We’re lost.My friend in the passenger seat pulls out a GPS system on his phone. Suddenly we’re a dot on his screen on an animated road. So we fix our course and turn around.For all practical purposes, speaking to another human being is almost completely unnecessary. Almost every need can be fulfilled at the click of a button save for our social need to stave off loneliness, which a recent UCLA study has found to be genetic — as biological as hunger, according to Salon.com.Loneliness is theoretically a physical response to being alone because as we evolved we often could not be alone and still survive.Now we can easily survive. We are isolated by the technology that supposedly warms us.Technology has the distinct power to remove us from ourselves, and Kanye West seems to have caught onto this.It’s debatable whether pop culture mirrors society or vice-versa, but sometimes the two dovetail.Kanye West — and to a lesser extent, Lil’ Wayne — has become very fond of a voice modulator called Auto-Tune, which is used by artists to distort vocals. Sometimes it’s employed by poor singers who still wish to sing, which is probably one reason why West uses it on his late 2008 release, “808s and Heartbreaks.”The album focuses on his recent “heartbreak” after both a long relationship with actress Alexis Phifer ended, and West’s mother died receiving plastic surgery West allegedly paid for.And using Auto-Tune, the album sounds like one of the loneliest and inhumanly human records to be released this decade. West is removed from his own voice, and his isolation became blatantly clear while he hides behind technology.The album sold very well because everyone feels what West feels on the album.Everyone feels what Lil’ Wayne feels when he throws on Auto-Tune during his hit single “Lollipop,” in which he speaks coldly about emotionlessly using women.The more we are connected, the more we are torn apart.We have essentially created another world with technology, a world in which we live a second life, whether we admit it or not.Take social networking, for example. Identities are easily created on Facebook. And through those identities, different personas evolve, even if we don’t want them to.If no one cared how they were viewed on the Internet, we wouldn’t waste time checking our profile photo, changing our status or finding clever anecdotes to put in the “About Me” section.There’s a commonly-told joke that runs along the lines of “A relationship is not a relationship until it’s on Facebook.” And every time the joke is told, everyone chuckles politely while thinking this is true for most college students.We shop on Amazon. We gossip on Juicy Campus. We buy music at iTunes. We read news at Digg. We validate relationships on Facebook.And then we’re confused when our pop artists suddenly sound like robots with warbling voices. Auto-Tune is the obvious step for pop music to take because it can connect with young adults in 2009It can connect with kids whose stomachs have turned at least once when a faulty Internet connection gave way in the midst of a particularly important instant message conversation.It can connect with kids who needed Gmail to install a drunken e-mail test to prevent them from sending out embarrassing truths while intoxicated.And soon, Auto-Tune may become the standard, just as Facebook has become the standard for college students now coming in from high school. The generation now at the University is the last one that didn’t grow up with Facebook and MySpace, with 24-hour Internet access, with phones that can track where we are at any given moment.These things go wholly unquestioned because they are great tools.And it’s not like we will forget how to interact — that is human nature, and it will never leave us.So we can listen to our Auto-Tuned singers, and we can dream of a time that was more difficult but seemed easier.Or we can just do what we were probably going to do anyway — work our way through another semester of college, checking Facebook for weekend updates and continue to evolve while our social surroundings incorporate technology that is growing far faster than we are.And if we still find ourselves lost, we can just check our phones to see where we are.– Contact Travis Andrews at [email protected]