The other night I went to see InRealLife, a film about teenagers, social media and electronic addiction. The narration raised important concerns about the rising influence of our electronic assets. With the enormous benefits that the internet has brought, from toppling corrupt regimes to crowdsourcing for better ideas in social welfare and to linking people all over the world, the potential downsides are also many.
The web is not the only invention to create questions in the minds of the thinker. Harnessing nuclear physics gave us radiotherapy, the end of the war and electricity ‘too cheap to meter’, but also Chernobyl, waste without treatment options and a world order based on armageddon. Meanwhile, the combustion engine heralded an age of freedom and discovery, balanced by pollution and city gridlock. The list goes on.
How we might be impacted by change is determined by our suggestibility to new ideas, and neuroplasticity. Age, social standing and financial liberty are also inportant, though probably secondary drivers. Our brains and their automated and willed responses to triggers direct how we react and how we spend our time, money and thought. To remain unbound by societal pressures is becoming, admittedly, extremely difficult: marketing is now in a league many magnitudes more efficient than the frenzied times of the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce ad agency.
When I was growing as a teenager in the 1980s (a blink of an eye back), we rode bikes anywhere we wanted, got whacked occasionally by our teachers and used the landline to phone home because that’s all we had (mobile coverage only came to Greater London in 1993). Such a period sounds quaint, even backward, but not at the time; this was our culture, the zeitgeist. We followed the model. If mobile phones had existed to message the prettiest or smartest could-be special friend in the next school, all of us would have wanted a shot.
Today’s teenagers are doing just that: following their peers. This can be considered a bad thing in itself, because when the mass communicates openly, the decisions not normally the most effective. You only need to read A Random Walk Down Wall Street or ask a market analyst to understand why. The herd instinct prevails, and sheep are stupid, trampling one another on the race to the bottom. However, the patterns of the few, or of the many when isolated and not influenced by one another, are extremely valuable. The internet giants gain their power more from understanding how, when and why the information is generated, rather than the quantity held. Not all data are created equal.
But I digress. Some of our worries, at least those expressed in the film, are not about whether one should conduct so much of life online, but how today's young people will cope, long-term. Experts voice disquiet that teens and pre-teens are addicted to their devices, will share everything that can later be used against them and finally, that the banal, short-termist nature of those interactions must preclude the ability for them to try hard, stick at one activity, and engage in meaningful dialogue
I’m going to rephrase these issues from the perspective of the individual, rather than collectively. As alluded to above, we cannot change anyone but ourselves. Purposefulness is a conscious choice. A person can decide to pick up their texting device, message to everyone that they just had incredible sex / a delicious meal / a nightmare of a flight and proceed to get in a huff because it’s not ‘liked’ immediately by all contacts. Or they can choose to have sex / food / journeys and leave out the rest. We all have options about which keys to push.
In essence, we’re talking about limiting the potential negative reactions to our own deeds on ourselves. I’m going to suggest three things that are quite simple. All foucs on being a bit tougher.
First, make conscious decisions about how you want to spend your time with the aim of making yourself and the world better off. This may not easy if you’ve got out of the habit of being productive, but who said that life was a doddle? Is ‘I should be doing my work but am going to play computer games all night instead’ pure laziness? Relaxing is good, but not all the time. I’ll put it this way: people of all ages in the West will need to work harder because some have spent all the reserves that our grandparents made and people in other parts of the world are studying like crazy and will one day own the clothes you stand in. A few of us may need help to get back into the swing of things. That’s probably not you because you’ve read this far.
Second, you have a choice about what to communicate. When you’ve had the misfortune to have to tell extremely distressing things to others, like members of the police and hospital services, tawdry might be the word for descending to the tittle-tattle. So you may want to think twice before posting. Meanwhile, digital platforms have taken the role of the all-seeing eye: you ask questions - they give results, omnisciently. However, these databases and algorithms are not your mentors, nor friends: they don’t care less if the answer comes back F*** you!’ You are just giving them more power every time you engage, not the other way.
The third thing is our resilience to exactly that kind of response. If the typical teenager has many hundred friends on social, what is the probability that they’ll all ‘like’ something just posted? Everyone is too busy creating their own content to be worried about the trivia you’ve written. However, social media has helped us to develop an addiction for rapid task-to-reward dopamine releases in the brain, which are reliant on and matched by the blitzspeed fibre-optics, hyper-efficient switching and super-optimised datalakes. Not receiving instant and powerful gratification might, within seconds, lead to stress. We’ve become labrats or circus monkeys, a traumatised Tillicum not getting his treat. The key ingredient of self-confidence is lacking, that ability to be proud without caring too much what others think about us.
When I published a memoir about an accident, many wrote to me, in ink and through the post about how they’d cried and laughed and had every other emotion in between. At the other end of the scale, some of my closest family members couldn’t muster half a sentence. I learnt more about human nature from publishing and from studying their reactions and mine to theirs than in my previous multiple decades. Most importantly, I appreciated that if you believe anything of any great importance and live your life by that mantra, you can choose your own endorsement.
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