A New Front On The War On Flow: Kid’s Connections

I have been writing a long time about the war on flow: How the media and other members of the commentariat will denigrate the sociality that we are investing ourselves into at the edge, and the forms that it takes through streaming media, social networks, and mobile devices.

Stowe Boyd, Nick Carr and Scott Karp: Is The Web Making Us Stupid?

[…] the inherent conservatism of the mass media and other mass organizations (those that are based on one:many modes of communication, like government, religions, business, and so on) will lead them to say that this new sort of thinking is illegitimate: they war against it, saying that our new ways of talking and thinking and the social structures that they engender are bad, inferior, immoral, and stupid; and that those in favor of this web revolution are dumb, misguided, or evil fringe lunatics.

Expect more of this. As we move to the edge, those in the center are threatened by the changing of everything, and they will do almost anything to stop it, or at least slow it down as much as possible. It’s a social revolution, and those who are losing control will go a long way to stop it, if they think they can.

The newest front of this ‘war on flow’ is The Concerned Psychologists and Childhood Experts looking at the new ways that kids are bonding. As has been detailed in many places over the past few years, we have taken away what was formerly ‘normal’ childhood — where kids scuffled around in parks and street corners with their pals after school and weekends — and divorced kids from that sort of unmonitored and unstructured play time (see The End Of Childhood).

And now, kids are filling the void by connecting via text, web, and social networks. And the yowling of the So-So-Concerned picks up:

Hilary Stout, Antisocial Networking?

To date, much of the concern over all this use of technology has been focused on the implications for kids’ intellectual development. Worry about the social repercussions has centered on the darker side of online interactions, like cyber-bullying or texting sexually explicit messages. But psychologists and other experts are starting to take a look at a less-sensational but potentially more profound phenomenon: whether technology may be changing the very nature of kids’ friendships.

“In general, the worries over cyber-bullying and sexting have overshadowed a look into the really nuanced things about the way technology is affecting the closeness properties of friendship,” said Jeffrey G. Parker, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama, who has been studying children’s friendships since the 1980s. “We’re only beginning to look at those subtle changes.”

The question on researchers’ minds is whether all that texting, instant messaging and online social networking allows children to become more connected and supportive of their friends — or whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.

It is far too soon to know the answer. Writing in The Future of Children, a journal produced through a collaboration between the Brookings Institution and the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton University, Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia M. Greenfield, psychologists at California State University, Los Angeles, and U.C.L.A. respectively, noted: “Initial qualitative evidence is that the ease of electronic communication may be making teens less interested in face-to-face communication with their friends. More research is needed to see how widespread this phenomenon is and what it does to the emotional quality of a relationship.”

But the question is important, people who study relationships believe, because close childhood friendships help kids build trust in people outside their families and consequently help lay the groundwork for healthy adult relationships. “These good, close relationships — we can’t allow them to wilt away. They are essential to allowing kids to develop poise and allowing kids to play with their emotions, express emotions, all the functions of support that go with adult relationships,” Professor Parker said.

It’s totally strange how these academics rediscover — over and over again — that social tools shape culture, in both nuanced and blunt ways. ‘Damn! We put these communications devices in kids hands that allow them to create and maintain many conversations at once, and they do! And it changes the way kids interact! And the ways that they affiliate and create self identity! Yikes! How did this happen! Where are the glory days of my youth! I don’t understand these kids!’

But once again, expect even more jabs and jibes, like the heavy-handed ‘Antisocial Networking?’ title for the piece. They will continue to maintain that the new ways of connecting are inferior, that our relationships through the web are ersatz, and we are up to no good: destroying the fragile fabric of social interaction.

I am personally more interested in how brains grow when people actively involve themselves in a broad spectrum of close relationships, engaged conversations or the like, which were formerly impossible, even in a face-to-face setting. How will these children manage work, teach each other, and shape their own children?