Where Are We Going?

A news item in September 2013 reported that a family was going to live without inventions made since 1986. They were going to try to manage without such items as mobile phones, the internet and e-mails, DVD players, CDs, MP3 players, digital cameras, cable television, modern video games and, of course, internet-based social media.

When we consider how all-pervading these things are, we have to realise that children brought up with them live in a completely different world from that of earlier generations. The long-term effects these things will have on their bodies and minds are unknown.

Physical effects are now being noticed. Doctors are warning of hearing loss, repetitive strain injuries, back problems, myopia, obesity, and increasing incidence of diabetes from lack of daily physical exercise. The hormones that regulate sleep patterns and wellbeing are disrupted by long hours of illumination from computer or television screens, and skills of co-ordination, such as the ability to catch a ball, estimate speeds and distances, use peripheral vision, hold a pen, and write properly, are being lost.

What are the effects on the mind? There is the obvious one of addiction—an inability to put these things aside, and an obsessive need to be in touch with others electronically while lacking ordinary personal social skills, such as communicating fluently, politely and clearly, having empathy, and being willing to co-operate in the physical world on cultural and charitable projects of social benefit. These types of personal interaction take place in neighbourhoods, sports clubs, charities, church groups, volunteer organisations, local agricultural shows and special interest groups. Such socially valuable activities are in many cases being limited by a shortage of younger members. Youngsters prefer to be hunched over a screen playing with the misnamed “social” media such as Facebook, or interactive games.

While these amusements can bring emancipation from isolation for some, for others they have an unhealthy dominance over their lives, and make it dangerously easy to link up with people or organisations that are merely using them for their own purposes. There can be witty exchanges and useful sharing of photos and experiences, but little of the civilised discussion that happens when real people meet to talk, because these are technologies of the instantaneous and the superficial.

Like most human inventions, social media could be a force for good, giving those without power a voice. Like most human inventions, they have been exploited for evil, such as cyber-bullying, scams, pornography and graft. The big difference from most other inventions is that they cannot be regulated effectively: nobody accepts responsibility.

Who sets the standards for acceptable speech and behaviour? Nobody, because parents alone cannot hope to counteract the forces at work; teachers and police get no support from incompetent and pusillanimous bureaucracies trying to be “progressive”. The debased nature of conversation is now set by the universal spread of low standards through the internet and television. The Melbourne psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg has commented on the damaging effect on children of access to garbage on smartphones, “by the pornified culture they are growing up in”. He sees among modern parents a “tendency not to use moral language or set boundaries”. The result is a generation unable to see the link between actions and consequences. In the words of another commentator, Miranda Devine, “Never have there been so many toxic forces conspiring against your efforts to raise happy, responsible citizens.”

The people who used to uphold civilised standards, such as magistrates and law-makers, are in many cases now so lacking in integrity that they allow vile abuse of police because of “changing social standards”. In other words, they are part of the problem.

The problem is not just one of deteriorating personal standards of speech and behaviour, but of the effects they have on society as a whole. Decency, meaning consideration for others, has social dividends. In its absence the following trends can be observed:

• An increase in bullying, admitted by some psychiatrists to be due to sociopathic tendencies in individuals who are brought up as self-centred children without social skills.

• An increase in violence, such as the assaults now commonplace, and the frequent shootings, stabbings and road rage.

• An increase in sexually transmitted diseases (in spite of, or because of, “sex education” in schools).

• A decline in basic numeracy, literacy and science results in schools in spite of increases in education funding.

• A movement, among those who can afford it, away from the public domain to gated communities and private schools.

The influence of electro-media addiction on these trends may only be a contributing factor. It may even serve a useful purpose in occupying people who would otherwise engage in anti-social behaviour such as vandalism. Other addictions such as alcohol and drugs could be a more significant factor, as may be a culture which confuses democracy with mediocrity. However, I suspect that these media do promote dysfunction in society. For example, teachers in past times, confronted with a child who was disruptive and used foul language as a matter of course, not knowing it was abnormal outside their feral family, would bring that child tactfully but firmly into the fold of civilisation. But now that the ferals have iPhones they can dominate a parallel universe unmediated by standard-setters, and become playground or cyberspace heroes. Their standards permeate the classroom, and useful learning cannot take place because of their disruptive behaviour.

The rush to private schools is not in search of better teachers, but to a system that can still insist on standards of behaviour which will lead to better educational and social outcomes. However, school authorities sometimes issue iPads to their students under the delusion that they are educational tools. For fourteen-year-olds they an opportunity to play games and “socialise”. They disable the various locks and filters and thenceforth their internet connection has little to do with schoolwork.

Some people, in letters to editors, congratulate themselves as Australians for the peaceable transfer of power in elections, compared to the violence in many other countries. They would be much more concerned about our political leaders’ safety if they read the hatred expressed towards political opponents in social media. Why do people see no reason for self-control and moderation? In many cases because they are anonymous. However, although it is an unintended result, perusal of these postings by outsiders such as potential employers and grandparents does have some value for their decision-making on careers and inheritances.

The background to these phenomena is the pathological individualism brought about by increased dissociation from face-to-face human contact, allied to cybermob psychology, which changes people into trolls. The media that contribute to this have also caused reduced attention span, so that the addicted cannot cope with reasoning, which takes time. Substituting for reason are shouted slogans, sensationalism, celebrity worship, crudity, and antagonism in news reporting and interviews.

