What 'The Giver' teaches us about social technology and meaning in life
So much about the world has changed since Lois Lowry's controversial 1993 novel, but so much has remained the same.
A friend in my writing group told me this summer, “I’m not sure how you’ll take this, but sometimes your writing reminds me of The Giver.”
I wasn’t sure how to take his comment, either, because I’d never read Lois Lowry’s 1993 novel. But being compared with a Newberry Medal winner has to be good, right?
The next morning, I started listening to an audiobook of The Giver. I was hooked. Not only was the story compelling, but its themes resonate powerfully even 30 years after publication. I listened to the sequels, too.
Throughout the books, I found ideas that connected with my research about meaning in life, social media, attention, distraction, and mental health. When I met characters who were trading away “the best parts of themselves” for cheap entertainments like slot machines that dispensed candy, I felt like I was reading recent news stories about kids addicted to smartphones, not a book written before Facebook or iPhones.
I recently wrote an essay for Discourse Magazine about this idea. arguing that we need to consider what people give up in exchange for social media when we evaluate its effect on mental health. You can read the essay here.
In today’s Idea Link, I wanted to connect a few more ideas that go beyond the scope of my piece for Discourse, and explore what else The Giver and its sequels can teach us about our relationship with technology:
Social media can breed sameness or division.
Social media can amplify or silence.
Life has meaning, even if society tells us otherwise.
“Online communities make it easy to join silos of sameness — to surround ourselves with likeminded people who we might never meet in real life, and to avoid next-door neighbors who disagree with our views.”
Social media can breed sameness or division
The series begins in the Community, a seeming utopia where pain and anguish have been vanquished, but only by banishing love, sex, biological family, long-term memory, agency and humanity.
Oh, and they kill the elderly and infirm by lethal injection. Nice place, huh?
The Community’s strict rules were established to create “Sameness.” Every life is virtually identical.
Likewise, our virtual lives can create some forms of sameness when social media connects people to one stream of information. Ideas that would have spread through society slowly over years can take off like wildfire overnight, whether they are memes or songs, beliefs or causes.
Have you ever had someone tell you a joke, but you had read the exact same joke in the exact same social media post just that morning? Sameness.
Also, because social media puts participants in the public eye, it can pressure us to conform to prevailing expectations for fashion, beliefs or pastimes. If someone steps out of line, they face sharp correction or severe social consequences.
Silos of sameness, divided
But that backlash over nonconformity reveals how social media also can cause division. Online communities make it easy to join silos of sameness — to surround ourselves with likeminded people who we might never meet in real life, and to avoid next-door neighbors who disagree with our views.
Online anonymity enables bad behavior as we interact with digital avatars instead of flesh-and-blood humans. Well over a decade ago, I wrote some political commentary on Facebook that mocked a friend’s political ideas. When he confronted me, I felt deep regret because I had violated my principles in exchange for a few clicks and cheap laughs. I publicly apologized and took down the post.
Something similar happens in Lowry’s novels. The book Messenger (2004) takes place in Village, a town that begins as a safe haven for people escaping dystopian communities. But sharp division arises when one man visits the mystical Trademart and gives away his honor in exchange for youthfulness.
Without his honor, the man leads a raucus campaign to forbid Village from taking any more newcomers who may bring disease and use up the town’s dwindling resources. The bitter division over the issue literally poisons Village.
Like the strict rules of the Community, social media can breed sameness, but when that sameness exists in silos that divide us, it becomes tempting set aside our honor, perhaps to impress other people in the same silo. The result can be political or cultural polarization and, in extreme cases, violence.
“Modern technology tempts us to focus on efficiency rather than efficacy — on investing in wealth rather than well-being.”
Social media can amplify or silence
In Gathering Blue (2001), we meet three gifted orphans with an uncanny ability to tell the future through artistic talents: Kira through weaving, Thomas through carving, and Jo through singing. All three live in the Edifice, the capital building of their city known as The Ruin.
