Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
section one - the brain, the senses
digital natives, digital immigrants
do they really think differently?
the internet
learning to think in a digital world
learning theory, video games, and popular culture
usability of websites for teenagers
user skills improving, but only slightly
is google making us stupid?
your brain is evolving right now
section two - social life, personal life, school
identity crisis
they call me cyberboy
the people’s net
social currency
the eight net gen norms
love online
we can’t ignore the influence of digital technologies
virtual friendship and the new narcissism
activists
section three - the fate of culture
nomadicity
what is web 2.0: design patterns and business models for the next generation of software
web squared: web 2.0 five years on
web 2.0: the second generation of the internet has arrived and it’s worse than ...
wikipedia and beyond: jimmy wales’s sprawling vision
judgment: of molly’s gaze and taylor’s watch - why more is less in a ...
a dream come true
the end of solitude
means
credits
index
Arguments for and
Against Facebook, Google,
Texting, and the
Age of Social Networking
JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2011 by Mark Bauerlein
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The digital divide: arguments for and against Facebook, Google, texting, and the age of social networking/edited and introduced by Mark Bauerlein.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN : 978-1-101-54752-6
1. Digital divide. 2. Technological innovations—Social aspects. 3. Social networks. I. Bauerlein, Mark.
HM851.D524 2011
2011019688
303.48’33—dc23
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
http://us.penguingroup.com
< Mark Bauerlein >
introduction
MARK BAUERLEIN is a professor of English at Emory University. His books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (1997) and Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (2001). His essays have appeared in PMLA, Partisan Review, Wilson Quarterly , and Yale Review, and his commentaries and reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, Reason magazine, and elsewhere. More information can be found at www.dumbestgeneration.com.
IN EARLY 2011, The Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from a book called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a treatise on the superiority of “Chinese mothers” over “Western mothers,” written by Yale law professor Amy Chua. The book excerpt was clearly intended to court controversy, but the exact way that that controversy played out illustrated well the new ways we communicate.
Within hours, it seemed, the article had exploded in op-eds, blogs, and follow-up stories from The New Yorker to NPR to Newsweek to angryasianman.com, with reactions ranging from enraged to regretful to cheering. The author’s eldest daughter defended her mother in an effusive testimonial in the New York Post. I just Googled “Amy Chua” and 544,000 results came up. Most amazing of all, perhaps, was the response of readers—not the content, but the quantity. At the present moment, fully 6,901 comments have piled up on the website beneath the excerpt. And of course, as all this unfolded, the hardcover edition of Tiger Mother climbed to #4 on Amazon. The book had only been available for a week.
For all the hoopla, however, we may be certain that in a few more days, attention will shift elsewhere to other affairs. That’s the pace of news in the digital era. The ups and downs of current events run steeper and faster, as if a roller coaster were squeezed into a smaller space. Ballyhooed controversies happened before the Web came along, but they didn’t arise, expand, and deflate so quickly and voluminously, and with so many participants in the process. In the days of print-only, the excerpt would have taken days or weeks to circulate to other journalists, and reader responses would have amounted to several dozen letters to the editor, three of them selected for publication in a later edition. By comparison, today’s communication travels at light speed, and any edgy, comic, or otherwise quirky story or video can “go viral.” Everybody can weigh in and say almost anything they want.
What does it mean? How are we to understand the change—or, perhaps more important, what is it that we are supposed to understand? What stands out in this case is that sublime number on the comments ledger: 6,901. It signifies the provocative nature of the excerpt and a watchful, interactive audience. The process sounds unequivocally positive, especially given the conditions the The Wall Street Journal sets for comments. “Community Rules” disallow anonymity, and “You must demonstrate appropriate respect” (no vulgarity). Violators are banned. As a result, comments there are thoughtful and critical.
Still, one has to wonder about the purpose of so many people writing so many things about a 2,500-word newspaper piece. It’s a new phenomenon, unique to the Digital Age, and it calls for examination. Some of the contributors to this volume would maintain that this is democracy in action, meritoriously so. That ordinary people have the chance to speak back and have their opinions published at one of the nation’s leading newspapers can only enhance civic life. Others, however, question what Journal readers think when they encounter 4,383 comments to a news story and b
elieve that post #4,384 really matters. Is this democratic participation or fruitless vanity?
