As a disclaimer, let me just start by saying that my generation has done a lot of good advancement for the human species in terms of technology. I think we millennials get a lot of flack for being the generation that doesn’t know how to relate to people properly or that has become lazy because of all the technological advancements we’ve had in our lifetimes. When each iPhone upgrade comes out, there is a new grumbling, elderly person, complaining about it no longer being the “good ole’ days” when they all had to walk seven miles uphill in the snow to get to school. So, to my fellow millennial’s: listen to me very closely.

I’m not here to condemn anyone for the struggles of this era and the people who live in it. I don’t want to throw my generation under the bus or be someone that hates everything about the age they were born into.

That being said, here’s the deal: there really is some truth to the complaints about technology, specifically about social media. We, as a generation and a people, have to think very carefully about the effects that internet technology and social media have on us in order to care best for the future generations.

This is not just an opportunity for our elders to scowl upon us and complain about how the world is so messed up today. This is an opportunity for us, as humans that care for our own well-being and health, to evaluate what being human means and how we can best fulfill that in the future, specifically in relation to technological advancements. It’s a discussion that we should all be a part of in order to find the truth about technology. So, here’s my contribution to the discussion.

Technology in of itself is not bad. In our time, we’ve seen some truly excellent advances in technology that have saved lives or made astounding changes in people’s day-to-day living. In my own life, I’ve witnessed a lot of beautiful art that’s resulted from the advancement of computers and smartphones — art that I would have no opportunity to see except through Instagram. It truly has some wonderful benefits that have changed our age for the better.

However, whether we like it nor not, we have to face the fact that smartphones and social media really do have a great effect on us, both psychologically and spiritually. They affect how our brain tells us to interact with the people and objects around us. If we’re ever in an uncomfortable situation, we just have to pull out our phones and be entertained by Facebook so as to avoid dwelling in awkwardness. Sometimes, we know more about people from stalking their Instagram accounts than from ever actually talking to them. We can communicate with people through the tapping of our thumbs on a screen long before we ever actually have to walk up to them, look them in the eyes and use our mouths to have a conversation. Communication has never been so quick and efficient, but it’s also never been so unnatural or impersonal. Is efficiency of speed in communication worth it? Or are there only certain places where it should be permitted to communicate in this way?

Smartphones also affect how we view our own bodily orientation in relation to an object. Our phones have become the one object we consistently keep right by our sides in order to have it ready at any time. We often feel uncomfortable if it’s not on our immediate person and become frantic when we lose it in the cushions of a couch. Some of you are probably even reading this article on a smartphone. You see how you’re putting your thumb to a screen and expecting it to produce different images or move in an upward or downward direction? That’s because your brain has produced the synapses that tell you what to expect from a touch screen when you handle it differently. Touching a screen and expecting to be stimulated by a certain image or sound has become so natural to our understanding of the physical world around us. Technology has certainly had a large effect on our brains’ psychology. Our brains interact with the environment differently than they did a hundred years ago. Those psychological changes are not necessarily inherently good or bad, but they are certainly different and should, therefore, be evaluated.

Although, aside from all the more common arguments against social media, there’s an entirely different reason social media has become so destructive that I had never even thought about. The other day, in my ethics class, my professor asked us what we thought about smartphone usage and whether or not we believed it to be a good or bad thing. I was about ready to attempt to be the optimist of the group, saying that technology doesn’t necessarily deserve all the flack it gets and that it’s actually done a lot of good things for our culture. I still stand by the fact that technology has done some really amazing things for our culture, but another classmate of mine brought up a point that really convicted me about our use of social media. He pointed out, after reading an article by Tony Reinke, that social media has trained and encouraged us to interact with the world almost solely in reactionary ways.

We’ve trained ourselves into really valuing our reactions to the images we see and the sounds we hear and the words we read. When we scroll through a social media source, we don’t properly consider exactly what makes up the stimuli which we’re receiving. We recognize it as a sound or an image or some words, but we don’t ever actually correctly think about what it means for that stimuli to exist. When we see a pleasing photo or work of art when scrolling through Instagram, we don’t typically stop and think about the artist’s intent for the display or exactly what they meant in creating it. Similarly, when we quickly scroll our thumb through Facebook or Snapchat and see something distasteful or wicked, we don’t stop and mourn for what is actually occurring in that image or video. We react in a way that says we know it’s gross or bad, but we’ve been trained to simply have that reaction and carry on rather than properly think about why exactly that image is so twisted and wrong. Social media is there solely for our reactions. We even have an attractively simple button on the bottom of pictures and statuses that allows us to simply say we “like” it without actually having to do anything further. It becomes more of a nasty habit to only think of the things we see on the internet in terms of whether or not they were properly stimulating and to not actually consider what they mean in the presence of our world. For all the reasons social media is more likely a tragedy than a benefit to our generation, I think this is the biggest reason of them all. We are in danger of becoming more and more desensitized to the things in our world that should properly make us weep or rejoice, not just press the like button for.

Technology really has a lot of wonderful aspects and has the ability to promote things that are true, good and beautiful. But, because our generation is so blessed with all these technological advancements and developments which infiltrate our society, it’s a topic we simply must discuss. We have to deal with this issue delicately and be sure that our future generations are going to be raised in a way that will produce the best kind of flourishing human lives. This is an important issue, not to grumble or be prejudiced about, but to earnestly and honestly discuss in order to deal with these advancements in the most humane and good way.

I don’t want to disown my own generation. I know we’ve come really far in a lot of ways and that we’re debating a lot of things about our future right now. We have a lot of things to talk about. I don’t want to look down on my generation from the pedestal that elevates me and says I’ve figured out the answer to all our problems because that’s not the case at all. I just want us to have a healthy conversation about how technology is affecting our lives in order for us to live as fully as we can. Please, let’s talk about this.