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| Australian magpies - they converse a lot, perhaps more intelligently than much that is posted on Twitter |
Young people, particularly but not exclusively, are heavy users of various electronic social networking systems, of which Twitter and Facebook are currently the most widely used. Most of them will also spend a great deal of time in front of computers, surfing the net. Is all this good? There will be many who argue that it’s an intrinsic part of modern youth culture, so what’s the problem? Well, the technologies are not, in themselves harmful, and they can be useful, but in exacerbating the developing tendency of adolescents to require constant stimulus and distraction from anything needing focused effort, they can be said to be dangerous to society. Let’s consider the arguments.
Twitter1 is a website through which users can send messages – called tweets - and read those of other users. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page. They are publicly visible by default; senders can restrict message delivery to lists of nominated friends, but reports of the way Twitter is used suggest that the idea of being at the centre of some hypothetical community of friends attracts the attention-seekers as well as those who have difficulty – perhaps because of their mobile phones and computers – interacting with real people. So they make their tweets available to the world.
Facebook1 is a website on which users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. They may also join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school, college, or other characteristics. Facebook was produced in 2003 at Harvard by a nerdy student called Mark Zuckerberg, dubbed a ‘social autistic’ by Sadie Smith2, and has spread like a flame through the combustible world of the would-be-connected young: there are now an estimated 500 million users. The idea of ‘friends’ is central to Facebook; in pursuit of connectivity users post information about themselves that may include the minutiae of their daily lives and blow-by-blow descriptions of their activities, as well as intimate details of their lives.
The question is, I think, what is the point of Facebook and Twitter? Do they serve any useful purpose?
Surprisingly, Twitter, with its 140 character restriction, comes out ahead in relation to that question. At the trivial level a friend pointed out that, having suddenly decided to dine out in New York the question of which restaurant provided good food (and good value?) was solved by sending out a tweet asking about restaurants in the area. Several replies (from unknown people), with recommendations, were received within five minutes. Not an earth-shaking result, but indeed useful and indicative of a general class of queries likely to elicit responses from the ‘Twittersphere’. But it’s a rather startling thought that – even in New York – there were enough people checking Twitter at the time for some of them to know about restaurants in that particular area and be prepared to reply. At an equivalent level, tweets and text messages are sent into television – and I suppose radio – stations where there is discussion of some subject or issue in which people are interested. So the senders are immediately involved (or at least they feel as if they are) and get the chance to contribute – although hardly in depth.
More usefully, Twitter is credited with providing the vehicle by which young people in Iran were able to tell the world what was happening to them as Iranian police and Muslim fundamentalist thugs broke up their demonstrations in favour of ‘non establishment’ candidates in the 2010 elections in Iran. In effect the twitterers provided a news outlet and focussed the world’s attention on events that were not covered by conventional western media, which might otherwise have been ignored. Some believe there is a Twitter revolution under way in Iran, and that the technology is having a significant effect on the rulers of the country, who have a considerable problem limiting the flow of information. However, we must recognise that there is no way of establishing whether a tweet is true or false, and no way of confirming the location of the sender, so there must be debate about how much of the information coming out of Iran is genuine, and the extent to which it reflects the views of the population3. Nevertheless, since I subscribe to the idea that a free press is an essential component of a free society, I must accept that Twitter has the potential to make a contribution that outweighs the triviality of most of its uses. (In this respect I noticed, in the weekend papers, that a Canberra academic is the target of a lawsuit because of a (allegedly libellous) remark she posted on Twitter. Even if the lawsuit fails one must question the judgement of a – presumably intelligent – person who does something like that.)
In the case of Facebook, the main argument that might justify its existence is that it helps to satisfy the basic human need to belong, to have an identity as a member of a group within which we are recognised and valued. This provides the basis for self-esteem. Families are the most immediate and important groups in this respect: in traditional societies the local community provides the milieu within which families and individuals are embedded and have their recognised and acknowledged places, but the gradual breakdown of families and family bonds in Western societies means that many young people are denied that support and recognition. So they look for something else among their peers and associates and Facebook seems to offer a community of friends, a community within which they can say: ‘This is who I am; this is why I matter”. It also provides instant feedback from someone, somewhere, 24 hours a day, and this constant reassurance comes without the stress of real-life, face-to-face conversation. Jaron Lanier2 argues that, on Facebook people “reduce themselves” in order to make a computer’s description of them appear more accurate. But there is no perfect computer analogue for what we call a “person”: the attempt to turn life into a database is a degradation, based on a philosophical mistake. Computers cannot represent human thought or human relationships, therefore recognition of otherwise unknown ‘friends’ by Facebook is based on incomplete information, besides involving no significant personal commitment.
There are major disadvantages to both Twitter and Facebook. Much (probably most) of what is posted on Twitter is trivial in the extreme. It has been labeled ‘pointless babble, better characterized as social grooming’[1] and, more serious than the fact of its triviality, there are strong indications that, among the young, particularly, Twitter and Facebook engender the feeling that it is essential to be in contact all the time, that you must respond to the flood of tweets and if you haven’t updated your Facebook page for a few hours you are out of touch. Connection is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the information that passes through it, the quality of the relationships that connection permits—none of this is important. Social networking software clearly encourages people to make weak, superficial connections with each other, hardly likely to contribute positively to constructive social discourse. There is an inability among the young, addicted to these technologies, to develop empathy. This cannot develop through social networking because we are not aware of how other people are really feeling - we cannot pick up on body language when we are communicating through a screen4.
