The Cyber Effect

by Mary Aiken

  All human life is an experiment in a way. But this seemed like an experiment on a much larger, more pervasive, and more profound scale than humans had been exposed to before.

  Like, what if a chatbot actually increased an individual’s social isolation rather than mitigating or solving it? Or what if it negatively affected a child’s social skills? The truth was, I had no idea. Was there any scientific evidence to help predict an outcome? I was curious about that. Surely, there must be some academic work in this area. But when I looked for answers, I found almost nothing. I searched publications for background studies—looking for research on the impact of Internet chatbots on developing children—and discovered that little work had been done in this area. Yes, there were reports from the field of human-computer interaction (HCI)—all very practical and market-driven—that focused on the size of your keyboard, where your eyes look on a monitor screen, or the usability interface aspects of websites. But I was curious about what was happening at a cognitive, emotional, and, most important, developmental level. I was desperately curious about one thing: the psychology of all things cyber.

  That curiosity led me straight back to college, to a postgrad course in forensic psychology, which in turn led to my entering a groundbreaking new field—one that tries to keep up with the impact of technology as quickly as technology is evolving. More than a decade and two advanced degrees later, I find myself still explaining what “cyberpsychology” is and what I do. That suits me just fine. As you’ve probably noticed by now, I like explaining. And with each passing year, as the real-world experiment continues, there has been more and more to do. I can barely keep up with the questions.

  Window for Enlightenment

  This new frontier has taken us by surprise. The human migration to cyberspace has been unprecedented and rapid. It has occurred on an enormous scale. The Internet is just over forty years old. There are 3.2 billion people currently online. Another 1.5 billion are projected to be connected by 2020. That means that in less than five years’ time nearly 5 billion people will cohabitate in cyberspace at least part of the time, and as many as 79 octillion new possible connections, according to expert predictions, could be enabled through mobile devices.

  How did this cyber-migration begin?

  We just bought a device, that’s all. We got modems, and servers. We got data plans, smartphones, and Wi-Fi. We connected to cyberspace, like all our friends and coworkers and family members were doing. It was new. It was exciting! Newness and new places are always exciting. Travel is invigorating. While human beings for the most part are made uncomfortable by too much disruption, travel is a contained way to experience newness—new environments, new cultures, new ways of thinking and feeling. (In fact, a gene has been identified that is associated with a need for novelty-seeking and adventure.)

  I believe that new experiences and new environments create new ways of thinking. Aesthetic and pleasing surroundings can stimulate the senses and heighten creativity. Human beings like to be stimulated. And this new cyber frontier certainly provides that.

  But now, a couple of decades into our mass migration to this new environment, we are realizing what an odd and yet familiar place cyberspace is. Culturally, we refer to it in science-fiction terms, as if it were outer space or an undefined new universe. At a cognitive level, we conceptualize it as a place, describing it using spatial metaphors. There are places to hang out and directions to get there—scroll up or down, swipe left or right, click here, check in there. And like all places, it has distinct characteristics that have the ability to affect us profoundly, and we seem to become different people, feel new feelings, forge new ties, acquire new behaviors, and fight new or stronger impulses.

  Our friends and networks have grown exponentially. As we connect with greater numbers of people than ever before, it becomes harder to keep track of hordes of social contacts and keep pace with rapidly evolving behavior, new mores, new norms, new manners, and even new mating rituals. The pace of technological change may be too rapid for society, and too rapid for us as individuals.

  Even our concept of self is changing. Babies and toddlers who are using touchscreens from birth may grow up to see and experience the world and themselves differently. The face-to-face feedback and mirroring that once were catalysts in identity formation in young children and teens have migrated to a complex, multifaceted cyber experience. The mating selection process that once depended on real-world social connections and proximity is now aided, and quite often determined, by machines. Some of us can remember a time when children mostly ran around outdoors and climbed trees, and laughed, shouted, poked, and teased one another, all face-to-face—these were formative experiences—rather than solemnly huddling in linear clusters and expressionlessly staring at devices. Some of us had our first romantic encounter in a real-world, face-to-face setting, when skin touched skin. Now, sadly, this is on the decline, replaced by explicit digital images that quickly circumnavigate the global Net.

  That’s the paradox of cyberspace. In some aspects, things are the same. Businessmen and -women still network to make money. Friends communicate. People still fall in love. Teens still obsess about appearance. Children are still playing together. But they are all alone—looking at their devices rather than one another. How will this shape the people they will become? And how, in turn, will they come to shape society?

  We have no answer to that crucial question. This is the formidable yet unknown cyber effect. Because of this, we cannot stand by passively and watch the cyber social experiment play out. In human terms, to wait is to allow for the worst outcomes, many of which are unfolding before our eyes. Others can already be seen ahead, around the curve of time—and have been predicted. We need to get ahead of the process. Great societies, as I said in the prologue, are judged by how they treat their most vulnerable members, not by the cool new gadgets they can sell to the greatest number of people.

