S T A T E M E N T

In the last 24 hours, my six
friends and I collectively sent 374
texts in a group chat coming up on
its five-year anniversary. And this
was a slow day.
Calling Tinder matches “pen
pals,”
all-caps
play-by-play
reactions to the new “Matilda”
movie, pictures of people we haven’t
spoken to in years that seem to
reappear all too often. Texts like “im
wearing a headband” and “a grown
man is sitting next to me on the
plane watching lyle lyle crocodile.”
Texts like “i feel like an empty shell
of a person” received soon after “my
mom j texted me that my plane is
moving as if i’m not on it.”
There is nothing — like really,
nothing — we haven’t discussed
over text. Nasty situationship
breakups, coming out of the
closet and going back in, odd
consistencies of period blood. Four
and a half years of overcoming
physical
distance
and
digital
hurdles have eradicated any and
all attempts at censorship. It feels
abominably rare to find a singular
space in this world that holds
absolutely zero judgment — and

maybe even more rare for that
space to transcend the confines of
tangibility.
Though the seven of us went
to different high schools and
subsequently shipped off to colleges
divided by expensive plane rides
apart, the group chat’s activity
has
somehow
never
wavered.
What began as a way for us to stay
connected in between high school
weekends
became
an
integral
piece of understanding ourselves,
each other and the independent
worlds we’ve transversed. The
permanent group chat name is
“extensions of self” for good reason;
it seems that no matter where we go
physically, our bizarrely comforting
codependence finds a way to make
itself at home.
For as long as we’ve been
friends, in-person interaction has
been the exception, not the rule.
From our former lack of driver’s
licenses to a global pandemic
to our current collegiate lives,
we’ve rarely been able to spend
consistent time together over
the years. But amid the gaping
hole that occupies the space of
our in-person relationships, a
much more sentient realization
exists: the affordances of modern
technology have, against all odds,
made each of our lives substantially

better. And it makes me think that
maybe, just maybe, there is a world
in which we are less than doomed
to live in the emotionless digital
dystopia we’re told is imminent.
On the edge of a precipice
In the last almost-three years,
“unprecedented” has become a
notoriously ineffective buzzword.
If everything is “unprecedented,”
the word loses its meaning entirely.
Though a pandemic exactly like
the one we experienced under
the exact social and technological
conditions of today’s world has
never happened before, human
nature has always been subject to
the same problems and fears that
dominated life in 2020: a lack of
interpersonal connection, anxiety
about humanity’s ability to resolve
a life-threatening conflict and an
overwhelming hunger to return to
a mythical stability that was really
never all that stable.
Writer and professor Jason
Farman cites a few examples
of
the
“unprecedented”
trope
in his essay “The Myth of the
Disconnected Life.” Throughout
the last 200 years, everything
from kaleidoscopes to landline
telephones to bicycles have been
criticized for being the “beginning
of the end” for human connection.
Farman’s decade-old piece itself

predates many of the products
that dominate today’s existential
technological worries.
Farman says even Plato was
against writing, arguing that it
would “disconnect us from the
meaningful presence that comes
with face-to-face interactions.”
And yet here we are.
In
his
seminal
1939
essay
“Learning in Wartime,” writer
C.S. Lewis reminds a World War
II-ravaged society that the state
of the world, though jarring
and nerve-wracking, is not as
“unprecedented” as they thought.
“The war creates no absolutely
new situation: it simply aggravates
the permanent human condition
so that we can no longer ignore
it,” he wrote. “Human life has
always been lived on the edge of
a precipice. Human culture has
always had to exist under the
shadow of something infinitely
more important than itself.”
In
a
world
chock-full
of
algorithms and devices that seem
to be suspiciously morphing into a
critically acclaimed Black Mirror
episode, it’s easy to feel bogged
down by the “unprecedented.”
An ever-increasing reliance on
modern technologies presents an
easy avenue for looming fear. But
Lewis presented a caveat from the

assumption that a major societal
shift inherently qualifies as the
jumping-off point for the end of the
world. Lewis knew that humanity’s
motivation to survive was much
bigger than whatever an era’s
“unprecedented” scenario may be.
There’s the artificial intelligence
platform that could destroy literacy
forever. And the GPS trackers that
are kidnapping women and stealing
cars. And, maybe most familiarly,
social media platforms working
so hard to keep our attention that
losing yourself in a sea of smiley
pictures of people you hate and ads
for shoes you won’t buy is often an
hourly occurrence.
There’s so much to be wary of.
And more than that, there is just so
much. Opening my phone can feel
like allowing an army to stampede
and invade my consciousness,
giving them permission to the
pieces of me worth preserving and
putting them up for sale. Even when
I’m trying to engage in something
I believe is beyond the noise, I
find yet another accredited news
institution publishing an article that
indiscreetly aims to unnecessarily
scare me into confusion (and a
subsequent subscription).
Radically imagining a better
future
How we interact with technology

