The Winter of Our Disconnect (26 page)

No one, certainly not Waldman, would argue that television or any other medium “causes” autism, a dizzyingly complex disorder involving sensory, motor, and cognitive difficulties, as well as social ones. But the possibility that chronic media use may act as an environmental trigger for kids with an underlying genetic vulnerability is being taken seriously indeed.

But we don’t need to drag autism in, kicking and screaming, to explain our kids’ empathy deficits. Let’s not forget, narcissism comes naturally to teenagers. There’s even a specific region of the teen brain that controls their tendency toward selfishness. Digital Immigrants make use of the prefrontal cortex when considering how their decisions will affect others. Natives use their temporal lobes, which are slower and less efficient. Their underdeveloped frontal lobes make teens feel invincible (“Pregnant? Me? As if!”). At the same time, they ensure impaired judgment about almost everything: from how to choose a phone plan to how to choose a boyfriend. Our kids won’t always be this clueless, neuroscientists promise. In theory at least, later brain development will enable them to delay gratification, to accurately assess risk, and—eventually—to consider the feelings of others.

In other words, we can’t blame our kids’ digital distractions for
all
their ditziness. Nor is it necessarily true that kids
either
spend huge amounts of time with media
or
they engage in lots of nonmediated activities. The Kaiser Family Foundation’s Generation M study found just the opposite, in fact. Contrary to researchers’ expectations, it turned out that “heavy overall media users also tend to spend more time engaged in several non-media activities than do light and moderate media users.” Specifically, the 20 percent of eight- to eighteen-year-olds who were the biggest self-reported screen freaks were also the ones who spent the most time “hanging out with parents, exercising, and participating in other activities such as clubs, music, art, or hobbies.”
¹²
Interesting. Especially given that the
average
amount of time kids spent on-screen in that study was 8.5 hours. You’ve got to wonder: When were the heavy users actually doing all that art and music and stamp collecting? In their sleep?

 

 

At the age of fourteen, Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory in the Hundred Years’ War. Sussy, also fourteen, struggles to change a fitted sheet. Eighteen-year-old Anni can be heard whimpering when she discovers the can of baked beans she wanted for lunch has no ring-pull. And my son the electronics whiz, who’s been putting together robots since he was eleven, claims he hasn’t quite gotten the hang of the dishwasher yet. Honestly. Who do these people think they are—somebody’s husband? And, more to the point, how did they get that way? Personally, I blame the guy who invented those Velcro shoe-fastener strips.

Is it just in our household that teenagers struggle with skills and competencies that were once taken for granted by the smallest children? Evidently not. Some observers have suggested that Digital Natives—aka the Pull-Ups Generation—may be suffering from a kind of global life-passivity that goes way beyond garden-variety teen cluelessness. While acknowledging the universal truth that older generations inevitably view the younger ones snapping at their heels as degenerate, unmannerly, and incompetent—the technical term for this being “envy”—there does seem to be something new and scary going on here. In the United States, colleges have introduced undergraduate courses in basic life skills such as banking and doing laundry and ordering from a restaurant menu. (Remedial can-opening, anybody?)

Twenty-five years ago, critic Neil Postman argued that the rise of the global village would spell the disappearance of childhood. Among today’s iGeneration, it has arguably elongated toddlerhood. After the equivalent of a full working day in front of their screens, is it any wonder our children have little patience for practicing life and all its funny little ways?

 

 

When two little girls got trapped in a storm drain near Adelaide in September 2009, they might never have made it out alive. Thank heavens the ten-year-old and twelve-year-old both had cell phones, and, like all Digital Natives, they knew exactly what to do with them.

They updated their Facebook status, of course.

Miraculously—but then again maybe not so miraculously—a school friend was online at the time and contacted the emergency services.
¹³

Five years ago, social networking was something you did over drinks on a Friday night—and the only people who had five hundred friends were first-division lottery winners.