  We are living through an exciting moment in history, when so much about life on earth is being transformed. But what is new is not always good—and technology does not always mean progress. We desperately need some balance in an era of hell-bent cyber-utopianism. In the prologue to this book, I compared this moment in time to the Enlightenment, hundreds of years ago, when there were changes of great magnitude in human knowledge, ability, awareness, and technology. Like the Industrial Revolution and other great eras of societal change, there is a brief moment of opportunity, a window, when it becomes clear where society might be heading—and there is still memory of what is being left behind. Those of us who remember the world and life before the Internet are a vital resource. We know what we used to have, who we used to be, and what our values were. We are the ones who can rise to the responsibility of directing and advising the adventure ahead.

  It’s like that moment before you go on a trip, and you are heading out the door with your luggage—and you check the house one more time to make sure you’ve got everything you need.

  In human terms, do we have everything we need for this journey?

  At this moment in time we can describe cyberspace as a place, separate from us, but very soon that distinction will become blurred. By the time we get to 2020, when we are alone and immersed in our smart homes and smarter cars, clad in our wearable technologies, our babies in captivity seats with iPads thrust in their visual field, our kids all wearing face-obscuring helmets, when our sense of self has fractured into a dozen different social-network platforms, when sex is something that requires logging in and a password, when we are competing for our lives with robots for jobs, and dark thoughts and forces have pervaded, syndicated, and colonized cyberspace, we might wish we’d paid more attention. As we set out on this journey, into the first quarter of the twenty-first century, what do we have now that we can’t afford to lose?

  Transdisciplinary Approach

  I believe it is time we stop, put down our devices, close our laptops, take a long, deep, and reflective breath, and do something that we as humans a
re uniquely good at.

  We need to think.

  We need to think a lot.

  And we need to start talking more—and looking for answers and solutions.

  The best approach is transdisciplinary. We don’t have time to wait for more new fields to arise and create their own longitudinal studies. We need to hear from experts and research in a wide array of existing fields to help illuminate problems and devise the best solutions. We need to stop expecting individuals to manage all things cyber for themselves or their families. Science, industry, governments, communities, and families need to come together to create a road map for society going forward.

  Until now, most academics have been looking at the cyber environment through the limited and myopic lens of singular disciplines. This book has tried to take a holistic, gestalt-like overview, using a broad lens to help understanding. As the network scientists say, it’s all about sense-making. We need to make sense of what’s happening.

  Critics will argue that this is “technological determinism”—that I am blaming all contemporary psychological and sociological problems on technology. They will cry out that the beautiful thing about cyberspace is the exhilarating freedom. But with great freedom comes great responsibility.

  Who is responsible now? And who is in control?

  If we think about cyberspace as a continuum, on the far left we have the idealists, the keyboard warriors, the early adopters, philosophers who feel passionately about the freedom of the Internet and don’t want that marred or weighed down with regulation and governance. On the other end of the continuum, you have the tech industry with its own pragmatic vision of freedom of the Net—one that is driven by a desire for profit, and worries that governance costs money and that restrictions impact the bottom line. These two groups, with their opposing motives, are somehow strategically aligned in cyberspace, and holding firm.

  The rest of us, and our children—the 99.9 percent—get to live somewhere in the middle, between these vested interests. As a society, when did we get a chance to voice our opinion? Billions of us now use technology almost the way we breathe air and drink water. It is an integral part of our social, professional, and personal lives. We depend on it for our livelihoods and lifestyle, for our utilities, our networking, our educations. But at the same time, we have little or no say about this new frontier, where we are all living and spending so much of our lives. Most of our energy and focus has been to simply keep up—as the cyber learning curve gets steeper every year. As we know from environmental psychology, when an individual moves to a new location, it takes time to adapt and settle in.

  Before we settle in, let’s make sure this is where we want to be. The promise is so vast—and within reach—let’s not allow problems to get in the way. As a cyberpsychologist and a forensic expert, I am deeply concerned. Every human stage of life is now affected by technology. Yes, of course, there are positives. But cyber effects have the capacity to tap into our developmental or psychological Achilles’ heel, whether it is visual perception in infants, self-regulation in toddlers, socialization in kids, relationships in young adults, or work, family, and health issues for the mature population.

  Let’s debate more, and demand more. Where should we start? Our biggest problems with technology usually come down to design. The cyber frontier is a designed universe. And if we don’t like certain aspects of it, those aspects can be redesigned.

  The Architecture of the Internet

  I believe that the architecture of the Internet is a fundamental problem. The Internet spread like a virus and was not structured to be what it is now. The EU considers it an infrastructure, like a railway or highway. The Internet is many things, but it is not simply an infrastructure.

  There are two analogies that I like to use to describe this. One is that the Internet is like a cow path in the mountains that became a village road for horses and carriages, then was widened into a street for cars, then widened again into a highway that could accommodate more traffic. Like a lot of things that start small and grow large, what we’ve wound up with is a convoluted, overly complicated architecture that is not fit for its current purpose.

