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