Today, thanks to the social media utilities Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, only freaks and losers and people’s mothers (if that’s not a redundancy) are satisfied with having a few close friends. For everybody else, apparently, friendship—or, more accurately, “friending”—is the new Versace, a form of conspicuous consumption tailor-made for a GFC-shaken world.

In “the black and white days,” we used to think communications technology was all about ... um, communicating. As quickly and as efficiently as possible. You were trapped in a storm drain. You rang triple-0. You wanted to go on a date with somebody. You called and asked them out. You liked somebody’s music. You bought their album. Today, that kind of no-frills approach seems so naive, so lacking in style and nuance and suspense. Calling somebody because you have a question to ask—or a life to save—is like being hungry and eating meatloaf. There’s no art to it.

At the English restaurant The Fat Duck (recently judged the second-best eatery in the entire world), you can order bacon-and-egg ice cream, or lime and green-tea meringues poached in liquid nitrogen. They might not sate your hunger, but at this level of fine dining, hunger itself is not the point. In fact, it’s a little uncool. The key to truly world-class dining out is all about the disconnect between food and hunger. Need, in other words, is not where it’s at.

Well, Facebook is like that too. It’s at least as much a performance medium as it is a communication medium—a stage on which to enact, perfect, and publicize “you” (whoever the hell that is). Asking and answering questions, eliciting or exchanging information—these things do happen. But on Facebook and other social media, including text messaging, they happen indirectly, unfolding in sideways steps like an origami flower or an art house film.

“Going out tonight?” I ask Anni on Friday afternoon. “Probs,” she replies. “I just messaged Alex to say I’d message him later.” A couple of hours later—and keep in mind I’m only trying to figure out what to cook for dinner—I try again. “Message Alex yet?”

“Nah, he messaged me before to say he’d message me later.”

I decide to go ahead with a family meal, but by the time it’s served, Anni tells me she couldn’t eat another bite. She’s been snacking on soy crisps for the last couple of hours, and anyway, she reminds me, she’s probably going out for dinner. “But it’s seven-thirty!” I sputter. “Surely you know whether you’re going out for dinner by
now
.”

She looks at me with a mixture of pity and disgust. “Why would I? I’m not even hungry.” She glances back at her screen, where a new message has landed with a satisfying thud, and snickers gleefully. “Plus, I’ve just messaged Holly to say I’ll meet her in the city later.”

“Oh, okay. Well, what time are you meeting her?”

“Dunno. I said I’ll message her from the train.”

I take a cleansing breath. I promise myself I’ll just leave it at that. I break my promise.

“Can you just tell me why it’s necessary to leave everything till the last possible minute?” I genuinely want to know.

“Can you just tell me why it’s necessary to be such a control freak?” she asks. I suspect she genuinely wants to know too.

“Diffuse” is a nice word for this style of communicating. Other options include “confused,” “disorganized,” and “utterly lacking in focus.” Facebook status updates (“Still in storm drain! LOL!”) or tweets are even less directional. There is no targeted recipient at all. Like a smoke signal or a billboard, these messages are broadcast indiscriminately. It’s not a case of me talking to you, but of me talking to whomever in my community is online and paying attention. You don’t address the envelope. You simply “put it out there,” as Sussy would say. (“Mum, do you realize I’ve never, ever been to Paris,” she announced at dinner last night, apropos of absolutely nothing. “I’m just putting it out there.”) People don’t reply, exactly. They “comment.” They might say “I like this” with a little thumbs-up icon—presumably not if you’re in a storm drain though—or throw a strawberry at you, or some other bon mot.

Information isn’t the only commodity that becomes more diffuse on Facebook. Friendship itself does too, insist some observers.