Kira is given the task of repairing a robe woven with scenes from the past, and she learns that she will add a new section to depict The Ruin’s future. However, she learns that the village elders expect her to create a specific scene that they want, rather than rely on her innate gift to depict their true destiny. Likewise, Thomas and Jo have their prophetic gifts regulated and controlled.
This reminds me of how social media can amplify our voices, or silence them. On the one hand, social media gives a platform to people who would never even get a letter to the editor printed in their hometown newspapers. “Influencer” is an actual career. Even young children can have their thoughts go viral.
But on the other hand, our reliance on social media as a platform gives those in charge the ability to silence voices ― whether those in charge be programmers, content moderators who government bureaucrats have on speed dial, or billionaires who can afford to buy or build a social media platform.
I’ve heard arguments from both sides of the political aisle about certain views being censored on social media, but even without conscious political censorship, the fact remains that algorithms decide whether anyone sees your words. As we consume information on social media, we need to remember that social media virality may not reflect the actual value of ideas.
Life has meaning, even if society tells us otherwise
Early in The Giver, the main character, Jonas, listens to an elderly woman complaining about a “ceremony of release” she had attended in honor of a woman who had been a birth mother, a role reserved for women deemed unfit for other careers.
“It was so boring,” she says. “They tried to make it sound as if her life had meaning.”
But in Son (2012), we meet one of those birth mothers, Claire, who contradicts this belief that birth mothers had meaningless lives.
After giving birth once, with complications, Claire is reassigned to work in a fish hatchery. But after she stops taking the daily pills, which The Community requires to eliminate emotion, Claire finds that she can’t stop yearning for her child.
That maternal feeling drives Claire through the rest of the book. She volunteers at the Community nursery to secretly identify and see her son. When Jonas escapes with Claire’s son to save the infant’s life, Claire flees as well.
After being shipwrecked in an isolated village, she eventually spends more than a year training for the arduous task of climbing a sheer mountain so she can search for her son. Even when the training is extreme — it makes Luke Skywalker’s training under Yoda sound like a breeze — her longing for her child drives her forward.
“We don’t have to take society’s daily pill that stifles our emotions. We don’t have to live the lives assigned to us by A.I.-driven algorithms. We can answer the call of meaning within us.”
What gave Claire’s life meaning
Claire’s life had meaning, even though she lived in a society that saw her as no more than a vehicle for delivering an infant she was unfit to raise. The meaning came from her choice, a goal that motivated her through great hardship. A fire inside that she refused to extinguish.
Many of the crises we experience today, from mental health to political violence, stem from a crisis of meaning. Many of the institutions that once gave people meaning have broken down or lost trust, and modern technology tempts us to focus on efficiency rather than efficacy — on investing in wealth rather than well-being.
The psychologist Victor Frankl wrote that our sense of meaning comes from “the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task, …. the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled.”
Claire’s dedicated journey reminds me that such meaning is possible for all of us. We don’t have to take society’s daily pill that stifles our emotions. We don’t have to live the lives assigned to us by A.I.-driven algorithms. We can answer the call of meaning within us.
Timeless stories for the next tech breakthrough, too
I could go on and on about metaphors in Lowry’s books with lessons for modern readers.
There are the surveillance mechanisms and megaphone-delivered notifications, or the different ways that communities develop with different technology.
Why does a book written 30 years ago, when most Americans didn’t even have internet access, seem so applicable to the technology that puts the internet in our pockets? It’s probably the same reason that stories written 100 years ago or 500 years ago continue to feel relevant.
These books are not about technology, but about human nature.
No matter what technology people invent, fret about, or embrace, human nature is always present. One reason we need to read and write literature — and not let artificial intelligence do it for us — is to explore what it means to be human.
The technology that powers our lives may change with each generation, but the timeless truths that make life good will remain largely the same. That makes literature like The Giver timeless and fit for every generation.
If you enjoyed today’s Idea Link, consider sharing it with someone who needs a reminder that life has meaning, that social media can unite us or divide us, or that thoughtful literature about human nature is worth reading.