The Sociology of… Technology

My personal quest to bring back analog fun

The Gist of It: I don’t need to tell you technology is doing Bad Things. Here’s the antidote. 

I have a theory that I can’t prove and haven’t formally studied, but, anecdotally, I’m all in on: People no longer have fun. 

I’m talking about REAL fun. The kind of fun where time passes without consciousness. Where you find yourself in an inappropriate giggle loop. Where you lose yourself in the moment. Basically, social flow. Fun and play require flow, and much of that has disappeared from our lives. 

I mostly blame technology. 

[A quick aside on what does and doesn’t count as “fun”: I’m sorry to report that memes, for instance, do not count as fun. They might amuse you, but that’s not the same thing as fun. Fun is also inherently social. This is a bigger topic, which we’ll explore in greater detail in a later month.]

Back to technology. Technology does have the power to fuel a fun-inducing flow-state. Take phone calls. I love a long, interrupted phone call. I still have a few friends that I’ll have two or three hour calls with periodically. We’re not merely “catching up”; we’re storytelling, imagining, and waxing philosophical. It’s a form of adult play.

Maybe part of why that type of phone flow comes so naturally to me is because I’m amongst the group some are calling “the last of the innocents” — people who grew up without the internet. 

We’re a rare breed, coming of age in one world, then transitioning into another shortly after reaching adulthood. We were like techno rookies. We trained for a different game, so we had to learn everything from scratch. But despite being thrust into a mediated existence, “the last of the innocents” also know what it feels like to have nothing to occupy ourselves but chatter. We’ve stared blankly at other humans on the train. We’ve gotten lost in our own thoughts. We know the thrill of FOCUS. The nostalgia (not to mention the increasingly rare ability to make real-time conversation) is strong.

But that was another era. If I’m being honest, I’m not hopeful about the trajectory we’re on with technology. I read think pieces — even and especially on Substack (though I’m not linking to them, cause I don’t wanna start any beef!) — proclaiming that the tide is changing! We’re going to stop scrolling and escape from our perma-online lives! Really? Are we?? I think they must be getting their information from their online info-bubbles that reinforce those daydreams. Because if I observe social behavior in the wild (and I often do) it paints a very different picture. One of doom-scrolling and living for the ‘gram, where every experience is imagined through its future-projected online representation. Will it/I look beautiful? Will it look fun? How are people perceiving of everything I do / see / think?

If you are obsessed with thinking about whether an online audience will validate your firsthand experience, it almost certainly isn’t actually fun in the moment. You have to choose. 

---

The Sociological Hot Take