The writings in this anthology address that and many other questions. They present a range of judgments about the Digital Age and digital tools and behaviors that have enveloped our waking hours. Indeed, whenever people consider the marvelous and unprecedented ways that the Digital Age has transformed our lives, they should keep that curious fact in mind. However sweeping and abrupt the changes are, most individuals have absorbed them with dispatch. The flood of digital tools was and is mighty and abrupt, but adults and youths generally behave as if it has always been thus. Calmly and expertly, they wield devices and form habits that were inconceivable only ten or twenty years ago.
And it has happened so quickly. Cell phones, e-mail, the Web, YouTube, and the rest have speeded up communications, shopping, photographing, and studying, and they have also quickened the conversion of each new and desirable invention into a regular part of life. At a clip that would stun a pre-1980 person, novelties promptly become customs. One or another of them may mark a fabulous breakthrough, but they don’t stand out for long as striking advances in the march of technology. Soon enough they settle into one more utility, one more tool or practice in the mundane course of job and leisure. How many decades passed between the invention of the telephone and its daily use by 90 percent of the population? Today, the path from private creation to pandemic consumption is measured in months.
Consider the Facebook phenomenon. The network dates back to 2004, but seems to have been around forever. In six years it has ballooned from a clubby undergraduate service at Harvard into a worldwide enterprise with more than 500 million users. It already has acquired a “biography,” chronicled in the hit film The Social Network and books The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World and The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook—A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal. Co-founder Marc Zuckerberg garnered Time magazine’s 2010 Person of the Year award. A 2010 Harris Interactive poll of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds ranked Facebook #2 for brand familiarity and quality (Google came in first). In the month of April 2003, Americans spent zero minutes on Facebook. In April 2009, they logged 13,872,640,000 minutes.
Or think about the rise of texting among the young. In September 2008, Nielsen reported that thirteen- to seventeen-year-olds with a mobile device averaged 1,742 text messages per month. A few months later, Nielsen raised the total to 2,272 texts per month, and by mid-2009 teens passed the 2,500 marker. In October 2010, Nielsen set the monthly amount at 3,339. At that pace, consumer behavior signals a lot more than convenience or trendiness.
Note, too, yet another sign of mass adoption: the astounding dominance of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. It opened shop only ten years ago, but now contains some seventeen million entries (according to the Wikipedia entry on Wikipedia). In 2008, educator Michael Petrilli tested Wikipedia’s popularity by choosing one hundred terms from U.S. and world history (The Mayflower Compact, Anwar Sadat, etc.) and typing them into Google. A Wikipedia entry came up first for eighty-seven (!) of them, second for twelve of them, and third once. Since the top spot in any Google search attracts 42 percent of all “click-throughs” (as AOL reported in a data release a few years back), Wikipedia’s first-choice status is clear. What didn’t exist in 2000 is now the towering source in civic and historical matters.
The popularity of these sites and actions has a paradoxical side effect. They appear altogether ordinary. People use them too much to register for very long their wondrous arrival. The content of a YouTube video or a text message may amuse or assist or shock a user, but YouTube itself and texting per se do not. Digital tools have proven so efficient and compelling and helpful that it now requires a leap of imagination to recall what life was like before their advent. It takes extreme, headline-grabbing cases to provoke popular recognition of the general impact, positive and negative, of Web tools on individuals and society. When in September 2010, for instance, two Rutgers University students secretly live-streamed a classmate in a sexual act with another man, prompting him to jump to his death off the George Washington Bridge, the episode became a vehicle for scrupulous discussions of harassment and privacy in the Digital Age for weeks. During the 2009 elections in Iran when individuals in the country used Twitter and Facebook as instruments of protest, organizing dissent online, spreading news past the firewalls of the state, and displaying vivid and hideous images of police crackdown, some observers christened it the Twitter Revolution.
Such episodes, newsworthy though they are, don’t inspire balanced judgments of various benefits and pitfalls of the Web. When anonymous users turn message boards at The New York Times or Sarah Palin’s Facebook page into playgrounds of rage and resentment, or when an offbeat, bullied high school kid goes online and finds far-off voices of sympathy, it is easy to render a verdict. When the 2009 U.S. National Texting Championship goes to a fifteen-year-old Iowan who honed her craft by averaging 14,000 texts per month, one might laugh or nod in dismay. It is harder to appreciate the Digital Age in its less dramatic occasions.
