An American student checks in on his smart phone.
Critics of social networking say it is having an isolating effect on
users. Photograph: Najlah Feanny/Corbis
The way in which people frantically communicate online via Twitter,
Facebook and instant messaging can be seen as a form of modern madness,
according to a leading American sociologist."A behaviour that has
become typical may still express the problems that once caused us to
see it as pathological," MIT professor Sherry Turkle writes in her new
book,
Alone Together, which is leading an attack on the information age.Turkle's
book, published in the UK next month, has caused a sensation in
America, which is usually more obsessed with the merits of social networking. She appeared last week on Stephen Colbert's late-night comedy show,
The Colbert Report.
When Turkle said she had been at funerals where people checked their
iPhones, Colbert quipped: "We all say goodbye in our own way."Turkle's
thesis is simple: technology is threatening to dominate our lives and
make us less human. Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate
better, it is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a
cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world.But
Turkle's book is far from the only work of its kind. An intellectual
backlash in America is calling for a rejection of some of the values and
methods of modern communications. "It is a huge backlash. The different
kinds of communication that people are using have become something that
scares people," said Professor William Kist, an education expert at
Kent State University, Ohio.The list of attacks on social media
is a long one and comes from all corners of academia and popular
culture. A recent bestseller in the US,
The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, suggested that use of the internet
was altering the way we think to make us less capable of digesting
large and complex amounts of information, such as books and magazine
articles. The book was based on an essay that Carr wrote in the
Atlantic magazine. It was just as emphatic and was headlined: Is Google Making Us Stupid?Another strand of thought in the field of cyber-scepticism is found in
The Net Delusion,
by Evgeny Morozov. He argues that social media has bred a generation
of "slacktivists". It has made people lazy and enshrined the illusion
that clicking a mouse is a form of activism equal to real world
donations of money and time.Other books include
The Dumbest Generation by Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein – in which he claims "the intellectual future of the US looks dim"– and
We Have Met the Enemy by Daniel Akst, which describes the problems of self-control in the
modern world, of which the proliferation of communication tools is a key
component.The backlash has crossed the Atlantic. In
Cyburbia,
published in Britain last year, James Harkin surveyed the modern
technological world and found some dangerous possibilities. While Harkin
was no pure cyber-sceptic, he found many reasons to be worried as well
as pleased about the new technological era. Elsewhere, hit film
The Social Network has been seen as a thinly veiled attack on the social media generation,
suggesting that Facebook was created by people who failed to fit in
with the real world.Turkle's book, however, has sparked the most debate so far. It is a
cri de coeur for
putting down the BlackBerry, ignoring Facebook and shunning Twitter.
"We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, yet we have
allowed them to diminish us," she writes.Fellow critics point to
numerous incidents to back up their argument. Recently, media coverage
of the death in Brighton of Simone Back focused on a suicide note she
had posted on Facebook that was seen by many of her 1,048 "friends" on the site. Yet none called for help – instead they traded insults with each other on her Facebook wall.Turkle's book has also hit home because her previous works,
The Second Self and
Life on the Screen, seemed more open to the technological world. "
Alone Together reads as if it were written by Turkle's evil Luddite twin," joked Kist.But
even the backlash now has a backlash, with many leaping to the defence
of social media. They point out that emails, Twitter and Facebook have
led to more communication, not less – especially for people who may have
trouble meeting in the real world because of great distance or social
difference.Defenders say theirs is just a different form of
communication that people might have trouble getting used to. "When you
go into a coffee shop and everyone is silent on their laptop, I
understand what she is saying about not talking to one another," Kist
said. "But it is still communicating. I disagree with her. I don't see
it as so black and white."Some experts believe the debate is so
fierce because social networking is a new field that has yet to develop
rules and etiquette that everyone can respect and that is why incidents
such as Simone Back's death appear so shocking. "Let's face it, I see
no sign of anyone unplugging," said Kist. "But, perhaps, we need to
involve a 'netiquette' to deal with it all."He also pointed out
that the "real world" that many social media critics hark back to never
really existed. Before everyone travelled on the bus or train with their
heads buried in an iPad or a smart phone, they usually just travelled
in silence. "We did not see people spontaneously talking to strangers.
They were just keeping to themselves," Kist said.http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/22/social-networking-cyber-scepticism-twitter
