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I have an abiding interest in a question that is on
the mind of every parent able to afford today's marvels of networking,
the mobile phone and personal computer. What impact is all of the
Facebooking, Twittering, texting and now Formspringing having on the
development of the next generation? (More on Formspring in a moment.)
In the last chapter of our book, Broadband Economies, I wrote about the
tide of research in the Nineties on the psychological impact of Internet
use. "If we take this research at face value," I wrote, "the
conclusion is clear. The Web is a destroyer of social capital. Power
it up with broadband, and you have the makings of a virtual plague
laying waste your community."
Really? I get impatient with
claims that the moral universe is shredding because the kids do things
differently than we did. Human has been making this claim for about
10,000 years, and the moral universe appears to be holding its own. All
change brings negatives and positives. Our current situation has
negatives and positives - something we tend to forget in the face of
change. When change does come, we usually focus on the negatives because
we recognize them. Our kids are head down with the smartphone, texting
away and ignoring the world. Obviously, a bad thing. They are
permanently plugged into video games or Facebook pages. Clearly a waste
of time and bringer of bad influences. We don't see the positives
because, in most cases, we don't have a mental framework for
understanding them.
 Three recent articles in The New York Times
point to new research and our ongoing lack of real knowledge about the
human-machine interface as it affects young people. On May 5th, Tamar Lewin wrote about a new social
networking site, Formspring.me.
("Teenage Insults, Scrawled on Web, Not on Walls.")
Think of it as an anonymous Facebook. Or as Lewin puts it, "It is the
online version of the bathroom wall in school, the place to scrawl raw,
anonymous gossip." Kids register, then link it to their Facebook or
Twitter account. Anyone visiting their page can post anonymous comments
and questions. "Comments and questions go into a private mailbox,
where the user can ignore, delete or answer them. Only the answered ones
are posted publicly -- leading parents and guidance counselors to wonder
why so many young people make public so many nasty comments about their
looks, friends and sexual habits."
Lewin interviewed Christine
Ruth, a middle school counselor in Lindwood, New Jersey. "I'd never
heard of Formspring until yesterday, but when I started asking kids,
every seventh and eighth grader I asked said they used it. In seventh
grade, especially, it's a lot of 'Everyone knows you're a slut,' or
'You're ugly.' It seems like even when it's inappropriate and vicious,
the kids want the attention, so they post it. And who knows what they're
getting that's so devastating that they don't post it?"
Okay,
raise your hand if you think that's bad. Me, too.
A May 2nd
article by Hilary Stout cited research from the Pew Research Center,
which ICF is presenting with a Founders Award on May 21. ("Antisocial Networking?" It found that half of
American teenagers send 50 or more text messages a day, while one-third
send more than 100 a day. Fifty-four percent said they text their
friends once a day but only 33% said they talk to their friends
face-to-face on a daily basis. According to the Kaiser Family
Foundation, Americans between the ages of 8 and 18 spend an average of
7.5 hours daily using some sort of electronic device.
What does
it all mean? Is the ease of electronic communication making young
people less interested in face-to-face communication with their
friends? Psychologists are worried, because close childhood
relationships help lay the groundwork for healthy adult relationships.
(Heck, I have wanted to throw away my wife's BlackBerry more than once
in the past couple of months, and we've been married for three
decades.) One neuroscientist, Gary Small, came up with a term for these
kids who have grown up using computers and mobile phones: "digital
natives." He argues that the new natives of the 21st Century are great
with technology but weak on face-to-face human contact.
One
parent quoted in the article, Beth Cafferty, who is also a teacher,
disagreed. She said that the hundreds of texts her 15-year-old daughter
sends each day are good. "I actually think they're closer because
they're more in contact with each other - anything that comes to my
mind, I'm going to text you right away."
We just don't know.
The other thing we always forget about change: it is a learning
process. Writing in today's Times, Laura Holson reported on
the coming-of-age of 21-year-old Min Liu, who has suddenly realized that
stuff posted on her Facebook page could be seen by people from whom she
hopes to get a job. ("Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Offline.")
She is busy removing photos and posts and asking her friends to do the
same. More than half of young adults surveyed by the University of
Berkley in April said that they were more concerned about online privacy
than they were five years ago. As they come to grips with the
positives and negatives of their digital identities, young people are
adapting. They are carefully controlling who sees what, and feeling
every more mistrustful of the Facebooks of the world, whose carelessness
with their private information keeps making headlines.
Even
Formspring may find its moment in the spotlight to be short-lived. A
14-year-old interviewed by the Times' Lewin reported ""We all
got Formspring about two months ago, when it began showing in people's
Facebook status. It's actually gone down a little bit in the past few
weeks, at least in my grade, because a lot of people realized it wasn't a
good thing, that people were getting hurt, or posting awful comments."
The young, massive online audience can make you a star in minutes but
they can also relegate you to the rubbish heap just as fast.
I
have an abiding interest in this topic because the answers really
matter. I instinctively believe that the culture of use being forged by
today's digital natives will be a net positive once we integrate it
properly into our lives. But gut feel is not the same as knowledge. I
am an immigrant in the digital nation, not a native. You probably are,
too. We both have to keep in mind just how little we really know.
Photo credit: John Shumaker, 17, on Facebook at his home in
Lafayette, Calif. Peter DaSilva for The New York Times |
