Can we autocorrect humanity?

A Facebook friend of mine share a video, can we autocorrect humanity? I watched the video intently and was amazed at how accurately it describes the way we are today. The video starts by saying that “the average person spends four years of his life looking down at his cell phone.” Considering that it takes less than 4 years to get a bachelor’s degree, this is indeed ironic. It is ironic because technology instead of uniting us it separates us from each other. It is ironic because technology made touch screen easy, but failed to get us to touch each other.  We caress our I-phones, tablets, laptops, and all the gadgets that enslave us more than we caress our spouse, children, and the world at large. 

The video talks about a world of I-phones, I-macs, I-Pads, so many I’s… Yes, so many I’s engrossed in “selfies.”  The cliché phrase “me, myself, and I” have taken a prominent position in our society. I remember a time when I can home from school, immediately dropped my books, changed my school cloths, and ran outside to play with my friends. I ran, played ball, laughed, shared, touched, enjoyed, talked, and did so many other things that enriched my life to the fullest. Today our children come home from school, go to their room, drop their books and immediately grab their I-phone, their tablets, and start to chat, surf the internet, and they can remain there by themselves for many hours on end. Joe Robinson writes,

“It's a little ironic that, as social media pushes the virtual friend count to new heights, the culture as a whole is getting ever more isolated. Researchers say that Americans have fewer close confidants outside family than ever before. One in four have no confidants at all. A study at the University of Michigan reported that 75 percent of college students have lower empathy than their peers did 30 years ago, which isn't going to boost the social cause; neither will a spike in students' narcissism over that same period, documented in research at San Diego State University.”[1]

Two words in this quote call my attention, “empathy” and “narcissism.” Empathy is, according to Merriam-Webster dictionary, “the feeling that you understand and share another person's experiences and emotions: the ability to share someone else's feelings.” The operant meaning in “empathy” is “sharing”.  Sharing in person and up close. Sharing to the point of touching the other person. Imaging how different the story of the Good Samaritan would be in today’s social networking environment. Let's recount the story in our social networking context:

Jesus replied with an illustration: “A Jew going on a trip from Jerusalem to Jericho was looking down his I-phone, when he was attacked by bandits. They stripped him of his I-phone, his clothes and money, and beat him up and left him lying half dead beside the road.

 By chance a Jewish priest came along; and he didn’t see the man lying there because he was reading his email as he was walking, he kind of glanced around to watch where he was walking, and crossed to the other side of the road and passed him by.  A Jewish Temple-assistant  passed by but he was so interested in the postings on Facebook that he walked over and looked at him lying there, but then went on because his attention was focus on the messages on his Timeline.

A Samaritan came along, he was listening to Napoleon Hill’s teaching Think and Grow Rich, and when he saw him, he felt perturbed. He knelt beside him, pulled his I-phone out and called 911.  He thought about helping the man, but he thought this might bring him a lawsuit or something like that. So he stayed there listening to Think and Grow Rich while he waited for the paramedics. The paramedics came and took him to the hospital. He told them to take care of the man. ‘If he got well send me a text at my number,’ he said, ‘I’ll be waiting for it.’

Now what do you think of this story? I know it is an exaggeration, but the point is there. Our society has because self-indulged in their own little world. This is where the word “narcissism” comes to the forefront. “Narcissism” is according psychoanalysts, “self-centeredness arising from failure to distinguish the self from external objects”. Isn’t this what happening in our society? Many of the school shootings in America have been done by “self-centered, deranged, unbalanced individuals that for the most part, lived a submerged existence in the networking media world.

I don’t want to generalize the situation, but the evidence before us is alarming. Dr. Jim Taylor writes,

“Perhaps the most comprehensive study to date found that Facebook overuse among teens was significantly correlated with narcissism. Among young adults, Facebook overuse was also associated with Histrionic Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, and Sadistic, Passive-Aggressive, Borderline, Paranoid, and Somatoform Personality Disorders. This study also explored the strength of Facebook use as a predictor of these psychiatric disorders and found that, even when demographics, such as age, gender, median income, ethnicity, and education were controlled, Facebook use was one of the three strongest predictors.”[2]

The question before us is, can we auto-correct humanity? I believe the question is problematic in itself because we cannot auto-correct humanity when humanity is auto-inflicting their own maladies by ignoring a glaring problem before them.  It's a fact, to solve a problem we must first acknowledge we have a problem, but what is going on is that we know there is a problem, but we want to ignore it and let humanity auto-correct itself. 
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[1] Joe Robinson, “Is Social Networking Destroying Our Social Lives?,” The Huffington Post (blog), February 1, 2011, accessed October 21, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-robinson/social-network_b_816108.html.

[2] Jim Taylor, “The Bad, the Ugly, and the Good of Children's Use of Social Media,” The Huffington Post (blog), May 28, 2013, accessed October 21, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-jim-taylor/the-bad-the-ugly-and-the_b_3346768.htm.