depends on how we understand
its place in our little, individual
universes.
I asked everyone I thought
would answer what their favorite
part of modern technology was.
My dad’s favorite is having an
in-depth encyclopedia always at his
fingertips. Friends answers varied
from making memes of other friends
to maintaining connections with
people as geographical distances
expand. When I ask myself what
part of online modernity I most
value, it’s the ability to visually
remind myself of all the love and
growth in my life. It’s the access to
photos and messages and ideas that
simultaneously ground and inspire
me if I look at them right.
The technological affordances
that permeate daily life depend
on our own identities, needs and
interests. In the oversaturated,
fragmented media environment
we inhabit, it is impossible —
and probably inadvisable — to
try to consume everything. But
on the coattails of that truth is a
substantial net positive: a digital
world at your fingertips provides
the autonomy to cultivate a
technological
experience
that
solely serves your best interest.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
5 — Wednesday, January 18, 2023

Rethinking our digital future

EMILY BLUMBERG
Statement Contributor

Design by Francie Ahrens

When I was younger, I lived
in Tiāntán, Běijīng. I was walking
distance away from the Temple
of Heaven — a sacred place —
but my Eden was a rectangular
arrangement of shrubs in the
courtyard of my apartment, with
a little hole that I would crawl
through and into the area inside.
That patch of bushes profoundly
changed me! It was the only peace
I’d ever found in my life. And now, a

more normal writer, recognizing the
intrigue they’ve assembled, would
softly guide the reader down into a
satisfying conclusion, filling your
mind with lavish sensory details
about what that patch of bushes was
like, but I’ll let you know that this
is not really the story I want to tell.
I don’t want to write something to
you that reads like a cliché college
application essay — how I “lost
my home and am struggling to fit
in in America and look at all the
challenges in my life” or whatever.
I want to suggest something beyond
“perfect patchwork grass and notes

of magnolias in the air,” et cetera,
and instead settle on something
beyond memory. Whether or not I
succeed is up to you.
A couple of years later I would
immigrate to the United States. I
got back from school one day when
I was 8 years old, and my father
told me we would be taking a short
trip. Then he took me on the biggest
airplane I’d ever seen. I looked out
the window into the deep, primordial
blue of the ocean and at that
moment, I realized that suddenly,
my country, my language and my
mother were gone. For a period of six

years I couldn’t go back, and when
I eventually did, I became a traitor:
a serpentine, Germanic language
flowing more beautifully through my
mind than Mandarin could — but the
noosphere, that realm of knowledge,
knows what it wants. Chinese rests
on the back of my tongue; I reach for
it in my back pocket and to this day
it’s uncorrupted, words coming out
ringing true, pure bell-like tones.
I’m reminded of that irony
whenever I speak English, looking
into myself through the mirror.
Thanks. Thanks. “I don’t know, I
feel like whenever I hear someone

else make that -th sound, there’s
like a nice, sibilant crispness, like,
through it,” I say to a friend, both of
us hunched in the corner of a room.
“Whenever I say it, it sounds soft and
soggy. I don’t know.”
She lets out an embarrassed sigh.
“Okay, you’re going to kill me,” she
started, “but you told me to correct
you. It’s sibilant, not sybilant.”
“Oh, ok,” I sink, “thanks.
Thanks. Thanks.”
“Xièxiè,” I say when I first revisit
China at an intersection in Qiánmén,
lying through my teeth. I come back
five years later and people assume

that I never left. I’m invisible as I walk
by the storefronts, no one perking
their ears at a misplaced phonetic.
I’m a foreign spy in my homeland,
waiting with bated breath until my
limited vocabulary gives up the guise.
But, with a feeling I can’t shake, I still
feel oddly comfortable here, more
than I did maybe anywhere in the
U.S. Among a torrent of black hair, I
recede back into the natural rhythm
of life, with a tonal language rocking
me back and forth into submission,
akin to a mother’s lullaby.

Trying for a world beyond language

DARRIN ZHOU
Statement Columnist

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Ani DiFranco Patty Griffin St. Paul & The Broken Bones

GINA CHAVEZ JARED DECK BAND OSHIMA BROTHERS KYSHONA

emcee PETER MULVEY with SISTASTRINGS

with special guest appearance by PARKER MILLSAP

B A N K O F A N N A R B O R P R E S E N T S

A FUNDR AISER FOR

SATURDAY 6:30PM
JANUARY 28

HILL AUDITORIUM
FOLKFEST

F O R T Y - S I X T H A N N U A L

A N N A R B O R

23
20

T I C K E T S O N S A L E N O W @ T H E A R K . O R G

Read more at MichiganDaily.com