Influence of Technology on Personal Life and Society
Kelli van der Waals explores the influence of technology on our personal lives, how we change through smartphones and social media, what they do to the beauty ideal and our self-image. How do we gain control over this new, confusing world?
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Kelli van der Waals is an award-winning journalist and columnist who knows how to unmask the spirit of the times like no one else. She wrote the book ‘Picture Perfect‘, about the first generation of teenagers who do not know life without the internet and lead a public life from a young age. In 2021, ‘Cold Water‘, a collection of her essays on the wonders of this time, was published.
In her reports, essays, and interviews for, among others, Vrij Nederland, Van der Waals investigates the influence of technology on our personal lives, how we change through smartphones and social media, what they do to the beauty ideal and our self-image, and how we try to gain control over this new, confusing world. In her column on the back page of Trouw, she analyzes our digital life and the discussions on (and about) social media twice a week. She regularly joins as a ‘digital conscience’ on the Radio 1 program Goed Ingelichte Kring. Van der Waals happily explains the connections between technology, cold-water swimming, minimalism, and the Brazilian Butt Lift.
She also enjoys sharing the insights she gained from her first book. Since 2017, Van der Waals has followed about thirty teenagers to capture this extraordinary moment in time: our relationship with social technologies is, like the characters in Picture Perfect, in a sort of adolescent phase. It influences how current youth find their identity and their place in the social hierarchy, how they view themselves, and how they interact with each other. Often, they have no idea how far the effects of small mistakes can reach, and that the internet does not forget.
On social media, we tell each other all day long how to live: how to exercise, how to eat, what to think, how to react. We demonstrate it to each other and imitate one another. That is how humans are, made to imitate.
Since the release of Picture Perfect, more has become known about the profound effects of these technologies, and Van der Waals closely follows the developments. We have become more critical of the role of technology in our lives, but can our critical insights keep pace with the growing influence of technology?
What distinguishes the younger generation from the rest: they have led a public life from the very beginning. In addition to their physical presence, these teenagers have a significant presence on the internet, where everyone they know, or at least everyone who follows them, can see them.
In 2023, Picture Perfect was included in the VWO philosophy exam. With the article on which the book is based, Van der Waals won the Mercur Award for the best report of 2018.
The rise of social media and the smartphone has not only changed our world but also ourselves, and how we interact with each other. We lead public lives and are increasingly forced to create a personal brand of ourselves. We are more self-focused and less on others, status is more important than ever, and we have a shorter attention span. How do we try to get a grip on this new, confusing world? And what should we actually do?
The current generation of teenagers and early twenties is the first to lead a public life from a young age, through the apps created in Silicon Valley. During the research for her book Picture Perfect, Kelli saw how adept they are at presenting a beautiful and coherent picture, but also the many complexities involved, and that they don’t always feel like it. How can we help them? And what future do we envision for ourselves regarding our relationship with these technologies?
We are image junkies, wrote the American philosopher Susan Sontag back in 1977, when most households in the industrialised world owned a camera. Three decades later, the iPhone appeared with its front-facing camera, allowing us to scrutinise ourselves minutely, to present ourselves – mini-celebrities that we are – as best as possible on social media. We have become self-portrait junkies. What does that do to us? To explain that, Kelli takes you on a journey to the undiscovered peoples who still lived in New Guinea in the 1960s. She tells about what a remarkable anthropologist discovered there at the time, and what that has to do with filters, baby botox, and BBLs.
When Kelli was asked years ago to interview the Japanese minimalist Fumio Sasaki, her knowledge of minimalism did not extend beyond Marie Kondo’s ‘spark joy’ credo, and she found the claim ‘owning less makes you happy’ to sound quite hyperbolic. But before she knew it, she was emptying her closets and sending hundreds of kilos of belongings out of the house. Since then, minimalism has never completely let her go. The benefits – for your personal life and for the world – are numerous, but with a good dose of self-mockery, Kelli also explains that we must consider what else lies behind the popularity of this lifestyle.
In our confusing new world, full of hard and impenetrable devices, fake news, and deep fakes, we crave a sense of authenticity. So we swim in cold water, shop at Dille and Kamille, and the ‘lumbersexual’ has become the prevailing male type.
Kelli explains in a delightful way where these trends come from, how we go wrong with them, and what the solutions are.
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