Sugay, Alexandra Nicole D.

4LM2

“The concept of humanity is a socially conditioned behavior”, says Skinner. Since time
immemorial, society has fixed unwritten rules of what and what not to do, of what and what not to be. It
is quite ironic that most, if not all, have their freedom compromised when in the first place, it is them who
created society. It is as if the morality imposed by society controls the life and mind of an individual.

I believe by nature, a person wants to be one step ahead of another, and because of this thinking
was the birth of technology. In the advent of the brilliance of the mind, things I could not thought would
exist are now in plain view. People devoted so much time to make impossible things possible by just the
work of the mind. But where does morality enter the picture?

Before going into space rockets, cloning machines, and nuclear missiles, let me focus with a
pocket-sized robot which influences man’s behavior more than anything else. Started out as a device that
enables man to send a message from one place to another in a stationary way, it now controls one’s
freedom. The emergence of social media sites – with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram being the famous
ones – puts man’s morality at stake. These sites serve as an avenue for people to project an image in a
way they want others to perceive them. Due to this standard set by virtual society, it sets up norms of
what and what not to do, of what and what not to be. Say a personal opinion bravely against that of the
majority, everyone loses their minds; post a statement sided with what the majority thinks, regardless of
what you really believe in, everyone puts a thumb’s up. All I see is deprivation of freedom because instead
of respecting another’s views, others say it is wrong and will hate you for it just because it is against what
they think. Morality is really just a social construct that creates a gap among humanity.

Technology greatly impacts a person’s life and collectively, it immensely affects humanity. If these
abstractions may seem to be an anti-social media campaign, it is not and there is a larger picture. A
concrete (and accurate) illustration is Black Mirror’s Nosedive episode. Just an overview, everything in
that world is controlled by the ratings of a person. If you have five stars and up, you get most privilege like
dining in a fancy restaurant; if you have less stars, then you are branded a loser and are only conditioned
to do limited things like owning a cheap, deteriorating car. The main character, of course, projects herself
to be likeable and flawless just for other people to rate her high, but her life off screen is full of
imperfections (which is totally normal). Instead of reaching out and actually interacting with others, she
deprived herself of freedom just to be at par with the conditioned behavior of society which resulted in a
major turn down that consequently costed her half her life.

Being in flow with everyone else, if it means putting up a potential to break humanity, will not do
any better. Technology and behavior are two words with far distinct definitions from each other, but by
putting them together - “technology of behavior” – will close options between ‘make or break’ and will
just simply change the world for the better.