponder in a never-ending pit of anxiety, somewhat satiated by my sertraline, if our appetite for human connection and communication can be quenched in this new digital age. Or should we reject modernity, embrace tradition, and light the bloody beacons on goddamn fire?
Sources:
Swan Soul Stories 
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