daily mail: social networking sites harm children
According to an article in today’s Daily Mail, the proportion of time spent online interacting via social networking sites is rewiring the brains of today’s children.
‘I often wonder whether real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitised and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf,’ says neuroscietist Susan Greenfield.
Teachers are noticing a decline in the ability of their pupils to understand others; Greenfield implies that there may be a greater link between autism and digitally-mediated interaction than has previously been thought. This report comes out on the same day as Lord Carter presents his interim Digital Britain review, reporting on digital infrastructure, public technology policy and the potential for digital engagement to improve governance. Public service delivery. Innovation. Computers in schools. The digital divide. Infrastructure, competition, choice, the Digital Economy. It seems we can’t make up our minds whether computers are a good thing or a bad thing.
Back to the Daily Rail: the article is in many ways a straightforward reactionary piece of Daily Mailism. Certainly it comes hot on the heels of an article about whether using Facebook can increase your risk of cancer by leaving you more isolated from actual human contact. But (Tom Morris’ parodies aside) one of the few virtues of the Daily Mail is that it articulates what a lot of people actually think, whether or not those thoughts have any bearing on reality. And the truth is that a lot of people are uncomfortable with the dramatically different mindsets of the kids growing up digitally native.
Ten years after Thatcher announced that there is no such thing as society, we (at least a lucky few, in the South of England) reaped the rewards of the new ‘Every man for himself’ social climate. And now, nearly thirty years on, we’re reaping the consequences - in excessive financial risk-taking, the implosion of absurdly over-leveraged financial structures and an unrepayable national debt. Was Thatcherism, overall, a good thing or a bad thing? As the Chelsea FC fans knew, when they stood up during 1980s matches against Liverpool and sang ‘Stand up if you’ve got a job’, it depends who and where you are.
Social media are probably only comparable to Thatcherism in espousing a kind of commonality through radical individualism (albeit, on the social media side, a California-flavoured one born in ’60s Palo Alto). So this is only really a thought experiment. But still: thirty years from now, what will the consequences of digitally-mediated social life be on the fabric of real-world society? Will we all be bloated screen-bound bovines as seen in Wall-E, or will we have hit some extraordinary techno-infrastructural Black Swan and been deprived of our networks altogether? If we raise a generation of kids unable to interact un-networked, how might we cope in the face of digital Armageddon? It’s paradoxical to sit writing something like this in a blog, I know; but it’s not surprising that, now that social media are maturing and going mainstream, we’re beginning to see debates as to whether the Web really is the great leap forward that it’s sometimes trumpeted as, or whether it represents a sociocultural or even evolutionary cul-de-sac.
And yet the truth is we’re all just figuring out how it works. Redcatco has a great article here (from a business perspective) about the power of face-to-face. A lot saner than alarmist Mailish backlash. And the truth is that today’s kids are not as stupid as all that. The law of unintended consequences says digital technologies will create cultural changes that will be as much bad as good; but the kids will figure it out, just as we’ll figure out how to deal, one way or another, with the economic mess the baby boomers have passed on to us.
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