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“There is a hidden psychic cost to selecting a lifestyle where the childish “I want” is pandered to rather than challenged. Without patience, the woman of fashion is incapable of nurturing anything of value. Her relationships “wither and die” and she would be lonely, if she had he patience for that. All that matters is the loss of peace of mind. At best, this will means a lifetime of low-level discontent.”
I came across the above in an interesting article about ‘women of fashion’. It stood out to me because of the generalisability of the author’s point: if we see happiness as residing in the satisfaction of our immediate desires then we inevitably come to lose the capacity to find lasting meaning in life. Such an achievement rests on the possibility of patience and commitment, as without the capacity to rise above our whims and our aversions life becomes ever more episodic. If we pander to the “I want” rather than challenge it then life comes to be a series of staccato moments, defined by our momentary desires and the degree to which we satisfy them (or fail to), rather than any sort of coherent whole. The point is not to counterpose ascetic self-restraint to hedonistic indulgence: the former repudiates our first-order desires while the latter submits to them. Rather we should embrace our capacity for patience and commitment so that we pursue the things which hold value for us as coherent projects rather than momentary indulgences.
I saw a film earlier today (the excellent District 9) and I was struck by the frequency with which the 16(ish) year old kid sitting near me checked his mobile. For the entirety of the film (nearly two hours) he checked his mobile every few minutes. I’m fairly certain he didn’t go longer than 6/7 minutes during that film without checking and much of the term it was far more frequent than that. While it’s obviously possible that he may have just been waiting for some life-or-death communication, it was a particular conspicuous example of a much wider phenomena and it left me pondering the growing generational reliance on mobile phones.
I’m not excluding myself from this but at 24, I can remember a point when I had a teenager social life without a mobile phone. I think I was about 14 or 15 when mobile phones began to become the ubiquitous phenomena they are today. Whereas a survey reported in the Telegraph earlier this year suggests that more than a third of children own a mobile by the time they are 8. If children carry a mobile phone from such a young age, is it at all suprising that evidence is starting to come in of tendancies towards mobile phone addiction amongst young people today? The constant connection which mobile phones facilitate, likewise the internet, represents something entirely unprecedented in human existence and teenagers today are the first generation to grow up entirely immersed in this technology.
Obviously I don’t think these compulsive tendencies are limited to the young. It’s just that the extent of their immersion in the technology, as well as their ignorance of a world without it, means that behavioural tendencies which arise when you place human beings within these communicative networks are much more deeply entrenched amongst those who grew up within these networks. Checking your e-mail or mobile phone can be a procrastinatory diversion just as easily as a debilitating compulsion but the line between the two is fuzzy and it becomes fuzzier the more we rely on the technology. Obviously the sheer functionality of these technologies goes a long way to explaining our reliance on them and, on a day to day level, much of how we use them is a function of practicality and needs. Perhaps there’s often a more neurotic dimension lurking below the surface of our use though? A desire to affirm our points of contact with the globe, reassure ourselves of our connectedness and, however fleetingly, transcend our isolation to feel ‘hooked in’. If you grow up with that feeling then it’s absence can feel like an itch but one which can easily be scratched when you have a mobile phone in your pocket. All the more so when you can check your e-mail or check facebook from it as well.
Social network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity, according to a leading neuroscientist.
The startling warning from Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln college, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution, has led members of the government to admit their work on internet regulation has not extended to broader issues, such as the psychological impact on children.
Greenfield believes ministers have not yet looked at the broad cultural and psychological effect of on-screen friendships via Facebook, Beboand Twitter.
She told the House of Lords that children’s experiences on social networking sites “are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity”.
Arguing that social network sites are putting attention span in jeopardy, she said: “If the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of fast action and reaction, of instant new screen images flashing up with the press of a key, such rapid interchange might accustom the brain to operate over such timescales. Perhaps when in the real world such responses are not immediately forthcoming, we will see such behaviours and call them attention-deficit disorder.
“It might be helpful to investigate whether the near total submersion of our culture in screen technologies over the last decade might in some way be linked to the threefold increase over this period in prescriptions for methylphenidate, the drug prescribed for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.”
She also warned against “a much more marked preference for the here-and-now, where the immediacy of an experience trumps any regard for the consequences. After all, whenever you play a computer game, you can always just play it again; everything you do is reversible. The emphasis is on the thrill of the moment, the buzz of rescuing the princess in the game. No care is given for the princess herself, for the content or for any long-term significance, because there is none. This type of activity, a disregard for consequence, can be compared with the thrill of compulsive gambling or compulsive eating.
“The sheer compulsion of reliable and almost immediate reward is being linked to similar chemical systems in the brain that may also play a part in drug addiction. So we should not underestimate the ‘pleasure’ of interacting with a screen when we puzzle over why it seems so appealing to young people.”