  As John Suler has said: “The Internet has been and will probably always be a wild, wild west in the minds of many people—a place where a badge is used for target practice. I believe it has something to do with the intrinsic design of the Internet.”

  Or as John Perry Barlow, cyber-libertarian advocate, says: “The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.”

  I am in favor of freedom of the Internet, but not at any cost. We haven’t held out for machines that really serve us and make us better parents, more effective teachers, and deeper thinkers, as well as more human. As the nineteenth-century physician and social reformer Havelock Ellis said, “The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.” I can’t help but wonder how different the Internet would be if women had participated in greater numbers in its design—and considered the work of Sherry Turkle as they did. I find it intriguing that, one hundred years after the suffragette struggle and the hard fight for women’s rights, we have migrated and are populating a space that is almost exclusively designed and developed by men, many of whom have trouble making eye contact.

  Our humanity is our most precious and fragile asset. We need to pay attention to how it is impacted by technological change. Are we asking enough of our devices, and their manufacturers and developers? The more we know about being human, the more we know what to ask for. We could ask for smartphones that don’t keep us from looking at our babies, games that aren’t so addictive that thousands of adolescent boys in Asia must be sent to recovery. We could demand a cyber environment where predators don’t have the easy advantage, just because they can hack or charm.

  We could regain some societal control and make it harder for organized cybercrime that has left us all in a state of ubiquitous victimology. (As I write this, I am dealing with my own case of cyber fraud, in which a cloned credit card of mine was used at 3:00 a.m. last night at a Best Buy store in California.) There is no reason to put up with a cyberspace that leaves us all vulnerable, dependent, and on edge.

  If we make no requests or demands—and don’t bother to ask—we will just leave it to the tech community to decide what we want. These designers, developers, programmers, and entrepreneurs are brilliant and amazingly talented, and have created new ways for us to pay bills, play games, make dinner reservations, make new friends, do research, and date. Their achievements are spectacular. But we can ask for more.

  Sheer convenience is not enough. Fun is not enough.

  To begin with, the architects of the Internet and its devices know enough about human psychology to create products that are irresistible—a little too irresistible—but they don’t always bring out the best in ourselves. I call this the techno-behavioral effect. The developers and their products engage our vulnerabilities and impulses. They target our weaknesses rather than engage our strengths. While making us feel invincible, they can diminish us—and distract us from things in life that are much more important, more vital to happiness, and more crucial to our survival. And what about our society? Have we had a moment to stop and consider social impact or, as I call it, the techno-social effect?

  The second analogy that I use to describe the design of the Internet is a mountain stream. Water runs downhill in a trickle, and over time that trickle can create twisting gullies and valleys. A lot of things that start small and grow large are twisting. I was explaining this at a conference last year when Brian Honan, an international cyber-security expert, cried out, “A stream is a compliment! The Internet is more like a swamp!”

  If structure is a fundamental problem, we should bring together a large, diverse team of people to discuss and brainstorm about how best to redesign it. Rather than “user” friendly, let’s make it “human” friendly. We could address many of the problems we have
now.

  To regulate or not to regulate? That is the central question. Perhaps our real-world lives are so safety regulated—in the U.K. it is called the Nanny State—that we feel overprotected and safe no matter where we are. Everything is regulated, from the rise of sidewalk curbs to the size of puzzle pieces to the speed limits of all roads to the thickness of plastic used in water containers. And perhaps the fact that cyberspace is not a physical space with tangible dangers creates a further illusion of safety. We access cyberspace from the comfort of our own homes and offices, from our cars and commuter trains, places that are all regulated carefully. But cyberspace offers countless risks. Even the basic laws that the government applies to gambling, drugs, pornography, and breast implants are not in place. I’ve discussed a number of safety concerns and risks, but my passion is the protection of the young. They are our future—and will soon describe what it means to be human. We have a shallow end of the swimming pool for children. Where is the shallow end of the pool on the Internet?

  Looking into the near future, the next decade, say, there’s a great opportunity before us—truly a golden decade of enlightenment during which we could learn so much about human nature and human behavior, and how best to design technology that is not just compatible with us, even in the most subtle and sophisticated ways, but that truly helps our better selves create a better world. The cyber future can look utopian, if we can create this balance.

  Hope lies in the many great evolving aspects of tech—particularly smart solutions to technology-facilitated problem behavior. Of all the innovative advances in fund-raising over the past decade, the rise of crowdfunding websites has been the most fascinating. Digital altruism is a beautiful thing, and an example of what I am talking about. The Crowdfunding Industry Report stated that billions of dollars have been raised across more than one million individual global campaigns. Online anonymity is a profound driver of many cyber effects, including positive ones such as online donations. I don’t think we have begun to scratch the surface of its power.