(Dis) Connected review – the survival guide for how to stay human online
Dis (Connected): How to Stay Human in an Online World by Emma Gannon (Hodder & Stoughton), £9.99.
Technology — will it save humanity or destroy it? It’s a critical question and one that will remain significant for the foreseeable future. Since the “birthday of the internet” in January 1983, technology has made colossal strides, best characterised by the rapid — albeit unnerving — creation of artificial intelligence (AI). Unsurprisingly, as technology becomes successively more sophisticated, we as a society are spending more of our waking hours online. In fact, at the time of writing, there are 4.88 billion users in the world today. From New Zealand to New York, a cacophony of pings, swipes and clicks in every corner of the globe.
Initially, just a static network designed to shuttle small freight of bytes or a short message between two terminals, the internet can now handle vast quantities of information to download and upload. The content is ours to handle, and we juggle commentating, creating and publishing on any given day. We can order a takeaway with a click of a button, keep up with the news cycle 24/7, go on a date with a stranger, send a picture in a nanosecond, write a blog, enlist international support for a campaign, create a business from the comfort of our bedroom, and video call our friends and family living 1,0000 miles away.
It’s maddening to think that it was only two decades ago when we were all communicating with each other on MySpace and MSN, sending rapid-fire SMS messages off our indestructible Nokia bricks. It’s a stark contrast to the digital leviathan we face now, where an online network has resulted in pressure to reply instantaneously, announce every minutia of our lives, having to deal with the harmful effects of “influencer culture” and the pressure to look flawless. It’s exhaustive and exhausting. And when you find out the nauseating fact that we all tap, swipe, and click on our phones an average of 2,617 times a day; you can’t help but wonder how much happier we’d be if technological advancement had stopped at the flip-phone.
Almost four decades on, the evolution of the internet and the advent of social media has drastically changed the way we interact all over the world. According to Statista, in 2020 over 3.6 billion people were using social media worldwide, a number which is projected to increase to 4.41 billion in 2025. It’s no surprise the figure escalates year on year, especially since the outbreak of the pandemic, where limited physical contact made us more dependent on the internet than ever before. But, have we, in the process of this advancement, forgotten the raison d’être of social media? Which is to be social? And has our hyper-connection resulted in disconnection?
In her latest book (Dis) Connected: How to stay Human in an Online World, bestselling author Emma Gannon gets to the heart of these questions and ponders whether the internet is losing its human touch. She explores how we can slow down and “go back to basics”, how to avoid the temptation to grow likes and followings, and in the process, remind ourselves of the importance of community and compassion in all of our online interactions.
Gannon is a media polymath – a podcast host, author, journalist and public speaker – who has amassed a following of more than 100,000 across her social media; she is more than familiar with the pressure of keeping up appearances online. In a previous book, Ctrl Alt Delete: How I Grew Up Online (Gannon has an award-winning podcast of the same name where she has interviewed over 300 people about work, wellbeing and creativity), she explored her formative experiences on the internet as a Millennial born in the same year as the World Wide Web.
When asked by The Bookseller why she was keen to return to the topic, she said: “It’s something I have been thinking about for a while. So much has happened since I wrote Ctrl Alt Delete. It might only be five years, but it feels like hundreds of years. And while a lot of what I wrote then still chimes with me, I also wanted to look at how things have changed, and how our behaviour on the internet now isn’t always great.”
As Gannon posited, the landscape of connection now feels radically different, and this is one of the main themes in her latest book. She reflects on the “innocent” days of writing on each other’s Facebook walls, recommending songs, and taking to Twitter to post about your breakfast (and not to start a keyboard war). Since then, a metric of likes and follows has led to everyone “brandifying” themselves online. In an increasingly-individualistic culture, she writes, we are beginning to lose sight of ourselves and prioritising our “internet self” at the cost of our “human self.”
Throughout (Dis)Connected, Gannon wears her heart on her sleeve. She uses herself as an example of what happens when you become over-reliant on social media. She confesses to years of “feeding the hamster wheel reward system of online validation” and how that amounted to an identity crisis. Exasperated by a merry-go-round of images, advertisements, and follows, she began to forget who she truly was and what she truly liked. Did she enjoy the music suggested by Spotify’s algorithm? Did she want that book suggested by Amazon? Or that dress from Instagram? Gannon began to question like we all so often do, what part an algorithm was playing in determining her life.
Another theme tackled in (Dis)Connected is the dark side of performance culture. This part will strike a chord with any reader who feels the pressure to constantly “announce” what they do and suffers from anxiety of having “likeable” achievements to post about in the first place. These days you only need to venture as far as Twitter or Instagram to see an onslaught of people celebrating job offers and filling their bios up to the brim with their achievements. It’s no longer good enough to just be a “journalist”; you now have to sell yourself online and curate a list of shiny triumphs and titles to feel welcomed in the competitive amphitheatre that is social media.
But Gannon is far from a technophobe, and this book is a far cry from a doomsayer’s scroll. (Dis)Connected may have plenty of statistics that make you want to hurl your phone across the room, but that reaction, Gannon stresses, is not the way out of this. While many advise a “digital detox” or a move to Timbuktu to deal with tech anxiety, Gannon refreshingly takes the view that it is an unrealistic option considering how integral the internet is now in all of our personal and working lives. The internet is here to stay, so the question at hand is now “how do we block everything out” but “how do we have a better experience of life when so much of it is online.”
Interlaced within (Dis)Connected is a series of interactive prompts for readers to start doing just that. They range from “getting back in touch with yourself” and spending a few minutes alone with no bleeps, pings or noise, to “Marie Kondo-ing your digital feeds” and unfollowing anyone who makes you feel anxious, to “reflecting on your E-personality” and asking yourself: am I doing this for myself and because I really enjoy it or am I doing it for validation online?
Gannon also offers helpful tips for those looking to become less individualistic and more community-focused, such as downloading the neighbourhood app NextDoor or calmly discussing a topic with someone you disagree with. Gannon’s observations on “cancel culture” are particularly compelling, and she is right, we could all try harder to challenge our views outside of our echo chamber, to listen to people closer, remind ourselves of human imperfection and use “constructive doubt” before damning people to the darkness.
(Dis) Connected is a pocket-sized manual for any millennial or Gen Z’er who has grown up against the backdrop of an ever-shifting technological culture. Gannon may not offer any ground-breaking insights, but she is right to remind us to look beyond the realms of “optimising, monetising, and being as productive as machines at every twist of turn.”
So if you’re after a quick-read, featuring personal anecdotes, handy tips, and straight-talking observation on what it is that makes us human in an online world, disconnect from your phone and pick up this survival guide instead.