The Social Backlash: The War Against Social Culture

As the newest enemy of the future to come forward, and write (yet another) book that attacks the rise of a social culture, Sherry Turkle is being warmly received by the Sunday supplement naysayers, who desperately want to illegitimize what we are doing online. The newest example is below, where are are told that Twitter and Facebook are driving us crazy, our online relationships are ersatz and cheapen ‘real’ connection, and that school kids are becoming addicted to the dopamine that squirts in their brains every time they make a friend on Facebook.

Charles Lawrence, Twitter and Facebook are driving us mad, says prof

Just two text-ready words may have punctured the delusion of cyberspace ‘connectedness’ that has gripped a twittering new world: ‘Alone Together’. They are the title of a book from a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has finally plucked up the courage to tell us something we all secretly know: we are losing our minds to a mania for the social media of Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging.

We are in danger of relinquishing our humanity to “social robotics” and a “new social confusion.” We are swapping real life for vicarious life.

There have been warnings before from shrinks and sociologists, not to mention anyone with the commonsense to have got angry at those texting away under the dinner table or the idiot bumping into you because he is buried in his Blackberry.

But Professor Sherry Turkle’s new book is the first to get the message through. Alone Together has sparked debate on where all this is taking us. The backlash has begun.

And so, of course, has the backlash to the backlash. Every book reviewer, commentator and reporter can, after all, be “reached on Twitter”. The word Luddite buzzes through cyberspace.

However furiously the fingers tap the interactive screens, however, it is hard to dispute Turkle’s argument.

“We’re using inanimate objects to convince ourselves that even when we’re alone, we feel together,” she writes. “And then when we are with each other, we put ourselves in situations where we feel alone – constantly on our mobile devices.

“It’s what I call a perfect storm of confusion about what’s important in our human connections. In solitude, new intimacies, in intimacies, new solitude.”

Talking to school kids, she finds that they are so used to hiding behind the cyber-walls of Twitter, text and Facebook posts that they are actually afraid to make a telephone call, let alone look someone in the eye at a face-to-face meeting.

Turkle, a psychology professor in MIT’s Science, Technology and Society programme, warns that all this is as addictive as dope, and for the same reason. “The adrenaline rush is continual,” she says. “We get a little shot of dopamine every time we make a connection.”

Having the latest device offers the same kind of dopamine rush. They are flaunted by the types who think that he or she who gets the most messages at the party or the business meeting wins. They have no idea that they are simply the cheap version of the old style social climber who pays the waiter to whisper in his ear that he is wanted on the telephone, urgently.

“It is a huge backlash,” says William Kist, a professor of education at Kent State University, Ohio. “The different kinds of communication people are using have become something that scares people.” He is a fan of ‘communication’, however, saying that what is needed is a new ‘netiquette’.

It had better come soon. There have already been studies indicating that the cyber clatter is numbing the brain, shortening the attention span, limiting the ability for real conversations, and eroding the bonds - such as empathy - that hold us together.

“We have forgotten how to respond ethically, emotionally and intellectually to the challenges, desires and opportunities of life at home and at work,” says Michael Bugeja, who wrote Interpersonal Divide in 2004, before anyone was ready to pay attention. His conclusion even then? The more connected, the more isolated.

Uproar over Turkle’s book has brought all sorts of academic tomes out off the back shelves. Evgeny Morozov – heard of him? – argues that social media makes people “slackovists”, always ready to post an opinion but never to do anything useful.

Mark Bauerlein of Emory University has a book out called simply The Dumbest Generation. “The intellectual future of the US looks dim,” he writes. A neuro-science project has studied the ‘brainwaves’ of teenagers playing video games while texting and keeping their eye on the Facebook page. Patterns of brain activity lit up the scanners in phenomenal displays of multi-tasking. But the same brains glowed only dimly when asked to focus on writing a story or solving a math problem.

“We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, yet we have allowed them to diminish us,” warns Turkle. “We’ve gone through tremendously rapid change, and some of these things just need a little sorting out.”

It’s all extremely knuckle-headed. 

When I was a child this sort of story in the paper would be about the dangers of reading comic books and watching television. Then it was video games. Now, the glories of western civilization are being trashed by wired dopamine addicts who have forgotten what authentic intimacy is, we are told. 

News flash: we feel connected because we are connected. It is not phony. It is not pretend. This is not a fantasy.

Please read the actual science that shows the reality of what’s going on, instead of this psychobabble. Check out posts here www.stoweboyd.com/tagged/social+cognition, and ignore the mumblers who are ideologically bent on undermining the new culture we are building on the web.

I do believe we are headed for a new consciousness, a new state of cognition, where we will have different values, perceptions, modes of reasoning, and behaviors. We will reject a great deal of what is conventional wisdom today. That’s why it’s a culture war: the war against social culture. They will say what we are doing is immature, immoral, illegitimate. But they are wrong, and since they don’t participate in the new web, they can’t really understand what is happening.