This globalization of ideas, beliefs, and cultures via technology is affecting not only individuals’ original thought, but is altering the way we interact with our physical spaces.

The famous sociologist Émile Durkheim wrote that, given the nature of our societies and the impact they have on our actions, original thought is highly unlikely. We may think that we act upon our own free will, and that all of our thoughts are generating completely by ourselves, but we are largely products of the world around us. In the digital age, we tend to believe that the all of the world’s information and knowledge is at our fingertips, and that by scouring the Web we can come to independent conclusions about the going-ons of the world. But what we are in fact interacting with is a seemingly infinite pool of information, that is aggregated from people, databases, and other inputs which are in themselves products of the societies we live in. Instead of consuming and producing original work and ideas, we are re-creating the world around us in order to fit our personal tastes or ideologies—hence, we are not creating original ideas.

Perhaps we are not even social creatures, as many sociologists believe us to be. Durkeim says that sociability is likely to have “slowly become organized in us”, as our environments have made doing so beneficial to our survival. But as digital societies are now densifying, and people are able to connect according to shared intangible interests and beliefs, it seems as if people are starting to favor impersonal interaction over face-to-face communication. The infamous Karl Marx believed in the idea of commodity fetishism- that social relationships were merely economic relationships between money and commodities. Marx might now describe our current situation as one of ‘communication fetishism’, in which our social relationships are dominated by the digital representations and extensions of ourselves on the Internet, rather than the relationships between our own physical selves (sociologist Guy Dubord deemed this the ‘Society of the Spectacle').

Regardless of whether original thought is unlikely, or if our digital societies are isolating people and commodifying our relationships, the technological revolution is a phenomenon that will not be leaving us anytime soon. Rather than condemn technology as harmful for society, we should take a functionalist standpoint, like Durkheim, and be assured that whatever society has in store for us will turn out for the best, and ultimately prove to be beneficial to mankind.

by charlie stephens