Julia

“One of the real problems with the breakdown of interpersonal relations in the digital age,” she continued, her voice steadier now, “is that people don’t know how to be intimate anymore. For example—” She stood up even straighter, projected to the crowd. “If we think about our youngest generation, they’re exposed to screens and swipes and scrolling before sticks and mud and dirt. And a lot of these toddlers—a certain demographic—are so scheduled and chaperoned, they’re not engaging in spontaneous play. They’re doing things of course, they’re learning, but they’re not necessarily engaged physically with their environment; they’re not scraping their knees. And what happens to a kid who’s been too supervised?” Her head was pounding. Across her frontal cortex, a throbbing of white light. “It dulls your instincts. And if you lose your instincts, you’re not developing confidence, so as these kids turn into adolescents, sports that require spontaneity and intuition and contact will be terrifying to them. Young people live in a two-dimensional environment,” she continued, despite the fury in her head. “If they make a fool of themselves in the real world, they make a fool of themselves online. Self-conscious adolescents will become self-conscious adults, who are just as worried about faltering in front of their peers as they were when they were teenagers. Eventually, these intimacy-starved humans are going to have to rely on experts to get any sense of comfort. What I’m talking about,” Sloane said, taking air, “is an entire generation of humans who are tactilely bereft.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch