The App Generation (13 page)

Pointing to similar anecdotes from their own observations of youth, our focus group participants expressed concern that mobile technologies and social media threaten to diminish the quality of young people's face-to-face interactions. One participant remarked, “Kids don't have enough practice with face-to-face interaction. They don't go out and play kickball. They don't know how to greet each other.”

The disruptive nature of today's technologies came through in our analysis of high school students' creative writing. For each story, we investigated the degree to which technology plays a central role in the plot, as well as any discernible attitudes expressed toward technology by the author or characters. In both the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century, technology and media appear only peripherally in the vast majority of the stories. We did discover an interesting shift in the role of technology in interpersonal relationships, however. In the early stories, technology is never portrayed as disruptive to a relationship; media are even presented in a few of the stories in connection to a shared experience, such as characters reading the newspaper together or watching television news as a family. In several of the more recent stories, by contrast, technology is seen interrupting relationships; indeed, in only one story does the author portray
a shared experience related to media (one of the characters is seen watching cartoons with a neighbor). It appears that today's young authors are attuned to the disruptive potential of the new media technologies that pervade their lives.

Among the relationships at risk of disruption by today's media technologies, the family may be particularly vulnerable. On the one hand, as we've noted, families have never been more connected. Thanks to cell phones, instant messaging, and email, discussion is no longer restricted to the morning scramble and the semiregular evening meal but can now extend throughout the entire day. And, as we've seen, when children leave home for college, these technologies allow them to maintain the same level of communication with their parents as when they lived under the same roof.
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While parents appear generally optimistic about the role of technology in their family life, there seems to be a tipping point. In one survey, parents supported the view that too much technology in the home—too much time online, too many gadgets—has an isolating effect and reduces family time and closeness.
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This state of affairs resembles the so-called post-familial family, in which families spend more time interacting with their gadgets than with each other.
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So much for the isolating effects of an app mentality. As we argue throughout this book, apps can be beneficial if used
well. Indeed, evidence accumulated over the past decade suggests that many youth reap considerable interpersonal benefits from their digital media activities.
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This body of research indicates that, by and large, young people use online communication not merely to substitute for face-to-face communication but rather to augment it. Digital media are thus associated with a
stimulation effect,
whereby the added opportunities to communicate with one's friends translate into increased feelings of closeness to them.

We've identified similar benefits in our own research investigating high school students' experiences with and perceptions of their online peer communications.
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We find that these online communications can support a sense of belonging and self-disclosure, two important mechanisms through which intimate bonds are formed during adolescence. Digital media may be particularly beneficial for youth who face ostracism in their offline contexts, helping them to find or forge a sense of belonging in a sympathetic community online.
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Of course, although a feeling of belonging is preferable to a feeling of isolation, it does not necessarily equate with benign ends (one can belong to a “hate group”—as turns out to have been the case with perpetrators of mass shootings). Nor is a connection necessarily intimate: it may be better described as transactional, rather than as warm, let alone transformational. Consider our discussion of Snapchat in the previous chapter. We noted how the self-destructing messages that people exchange using this app don't support a dialogue so much
as a series of one-way dispatches that may lack connection to each other.

Another app, Facetime (Apple's answer to Skype) can also be used to illustrate the ease of falling into a transactional rather than a transformational interpersonal exchange online. When Katie and Molly first talked remotely using Facetime, the first thing Katie noticed was that genuine eye contact is impossible. If you want the other person to feel like you're looking them in the eyes, then you have to look into the camera, not their eyes. In other words, to create the
illusion
of eye contact one must actively
avoid
it. Something else that Katie noticed instantly was her own image in the corner of the screen. She found it hard not to glance over at it periodically, which turned her attention away from Molly and onto herself. Apparently, Molly was equally, if not more so, enticed by the “Narcissus trap.” In fact, at one point in their conversation, Katie was confused when she made a funny face but Molly didn't react in the slightest. When Katie called her on it, Molly admitted somewhat sheepishly that she'd been focusing on her own image and facial expressions instead of her sister's. Overall, Katie's experiences with Facetime, Skype, and Hangouts on Google have led her to conclude that, while it's great to be able to connect with others across distances, it's difficult—if not impossible—to achieve the level of deep, warm connection that face-to-face contact provides.

Ultimately, whether digital media lead youth to feel connected to or isolated from others will depend on their orientation
toward these media: Is theirs an app-enabling or an app-dependent stance? Do they use apps to augment or replace their offline relationships?

Isolation is an individual-level problem, but one that can have larger social effects, straining empathy and diluting prosocial attitudes. Considerable evidence suggests that today's young people are less empathetic than youth of the 1980s and 1990s. Researchers at the University of Michigan came to this conclusion after analyzing the combined results of seventy-two studies of American college students conducted between 1979 and 2009.
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They found a small but significant decline over time in the number of students who agreed with such statements as “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective” and “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.”

Other trends parallel this decline in empathy and perhaps serve as indicators of it. The Michigan researchers themselves point to research showing an increase in crimes against stigmatized and marginalized groups, such as the homeless, Hispanics and perceived immigrants, and lesbians, gays, and bisexual and transgender individuals. There's also evidence that sexual harassment and stalking on college campuses have increased in recent years.
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If we consider these disturbing trends
in light of the empathy decline, we might posit that people are more likely to harm others when they lack the ability to see themselves in other people. Indeed, the absence of empathy is a trademark of the sociopath.

The decline in empathy and rise in hate crimes seems at odds with our discussion in the last chapter of youth's greater acceptance of people who are different from them. With respect to hate crimes, it's important to note that most young people do not commit such acts. The increase in these crimes involves a relatively small proportion of individuals who may be disproportionately affected by the general decline in empathy. With respect to the apparent incongruence between increasing acceptance of difference and decreasing empathy, it's worth noting that acceptance and tolerance of others is not the same thing as putting oneself in their shoes. Furthermore, recall that our focus group participants observed a certain shallowness in youth's approach to people, practices, and cultures that differ from their own. In other words, their acceptance doesn't seem to be accompanied by a greater understanding of others. Nor is it the case that, given a choice, young people voluntarily spend time with those from different racial or ethnic groups. Silo-ing appears to be alive and well in many high schools and colleges.

In our own analysis of seventh- and eighth-grade fiction, we identified a decrease over time in the number of stories in which the author featured characters who differed notably from him- or herself. In the mid-1990s, 32 percent of the stories depicted a main character who differed from the author in terms of gender or age. Not one story from the late 2000s did
so. This decline in “character play” indicates that today's students may be less inclined—less able?—to assume the perspective of characters who are different from them. And if one can only compare oneself with individuals already in one's social group or (more likely) to their idealized portrait on a social network, there's little wonder that greater empathic stretches are undermined.

In the Michigan study, the greatest drop in college students' empathy scores occurred after 2000. It's hard not to consider this trend in light of the explosion in social media that took place during the same period. Could viewing the world through our apps be hurting our ability to view the world through another's eyes?

To explore this question, we turn first to a 2011 Associated Press–MTV poll that suggests that online speech may have a coarsening effect on the way people relate to each other.
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In the poll, 71 percent of fourteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds said people are more likely to use racist and sexist language online or through texting than in person. Molly wasn't surprised by this statistic. In her experience, people are generally meaner online than in person. “I think kids my age find it easier to make fun of someone through a veiled post on Facebook or Twitter. I think they forget who they are online and use [their online profile] as a separate identity almost that loses responsibilities and is invincible to consequences because it's just
black ink on a screen.” She explained that the public pages of Facebook can be sites of particular cruelty. “On comments or wall posts people can unleash their meanness, in which case the thread can turn into a public ‘debate' where friend groups take sides and people join in.” Molly noted that online cruelty is especially common among middle school students and girls, an observation that's consistent with existing evidence.
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Molly also explained how photos can be used to embarrass another person publicly, particularly someone who's considered weird or uncool. As an example, she recounted a story from her own middle school experience. Soon after she joined Facebook, she came across a photo album posted by one of her classmates. “I was in a few of the pictures, which had been taken in 2006 or 2007 (so before I met the glories that are tweezers, contact lenses, and braces) and one of my supposed friends (at that time) had commented, ‘Thank God for braces and contacts,' which was met by a series of agreements and similar comments between the other people in the album. I completely agree with them, but to see it written on Facebook in such a mocking way was harsh.” Though Katie can remember experiences of bullying from her youth, a notable difference between her experiences and Molly's is that she could at least put them on pause when she came home after school. Now, in a manner reminiscent of the former British Empire, “the sun never sets on bullying.”
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Though this sort of online bullying is somewhat more prevalent among girls, boys aren't off the hook when it comes to the coarsening effects of digital media. Sexual harassment
is common in certain online gaming communities, in which women are called various derogatory names, offered virtual money in exchange for online sex, and, stalked, both online and off. In one heinous example, a male gamer responded to the efforts of one woman to combat sexual harassment in online games by creating his own game in which players punch the woman's virtual image, adding bruise upon bruise, until the screen turns red.
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Even more ubiquitous than online games is online pornography. Pointing to the unparalleled access that today's youth have to pornographic material, some of our focus group participants expressed concern about the emotional effects of experiencing pornography as a dominant model of relationship. In particular, they worry that boys will approach their romantic relationships by sharing less of themselves and making less effort to understand and connect with the emotional life of their partner. Adolescent males will come to expect that their sexual partners will be as willing and as undiscriminating as is the composite porn star.

Scholars have suggested a link between youth's consumption of online pornography and a “hook-up” culture that's arisen over the past fifteen years among American high school and college students.
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One educator we interviewed said that the teens she works with today seem to consider oral sex “less personal than kissing.” In one study, researchers found that today's college students are hesitant to enter into committed relationships, preferring instead to cycle through a series of casual relationships based on sex instead of romance.
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(This
cycling is made all the more easy with dating and hook-up apps.) The study's authors suggest that it's not that today's youth aren't interested in romance: they are. However, their fear of making themselves vulnerable to another person outweighs their desire for romance. For these youth, a series of isolated hook-ups feels less risky than a sustained emotional attachment to another person. In a similar vein, and harkening back to our earlier discussion of the “whatever generation,” one therapist observed: “The goal is to feel nothing. . . . In an overstimulated world, there's a ‘cool thing' about dissociating and feeling nothing. As if that would be the goal of a sexual encounter—to be able to walk away from it saying, ‘No big deal. I'm empowered.'” Howard was amused—or perhaps bemused—to learn that many young people hook up first, then consult the relevant Facebook entry to decide whether they want to see their sex partner again “in the light of day.”