Of course, skepticism about the benefits of digital technology has but a limited field of application. The miraculous advances in medicine, finance, communications, logistics, travel, and dozens of other professions and industries render the overarching question “What is the significance of digital technology—is it good or bad?” ridiculous. Only in areas in which values and norms come into play does the debate, cast in such stark terms, have any substance. The deep assumptions and fundamental dispositions—how we think, what we expect, how we relate to others, and where we stand in the universe—are where we may usefully evaluate the Digital Age.
They are best approached through ordinary behaviors. If you walk into a coffee shop, order a latte, and sit down for an hour with the newspaper, you may find one of them right beside you. A twenty-year-old woman has a coffee in hand, too, but she’s gazing at the screen of her laptop. Nothing unusual about that, but the common appearance shouldn’t blind you to the phenomenal destiny she represents.
First of all, her activity is unknown. Everyone knows what you are doing—you can’t read the paper and do anything else. Her tool, though, allows her to do a dozen different things, including reading what you’re reading. She looks the same whether she reads a book, buys a book, or checks Facebook. This reclusiveness in public spaces is an important feature of digital conduct. It explains the frequent and annoying phenomenon of people in public handling private matters, for instance, an intimate cell phone call carried out in a doctor’s waiting room and overheard by everyone there. One shouldn’t blame the users too much for it, however (I’ve been guilty myself). The tool encourages it. Others can see and hear the user, but they don’t know what flashes on the screen or sounds through the speaker. In the middle of a crowd, the user enjoys a semi-private relationship with things beyond.
There is an ominous corollary to this mode of withdrawal. It allows her to sip her coffee, enjoy the mild music in the room, and smile at passersby, all the while viewing and committing uncivil acts online, if she so chooses. Her real appearance may be prim and genteel, but her online focus might fall on the juvenile and uncouth. Perhaps she frequents sites such as collegeabc.com, the college gossip site filled with entries such as this one relating to my home institution: “Who is the shittiest person at emory?” Or she ends a courteous exchange with a busboy by turning to Lady Gaga on YouTube moaning, “I want your ugly, I want your disease . . .” (“Bad Romance,” with more than 335 million page views).
Nobody can tell, and that precise shelter removes one of the long-standing curbs on vicious conduct, namely, exposure. For the bare truth is that young people act well not so much from virtuous motives within as from social judgments without. The disapproving looks of others keep their lesser intentions in check. Not anymore. She can go anonymous in the virtual sphere and join the cyber-bullying, mobbing, and swearing, all the while appearing e
ntirely decorous in the public sphere of the coffeehouse. The sites she enjoys have no gatekeepers, but that’s not all. With the screen disengaging her from the surroundings, others nearby have no gatekeeping power.
These are just a few speculations about screen experience, and none of them are decisive. Neither do they establish whether each development is a good or bad one. We are called to do so, however, to judge the significance of it all, if only because we have otherwise assimilated digital tools so readily. That is the primary purpose of this assembly of writings. The selections range across the spectrum of appraisal, supporters of digital culture contrasted with critics, their conflicts applying to social networking, evolving ways of thought and inquiry, and the classroom. Some of the writings already enjoy canonical status. Tim O’Reilly’s “What Is Web 2.0” (2005), for instance, helped solidify a fundamental recognition of the Web as a dynamic, collaborative application, not just a source of information and a desktop tool. Marc Prensky’s “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” published 2001, coined terms that have had a tactical and widespread use among educators. Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic Monthly essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (2008) was one of the most discussed essays of the year.
Taken together, the selections form a far-reaching body of opinion about a rushing cataclysm that has upset centuries of social and intellectual practice. We do well to retain it. One of the dangers of the Digital Age is that technology changes so rapidly that it clouds our memory of things as they existed but a few years past. We forget the experiences of 1998 as soon as we acclimate to the tools of 2008. And if that’s true, then the outlook we adopt now, even at the cutting edge of technology, may have little bearing upon ordinary experience ten years hence.
If we let the human realities that accompanied those older tools fall into oblivion, if the arrival and actual or potential disappearance of e-mail, laptops, and so on become just a set of distant facts, then we lose a part of our humanity, a historical sense of our recent selves. We have witnessed stunning transformations of society, politics, communication, and even selfhood. New identities have emerged or been fabulously empowered—the angry citizen with a video camera handy, the hyper–social networking teenager, the blog “troll,” avatars. To understand them, to judge them well, we need steady and penetrating reminders of the changes they have wrought. The writers included here provide just that.
The Digital Divide Page 1