Are we all becoming digital hermits?

We live in an age of hyper-connectivity, but paradoxically, we often face the challenge of connecting with “the other”, whose values, beliefs, faith, opinions and culture may be different from ours. As digital technology has become ever more sophisticated and adept at personalizing and customizing our social experiences, online and off, we are increasingly stuck in our own cultural and moral fiefdoms – “Filter Bubbles”, as Eli Pariser calls them. These are the result of algorithms (used by search engines, social networks, online stores, and other services) programmed to constantly reflect back to us variations of our own image. The more we feed them our “clicks,” our “likes,” and our “choices”, the more of ourselves the algorithms volley back. Soon, if we’re not careful, we will live in a house made of mirrors, surrounded by familiar content that is specifically curated to look and feel “like us”. But who is “not us”?

The “Filter Bubble” effect narrows our ethical sensibilities and our ability to develop moral sentiments for the other, and in fact, may deprive us of our very foundation for respect and tolerance, for civic discourse, and ultimately trust and collaboration. This is because morality is granted through empathy, by feeling with the other, or as the philosopher Hans Jonas described it, by “being for the other.” But how can we be with and for the other if we don’t meet him or her? If algorithms, as our “personal techno-butlers”, make us stay inside our comfort zone, we stop learning; in fact, we unlearn – and the “social graph”, the online manifestation of our social ties and behaviours, may indeed become, to quote Max Weber, the new “iron cage” of our age.

Unless we want to become digital hermits, we ought to look to technology itself for solutions. In fact, digital products, services, and features are powerful vehicles for enabling social discovery, not only based on what we have in common but also on what distinguishes us. They can add friction, increase our exposure to the other instead of minimizing it, and reward us for doing so. Imagine a social network that connects the “unlike-minded”; a location-based ad-hoc mentoring app across generations or communities; a search engine feature that recommends opinions diametrically opposed to ours; a travel service that offers trips and trip buddies by deliberately “mismatching” our profiles; or a conference app that presents sessions outside of our industry focus or field of expertise.

These may be just some naïve examples, but they illustrate the broader mindset shift that is desired: we must innovate against what Evan Selinger characterizes as the social ethic of “technological efficiency and frictionless sharing” and counter “solutionism” with “discomfort zones” that challenge our assumptions and take us outside of our increasingly small worlds. We must move from a notion of technology that facilitates social expediency, predictability and comfort, to one that allows ambiguity, serendipity and discomfort: the very traits that make us human and keep us from succumbing to an “algorithmic” world view.

Author: Tim Leberecht is the chief marketing officer of NBBJ, a global design and architecture firm, and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Values. He co-hosts the Silicon Values dinner series and is the author of the upcoming book “The Business Romantic; Creating Experiences, Organizations, and Things That Mean More” (HarperCollins, 2014).

Image: A woman surfs the web in Seoul REUTERS/You Sung-Ho