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 b
y “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.
When Zuckerberg trialed News Feed, early subscribers freaked out. But after a few days the tide of protest subsided. Within a few weeks it had given way to a landslide of support, and subscribers. Through the magic of News Feed, Facebook users could now enjoy minute-by-minute updates detailing the most trivial details of their friends’ deeply humdrum lives—a gossip column, if you will, for nobodies.
The microblogging site Twitter, as even the least assimilated Digital Immigrant must by now be aware, works in much the same way, via posts—i.e., text messages—of not more than 140 words that answer the question, “What are you doing right now?” Powerful Twitterers—celebrities, politicians, and journalists in the main—who lead more tweet-worthy lives, use the site to broadcast everything from red-carpet gossip to fun-sized musings on foreign policy. The world’s top Twits command millions of followers, and the Twitterverse is—as they say in the classics—expanding. Digital Immigrants who demand to know what’s the point of Twitter (as so many of us do) simply show their age-slash-cluelessness. Often, there is no point, at least not in the Gutenbergian sense that communication is about the useful exchange of information. (In this respect, the term “social utility” is almost hilariously inaccurate.) Twitter describes itself as a “global cocktail party thrown by regular people.” Does a party have a point? For that matter, does a cocktail party with no alcohol? But I digress.
Thompson and other observers argue that what social media such as Facebook and Twitter deliver is simply contact itself—“ambient intimacy” or “ambient awareness.” Explains Thompson, “Each little update—each individual bit of social information—is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait ... like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.”19 It’s not friendship exactly, Thompson concedes. It’s more like artwork. Reading over my own sadly neglected Facebook page, it seems closer to a really crappy craft activity. Less pointillist painting than pipe cleaners on an empty egg carton.
The emerging etiquette of “friend requests” suggests there are plenty of nuances yet to be explored. Parents friending their own kids, for example—a practice Bill describes to me as “disturbed and barbaric.” Barbaric? “In the same sense as the live sheep trade is barbaric,” he explains. “Because it causes pointless suffering.”
Sussy agrees, and Anni does too, largely. Before The Experiment, she and I became “friends,” but I was careful to respect the boundaries. (No gratuitous photo-commenting, no hectoring wall posts, no snide comments about Farmville.) Yet the stigma seems to skip a generation. When I created a Facebook account for my mother and sent friend requests to her grandchildren, all six accepted immediately. “Does it bother you that Grammy checks out your photo albums?” I asked Sussy.
“I am semi-freaking out,” she admitted.
But I guess that’s what families are all about, right?
When Bill “added” his favorite teacher last year, it was my turn to semi-freak out. But a study reported in Psychology Today of university-based Facebook users found that academics who disclosed information about their social lives on their profiles created a more comfortable classroom climate and increased student motivation.20 Yeah, but to do what? On the other hand, a third of students surveyed believed their teachers should not be permitted access to Facebook at all, citing privacy and “identity management” concerns.
An article I came across in a law journal examines the advisability or otherwise of legal professionals friending witnesses.21 The Wall Street Journal reports that U.S. tax agents have joined in the fun as well, using social networks to friend and apprehend suspected tax cheats.22 The tendency of networking media to redraw traditional social boundaries—whether between generations, or school cliques, or authority figures and subordinates—is part of the attraction. We are all equal in the eyes of Facebook, or among those whom we tweet. Or so, at least, runs the mythology.
“Twitter is all about stalking celebrities,” Sussy informs me confidently during month four. “It’s like, you add them and then you know everything they do.” She doesn’t have an account yet, of course. Weirdly enough, I was the one who explained to her what Twitter was. But in the weeks since we embarked on The Experiment, the microblogging site has exploded onto the new media scene like a rotten egg dropped from a high window, and she’s been gathering intelligence about it from her girlfriends. When I tell her that many celebrities’ tweets are ghosted by staffers, she rolls her eyes. “That is sooo something you would say, Mum,” she tells me. No arguments there. She tosses her head in irritation, as if my words were blowflies. But I can see from the look on her face that she’s thinking about it.
Social media cost employers $2,700 a year per worker in lost productivity, according to one recent survey.23 If they could put a price on parents’ lost sleep, we’d have to declare national bankruptcy.
Parents angst about their kids’ media use generally. But studies show our parental paranoia peaks around social media. That’s understandable, given the interactive nature of the beast. We are all too aware of the risks—especially those posed by cyber-bullying and online predators. Yet most of the time we feel pretty powerless to do anything about it.
One recent study found that 71 percent of parents speak with their kids about online safety, but only half that many impose controls. (N.B.: Speaking of controls, the research was sponsored by an Internet filter manufacturer!) Lord knows, cyber-shit happens. In the case of online bullying, pretty much constantly, in fact. In Canada, the United States, and Great Britain, a third to one half of teens report being victims of targeted online abuse by peers. A study of four thousand children aged twelve to eighteen published by the Cyberbullying Research Center i
n 2010 found 20 percent admitted to having been repeatedly harassed, mistreated, or ridiculed by another person online or while using cell phones. “Mean or hurtful comments” and rumor mongering were the most common forms of abuse.24 Australia purportedly has a much lower incidence. A government-commissioned report issued in September 2009 found fewer than 10 percent of kids aged ten to fourteen had been bullied online or via a cell phone, ranging upward to 20 percent of sixteen- to seventeen-year-olds.
Not surprisingly, victims of cyber-stalking are rarer still. Regarding other forms of inappropriate use, Australian experts estimate that 84 percent of boys and 60 percent of girls have been “accidentally exposed” to pornography online—curious that the boys have so many more “accidents”!—while 38 percent and 2 percent, respectively, have been deliberately exposed.25
Without underplaying these risks, the truth is that out-and-out abuse is probably the least of our problems as parents of Digital Natives. It’s a bit like our overblown stranger-danger fears, when statistics show very clearly that family friends and relatives pose by far the greatest risk for sexual, emotional, and physical abuse of our children. Or, for that matter, like our fear of flying versus our lack of fear of driving home from a party. We tend to badly misperceive where the real dangers lie: in the mundane and familiar environments that surround us. Their very familiarity means we look through, not at, them. And therein lies the risk.
The Winter of Our Disconnect Page 20