How Mobile Technology causes Social Isolation

We are living in an age which is dominated by electronic devices and now more than any other tech gadgets mobile devices are playing the most influential role in shaping the psychological as well as physical being of modern man. Until few years before mobile phone was said to replace many types of communications like trunk calls, letters, telephonic communication through static land line phones, etc. but with the advent of multimedia and Internet facility on mobile phone mobile technology evolved as formidable so as to become a viable option even for many functionalities earlier attached with computing devices. Now to get in touch with your email facility is as easy as to viewing a phone number in the contact folder of your mobile. These enormous changes in the technology front revolutionized the mindset of people in regard to their relation with everyday reality. Now we are more accustomed to depend on our hand held device to communicate to our friends, family, relatives and acquaintances rather than encountering them physically. Words and use of words are everything, there's hardly any need to relate physical expression or body language and silence in between words are just a sign of labor of expression rather than any indication toward a secondary meaning of the verbal or written words. If all these delicate crisis of communication are felt too much as a burden of technological progress, you always have the option of conducting video conference on your mobile screen just by using a compatible handset and opting for the service feature from your network and connection provider. Just sitting in a distant island with a state of the art mobile device and service package you can be connected with your people for days and months and years long. Just sitting at your dinner table you can go on chatting with your friends with the help of social networking. Every now and then over the global interactive space of Internet you can venture to meet and share your ideas with a stranger and consequently all those strange meeting places in the bus stop or at the corner of cafeteria are simply irrelevant and involves more risks of wastage of time than the direct and cleverly fabricated as well as free space of Internet. All these and many more factors are acting as potential epicenter for the birth of new meaning to our individual as well as social life which as conceived in our present perception are artifices of freedom and free association. Moreover the rigorous business objectives and mechanisms of globalization are too apt to convince us of the greatness and intensity of this unbound freedom that the technology offers. How at one end we are experiencing new dimensions of freedom and at the other end we are shackled by the new hyper reality of technological innovations that would determine the context in which we have make our enquiry of how mobile technology causes more social isolation.

The freedom of choice and social isolation

The freedom is the most frequently used word by the theoretical advocates of globalization. We would zoom in our focus on the real character of this freedom and how it through the evolving market place of mobile technology causes social isolation. Like any goods in market driven consumer society the choice is huge in respect of choosing electronic devices. Moreover the market with its evolution with technological innovations is apt to increase its offers of new usefulness and corresponding technologies. Mobile or cell phone being the most evolving and happening zone for more than a decade offers greatest variety of choice compared to other categories of products. But the choice being enormous and most varied isn't it entirely driven by the producer companies? First you are indoctrinated in the spell of new as well as unthought-of brilliance which is likely to arouse your possessive ambition and with it almost the half of the work is done. In the next step the technology would attain a higher social stigma and would stir the bottom of your heart with anguish over the pride and greed involved in relation to its possession. Gradually the sweet spell of thinking about the product would engulf you and one day you would end up in buying your so called dream device. But the spell is always there and dream is continued with enough such milestones to follow. The freedom experienced under this spell is a hallucination in thinking that you can replace all your natural wishes and joys with technological devices at your side. But in reality, you are losing all your primary and primordially acquired freedoms. In social place the meeting and free association of individuals from various familial or social places are steadily decreasing, almost to the effect of replacing the many of the grounds of physical contact. Mobile technology is driving your choice of your human contact and relations. It is all database and numbers which all are waiting for your application to consume them and process them with least time consuming exactitude. Can we at all call this a relationship or human contact where all we are likely to do is to share information with precise objectives like a robot? No doubt we all do not actually do this through our high-end mobile devices and try to deal with our surrounding with the same emotion and empathy as in real life but in doing so it becomes insincere and falls in the categories of games or feeble shows or almost takes the shape of playing a role. Thus technology makes fun of you without your knowing it. From social networking to a graphic game of football, from online astrologer to language classes, from video chat with your shuffled friends to internet banking pranami to your spiritual guru, all are just on your mobile screen. By having all so easily at your fingertips you have actually lost the essential bond with them, the real value or meaning of each relation and thus you have only the mobile threads with everything in this world and in essence you are most isolated. When we say that mobile technology causes social isolation, to understand the statement you have to start thinking from your essential naked reality upon the earth and juxtapose this theme beside your present situation.

Actually the consumerist greed that precedes the onset of many consumer devices just as the mobile technology causes social isolation. Only with our conscious faculty of putting a barrier to the extreme level of use of these devices we can take a step forward to put a stop to the replacement of our sense of reality and it is crucial for our human values so as not to lose all our real bonds and earthly treasures in the process of this camouflage and mockery.