In his book, "Living Into Focus," Arthur Boers cites Richard E. Sclove’s writing about a village in Spain. The residents relied on a fountain near the middle of the town for getting fresh water and washing clothes. Innovation came and gifted the villagers with pipes which ran water directly to their homes. They no longer had to go to the fountain every day and haul water back home with donkeys. The result was that the fountain, once a place of constant social interaction among villagers as they chatted while washing clothes or fetching water, became almost abandoned. This contributed to a weakening in the social bonds and relationships that were once strong among the villagers.
Social bonds and communal relationships are vitally important because not only do they improve quality of life, but in some cases they can be the difference between life and death. Take the example of Roseto, a Pennsylvania mining town filled with Italian immigrants in the 1950s. Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the townspeople and observed how in an age where heart disease and cholesterol related deaths were prevalent across America, the Rosetans were mostly unaffected. Boers writes, “Also notable was the absence of suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, crime and ulcers. No one was on welfare. Old age was pretty much the only cause of death.” Rosetans were surviving and thriving despite their unhealthy diets and lack of proper exercise. Gladwell’s observation was, “Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world.” Stewart Wolf, who also studied the town, also deduced the cause was how the townspeople related to each other. Their communal bonds were stronger than in other towns and this contributed to the Rosetans’ good health and lack of crime, suicide, and drug addiction.
Based on this study, it can be reasonably assumed that if other communities possessed strong social bonds, built on constant interaction outside of a virtual environment, then people’s quality of life would improve substantially. The problem is technology often comes in and we allow it to inadvertently disintegrate communal bonds and thereby isolate people. In the case of the Spanish villagers, the severing of communal bonds and resulting isolation was the cost of modern plumbing. With Americans it has been devices such as smartphones, computers, tablets, and televisions which have isolated people. Boers states, “As communication technologies evolve, our quality of life declines.” Norman Nie is more specific when he says, “The Internet could be the ultimate isolating technology that further reduces our participation in communities even more than did automobiles and television before it.”
Technology is simultaneously benefiting us by increasing our comfort, but also narrowing our communal relationships and displacing our priorities because we allow it to do so. Ironically in an age where everyone is more interconnected than ever, we continue to get further disconnected from each other.