At the time we unplugged, the average number of “friends” in a Facebook network was 120, according to Facebook’s in-house sociologist Cameron Marlow.
¹⁴
Today, the figure has risen slightly to 130. Rather unsurprisingly, women tend to have more friends than men. In Anni and Sussy’s age group having fewer than two hundred or three hundred is a sign of social backwardness, though “Not for guys,” Anni tells me. Five hundred friends or more is nothing special. In an article titled “You Were Cuter on Facebook,” even teen-focused
Cleo
magazine warns, “We are choosing quantity over quality.” To illustrate the point, writer Bessie Recep recounts the tale of a friend presently documenting an eight-week European holiday at the rate of 350 digital images a day. Surely even the strongest friendship would stagger under the weight of viewing 20,000 holiday snaps, Recep muses. “I don’t even want to think about how much time that’ll take (time that could be spent creating my own life experiences and not just reliving someone else’s).”
¹⁵

Friends and photos have a lot in common in the digital age. There’s no end to the number you can have—but just try to find the good ones when you need ’em . . .

Oxford University anthropologist Robin Dunbar, an expert in social networking in humans and other primates, agrees with me—that one’s contact list, while in theory infinite, is in practice subject to some pretty rigid restraints. Our capacity for “friending” is not only finite, but predictably finite. In fact, it’s reducible to a number. Dunbar sees Facebook as a form of social grooming, exactly like that done in the wild by our ape cousins. The reach of any individual network—whether of people we “comment” or pick lice off—is strictly limited by its species’ cognitive power. For human primates, Dunbar has calculated the number at around 150. Researchers now refer to it as the Dunbar number, and it has been found to be relevant across a wide range of human groups, from corporate divisions to Neolithic villages to Facebook networks.

Cameron Marlow’s findings for Facebook suggest our core network capacity—the people we interact with specifically and reciprocally—is much smaller still. An average Facebook user with 120 friends—me, say—will generally communicate (in the old sense of the term) with only seven of them. That’s about 6 percent. The other 94 percent are pretty much there for show. But the Facebook user with five hundred friends—Sussy, say—will only directly interact with about sixteen or a mere 3 percent of the pool. “Networking” is almost certainly a misnomer for all this. What Facebook users are really doing is “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” notes Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. “Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently,” another expert concludes, “but they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.”
¹⁶

In a social landscape dominated by “friending”—a gerund that still sets Digital Immigrants’ dentures on edge—the word “friend” has arguably lost more value than the Vietnamese ng (a currency valued at around one 1,800th of a U.S. dollar). “When introducing a real friend to a new acquaintance, I often feel the need to call my friend ‘a dear friend’ or a ‘close friend,’ ” writes University of Toronto’s Neil Seeman. “ ‘Friend’ requires an adjective these days, since it otherwise feels empty. We’ve dumbed adult friendships down.”
¹⁷
Only four-year-olds call everybody who says hello to them a “friend.” But suddenly grown-up people who ought to know better are doing exactly that, carrying on like Casper the Friendly Ghost or Sniffles the Mouse (who, if memory serves, once tried to make friends with an acorn). I recently rejigged my own Facebook account to create two lists: “Actual Friends” and “Acquaintances at Best.” The latter seemed more diplomatic than “Total Strangers.”

As of June 2010, Facebook had 400 million monthly active users worldwide. Between 2008 and 2009, membership had doubled in the United States alone—where, just for the record, 38 percent of the total population has Facebook accounts as of this writing. Yet 70 percent of users are outside the United States. Worldwide, we currently spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook.
¹⁸
That’s roughly an hour and a quarter for every man, woman, and child on the planet.

Legend (and now a major motion picture, no less) has it that Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in a Harvard dorm room in 2004. Two years later, Bill Gates paid $249 million for a 1.6 percent share. As Clive Thompson observed in 2008 in
The New York Times Magazine
, Facebook’s greatest innovation—and what makes it unique among other social utilities—is the News Feed: the very useful engine that broadcasts changes in a user’s page to everyone on his or her friend list. Like many other users, I was aghast the first time I discovered how it worked, which I did when the humiliating news “Susan Maushart has updated her birthdate!” was flashed around the world. (I was only correcting a typo, I swear!)

The effect of News Feed is not unlike a social gazette from the eighteenth century, or, in Thompson’s words, “like a giant, open party filled with everyone you know” except you’re able to eavesdrop perfectly, on everyone, all the time.