The designation “family” has traditionally been defined as two or more people related by birth, marriage, or adoption, who reside together to form a core unit. It has eternally served as a foundation for love, support, and shared ideals. The transmogrification of society, from personal to digital, has tragically resulted in it’s observably less intimate conception and dynamic. Such a loss of conjoint identity, in our view, is a notable emotional loss and a persistent factor in the continued erosion of mutual participation and nuanced identification that underpin a happy and secure personal identity and a stable society.
In a much earlier piece, we recalled a common scene from our childhood: our family sitting together in our living room, engrossed in the radio reports on the progress of the Second World War. We listened as individuals, but also thematically, as an impacted unit, a family, mutually anxious for good news. The concern was palpable, but shared, by the “Family” listening mutually and attentively. The anecdotal recollection is representative of the traditional family’s organic nature, shared and, when relevant, comforting or jointly distressing. A member of the family who has achieved publicly recognized kudos from the community, redounded to the honor of the family, as well as the achiever. Analogously, the dynamics of derivative attribution would apply, as well, to a family member’s miscreance.
The traditional family sat down to meals together, often vacationed together, celebrated holidays and birthdays, and shared losses. The stereotypical family was consistently relegated to the established social status, stereotypically conferred on the head of household, the father.; viz., someone might be identified as “the Doctor’s son,” or the Principal’s eldest daughter.
The societally salutary context of “the Family” was tragically transmogrified with the advent and popular use of impersonal digital devices. principally, the “smartphone.” Studies demonstrate the unfortunate morphing of the individual’s perception of the self from the societally salubrious state of a participant in the universal world of social interaction and interdependence to the perceived status as a singular and lonely participant in a cold world of competing strangers. The social and emotional cushion of close family or other close and empathic intimates had become unavailable, inarguably, as a proximate result of the contextual change effected by the computer- altered perceptive dynamics of the societal individual.
There appears to exist a causal and direct relationship between the exponential rate of computer algorithmic innovation, robotization, and other Silicon Valley “advancements,” and the ubiquitous decline of beneficial humanism, generally, and specifically in the case of the “family. Existentially vital thought needs to be given to the irreversible trade-off of the uniquely human and irreplaceable characteristics of Natural Evolution’s generous gift of Homo Sapiens and the ungrateful and self-destructive challenge of digital “progress.”
Nothing to us is as dismaying as the not uncommon scene in which the modern family, at long last, sits down to a rarely attended family dinner, at which the twelve-year old daughter is simultaneously communicating by smartphone, held under the table top to avoid detection.
-p.
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