Greenfield also warned there was a risk of loss of empathy as children read novels less. “Unlike the game to rescue the princess, where the goal is to feel rewarded, the aim of reading a book is, after all, to find out more about the princess herself.”
She said she found it strange we are “enthusiastically embracing” the possible erosion of our identity through social networking sites, since those that use such sites can lose a sense of where they themselves “finish and the outside world begins”.
She claimed that sense of identity can be eroded by “fast-paced, instant screen reactions, perhaps the next generation will define themselves by the responses of others”.
Social networking sites can provide a “constant reassurance – that you are listened to, recognised, and important”. Greenfield continued. This was coupled with a distancing from the stress of face-to-face, real-life conversation, which were “far more perilous … occur in real time, with no opportunity to think up clever or witty responses” and “require a sensitivity to voice tone, body language and perhaps even to pheromones, those sneaky molecules that we release and which others smell subconsciously”.
She said she feared “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. Perhaps future generations will recoil with similar horror at the messiness, unpredictability and immediate personal involvement of a three-dimensional, real-time interaction.”
The solutions, however, lay less in regulation as in education, culture and society.
Greenfield argued that the appeal of Facebook lay in the fact that “a child confined to the home every evening may find at the keyboard the kind of freedom of interaction and communication that earlier generations took for granted in the three-dimensional world of the street. But even given a choice, screen life can still be more appealing.”
She quoted one user saying they had 900 friends, another saying the fact “that you can’t see or hear other people makes it easier to reveal yourself in a way that you might not be comfortable with. You become less conscious of the individuals involved [including yourself], less inhibited, less embarrassed and less concerned about how you will be evaluated.”
But Greenfield warned: “It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result in brains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations. We know that the human brain is exquisitely sensitive to the outside world.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/24/social-networking-site-changing-childrens-brains
It’s interesting to read the comments that were posted on the guardian website, as they point to some of the difficulties inherent in trying to have a sensible debate about this. People seem to be far too prone to making knee-jerk accusations of intergenerational prejudice or technophobia. Just because prophetic warnings about past technological advances largely failed to be matched by actual social consequences, it doesn’t license us to engage in an a priori dismissal of a specific case being made with regards to a particular kind of technology. The point is that the internet, particularly in the incarnation of web 2.0, is something that is genuinely radically new. Real lives and web lives, personal identities and online personas, are coming to intersect in ways that destabilize the boundaries between online and ‘real’ life. This is not exactly a new or radical point but outside a very specific sphere of theoretical discussion, it seems to go largely unrecognised when it should surely be pushing us towards a serious and open-minded evaluation of the way that the technological immersion of great swathes of young people might be impacting on the structures of their minds and personalities.
I’m currently getting paid £80 to participate in an experiment at Warwick’s cognitive neuroscience institute and it’s got me thinking about all the problems I see with what is, essentially, quantitative psychology. In the particular case of the cognitive neuroscience institute, this is profoundly not an attack on what they’re doing (“studying the links between perception and action, in an attempt to better understand how so-called ‘controlled’ processes are instantiated by structures in the nervous system and their automatic functions, and how so-called ‘automatic’ processes are controlled by structural, intentional, and environmental factors“) as much as it’s an observation of the methodological difficulties inherent in non-hermeneutical approaches. They seemingly aim for experimental closure, yet they rely on paying students (in themselves a fairly atypical group and a dangerous starting point for inductive generalisation) and in some cases basically coercing undergraduate psychology students into participating by otherwise forcing them to do extra work. Externalities constantly seep into the experimental situation.
I doubt I’m the only one who finds it impossible to sit and perform a mindless repetitive task without interpreting the situation (e.g. thinking about what the designers of the experiment must be thinking about, thinking about the structure of the experiment) in a desperate attempt to make a banal task take on personal significance. The fact it’s being done for money, with my tendency to start thinking about what I’m going to spend my money on, further aggravates this issue, as the experiment becomes a challenge to distract myself through meaning-making (trying many different ways of understanding the boring repetitive task as having some significance to me). I guess the question at stake is whether the particular phenomenology of the experimental situation precludes their attempt to causally unpackthose cognitive functions usually deemed automatic.
I’m really not sure of the answer to this question but I suspect that the causal structures of cognition are constructed in a way that renders them epistemologically unproblematic and sidelines the phenomenology of cognition. The very way they pose their objectives as peering round the back of concepts naively understood as automatic/natural hints at the assumed epiphenomenality of first-person experience, presumably leaving it quite difficulty to sustain the sort of questions that seem obvious from a hermeneutical standpoint. At the end of the day, the researchers are embodied human interpreters and they are interpreting the interpretations of the participants. This dual hermeneutic is at work in all human science and an awareness of it should always frame inquiry. Obviously quantitative methodologies, which have a time and a place, must in some sense get beyond the dual hermenutic but it must be done so in a pragmatic and methodological way, rather than through a set of tacit ontological and epistemological assumptions that simply dissolve the questions.