A consequence of the addictive urge to be ‘connected’ was highlighted by an article in the New York Times about the impact of these social networking technologies on schoolchildren in California. Students are constantly distracted or inattentive: responders to the article overwhelmingly decried the effects of the technologies on school work. A contributor to the NY Times discussion said that many of the descriptors of technology-infused school kids match those of criminal personalities: inability to maintain concentration on necessary tasks, need for constant and instant gratification (being bored is an offense!), and worst, failure to appreciate the necessity of personal investment of time, attention, and effort in order to accomplish anything worthwhile. It is clear that, uncontrolled – as they mostly are, at least by America parents – these technologies pose a profound new challenge to focus and learning: apparently students can’t think independently or originally, and information, if it isn’t coming to them from a screen, is ignored as having no value.
Baroness Susan Greenfield4, an eminent British neurosurgeon and scholar, has expressed serious concerns about the need felt by the wired, cell-phone generation, for instant gratification: the whole concept of chat and texting, bypasses the most fundamental human communication – actual conversation. And because, in technologies like Facebook and Twitter ‘pithy allusion substitutes for exposition’5, the art of conversation, of interesting development of an argument or an idea, is clearly endangered in this socially uncoupled generation. In the profession I followed, clarity and accuracy of expression are essential in the business of conveying sometimes complex ideas so they can be understood, tested, refined and either discarded or promulgated. This is hardly likely to be a skill developed, or appreciated, by those for whom sloppy inaccurate expression and abbreviated, unpunctuated telegraphese substitute for disciplined written communication. Shoddy prose bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident of what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (“It’s only my opinion…”).
Social networking sites apparently tap into the basic brain systems for delivering pleasurable experience. In the case of Twitter, where users post an almost moment-by-moment, stream-of-consciousness account of their thoughts and activities, however banal, the addictive nature of the activity is much like traditional sources of instant gratification - sex, drugs and drink. The compulsion to know what other people are doing and thinking and feeling is, arguably, a form of voyeurism, although for many people, the idea of describing your thoughts and actions in minute detail is absurd. Why would you subject your friends to that, and how much trivia can you absorb? The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme—the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world6.
There are other problems, or potential problems. One of these (depending on your point of view – you may think it’s acceptable) is targeted advertising. Because the personal information on Facebook sites is publicly available it can be used by companies who can target their advertising very precisely to groups or regions – another step in the commercialisation of our world and encroachment on our privacy. Where once the Internet seemed an opportunity for unrestricted communication, the increasingly commercial bias of the medium—”I am what I buy”—brings impoverishment of its own.
Clearly these technologies are here to stay; they have their uses and those will no doubt expand. They have hundreds of thousands of users – although mass adoption does not, in itself, constitute a logical or intellectual argument in their favour. For those who have reached ‘responsible adulthood’ (which research indicates is about the age of twenty-two in males; younger in females) Facebook, Twitter and their ilk may well be used sensibly for profit (in the widest sense) and pleasure. Used sensibly they undoubtedly provide agreeable methods of communicating with real friends, and Twitter may be a useful source of information. The dangers they pose in relation to the inability of kids to concentrate, endless time-wasting, low social skills and possibly poor ability to develop strong personal relationships, are part of the spectrum of problems generated by computers and mobile phones in general. The dangers to children can be overcome (although in most cases they won’t be) by parental control and discussion, talking to each other, encouraging reading real books with substantial content, discussing implications of the technologies. In relation to time-wasting, if you are among those who think that addiction is not a particularly harmful condition, and that spending time constantly updating your activities for the benefit of Facebook ‘friends’, or sending bursts of inconsequential information into the ether, to join the mass of equally banal, inconsequential and short-lived information swirling through the it, then there’s nothing to argue about: that’s a value judgment, not an objectively arguable fact. I would just have to say that those are not values I subscribe to.
At a more basic level these electronic social technologies cause us to examine our assumptions about the purpose of life and how we should – in some fundamental sense – spend our time. Is time spent exchanging useless information via Facebook and Twitter wasted any more than time spent watching rubbish on television? Probably not. But the question pushes us back to the idea of a fulfilled life, of reaching our physical and mental potential. Both need work and self-discipline. In the long run time spent doing something worthwhile will be far more rewarding than time frittered away in exchanging trivia. Strong, rewarding human relationships will be far more rewarding than the accumulation of large numbers of ‘friends’ on Facebook, most of whom mean nothing and do not meet the criteria of genuine friendship.
Sources consulted
1 Wikipedia
2 Sadie Smith: “Generation Why?’ NT Review of Books, Nov. 25.
Jaron Lanier was cited by Sadie Smith.
3 Annika Wang: ’Twitter and the Iranian elections’, CIMA, Nov. 2009.; Daily Mail, Nov. 2010.
4 Report of a speech by Baroness Greenfield: “How Facebook addiction is damaging your child’s brain.
5 Tony Judt: ‘Words’ NY Review of Books, July 2010.
6 Clive Thompson. NY Times Magazine. Sept. 7, 2008.