The addictive nature of mass entertainment became clear with the invention of cinema, and was confirmed with the spread of television in the middle of the last century. The illusion of control over the addiction became possible with the personal computer, but the concomitant lack of restraints on content gave equal potential for emancipation or degradation.

In the present transitional phase, when some people mistake electronic communication for real human contact, there is a risk that others (usually the elderly) will become isolated. Human contact takes effort to maintain, as do most valuable things in life. Real friendships are one-to-one, each relationship unique in its interactive mode, intensity, interpretation of body language, facial expressions, and business or social background. It is truly personal, whereas “friending” is a travesty of it, an automated imitation.

Mobile phones can isolate their users from reality to the extent that they become a danger to themselves and others as they wander the footpaths and roads, blundering into real people and cars or falling off piers. The use of mobile phones while driving has been shown to make a serious crash four times more likely, with drivers focusing on the conversation, not the road.

The phone addiction is often due to a common phenomenon known as “fomo”, fear of missing out. Stephen Kirchner, in the London Daily Telegraph, wrote, “Fomo sapiens cannot leave its phones, tablets or laptops alone, no matter how inappropriate the occasion.” He was referring to the notorious Obama–Thorning-Schmidt–Cameron “selfie” at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. The disjunction between this behaviour and the event being attended shows that these technologies are “improved means to unimproved ends” at the very least, but more concerning is the possibility that they are causing infantilism.

Considered opinion is now regarded as boring, with communication reduced to superficial codes: omg, lol, imho, “like”, emoticons, and even abbreviated obscenities, such as wtf, which are analogous to the proto-lingual calls of the jungle. As New Scientist described it:

As people lose aspects of higher cognition … their ability to issue volleys of profanities often remains intact. Curses hunker down in areas such as the amygdala and basal ganglia … These areas emerged at an earlier point in evolution.

On Facebook, a contributor actually apologised in advance that his posts (which were merely discussing grammatical features of sentences) were to be based on a book of hymns. So religious texts might offend, whereas being insulted by obscenities is no impediment to publication.

Robert Bolton, in his excellent book People Skills (1986), discusses three categories of behaviour in relation to other people: submissive, assertive and aggressive. The second type is the behaviour that defends one’s “personal space” while respecting the rights and feelings of others. In personal relationships this requires tact and recognition that the other person may not realise that they are invading your “territory”, which is not just the physical space around you but also the right to your own values and perceptions.

Bolton writes, “Maintaining an appropriate emotional and values distance from other people’s social space is often difficult.” It is particularly difficult on Facebook because the concept of “friends” is taken to bizarre lengths, and whatever is posted, copied or “liked” soon becomes common property.

It would be futile to ask anyone to moderate their tone on your behalf, and the pressure is to be submissive; to “like” something without due consideration of its implications, in order to seem sociable. What the compliant person does not realise is that by “liking” a post containing obscenities, the “liker” is legitimising feral attitudes and tarring themselves with the same brush.

The opposite behaviour, aggressiveness, is also typical of “social” media, where rants and denigration of public figures are published. Facebook and similar sites therefore encourage the two extremes of Bolton’s behaviour classification and lower the general standards of civility and respect for others.

If one were to try on the web the negotiating techniques of Bolton’s “assertive behaviour” one would be misunderstood or ridiculed: “Why are you here then?” would be the usual reaction.

One solution, apart from blocking messages or opting out of Facebook altogether, is to “unfriend” the source of undesired communications, usually “jokes” passed on, or political or religious proselytising; but note the wording—“unfriend”—which makes assertive action seem like aggression or hostility, strongly implying that you don’t want to be a real-world friend either. If you don’t want to risk receiving unwanted messages for “personal space” reasons, whether it be politics, language, morals or just tedium, then you risk being unfriendly.

In real life you can negotiate the terms of conversation with friends. These terms are usually mutually understood and respected, but not on Facebook. This reduction of human relationships to a mouse click can even damage relationships and cause resentments that would not exist if people did not use such media as their main mode of interaction. Mature people are not disposed to do so, but the effects on those reared on them are uncertain, possibly harmful, and certainly harmful to those ostracised or ridiculed in public. Similar objections apply to Twitter, where again human communication is trivialised and devalued. We even have national leaders, who in view of their social position should manifest some gravitas, tweeting not only their spontaneous thought bubbles but also matters of international diplomatic concern, which could have serious consequences.

Individuals who think for themselves, as they are expected to do in a democracy, become a rarity when the group-think of social media prevails. From the factiousness of GetUp! campaigns to the sick fixations of terrorism, attitudes are facilitated which weaken social cohesion and destabilise good government. The advance of civilisation is predicated on elevation of purpose and civility of discourse, but we are seeing a race to the bottom in human expression and behaviour.

Joe Hildebrand, in a recent Sydney Daily Telegraph article titled “Political patience now a lost virtue”, wrote:

It is impossible not to notice the outbreak of brutal skittishness in politics has correlated almost exactly with the explosion in social media. Never have we had an electorate so empowered, so impatient and so impolite.

He notes that politicians can be abused on a scale that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago—then “the caravan of outrage moves on” to some other object of hate.

The head of the Anti-Corruption Commission in Thailand said recently, “Elections are not the only part of the democratic system. You must have people of good faith and people of ethical and good conduct.” George Orwell wrote in 1940, “The thing that frightens me about the modern intelligentsia is their inability to see that human society must be based on human decency.”

All these commentators have noticed that a functioning polity is based on good manners in the broad sense, a proposition clearly explained in Lucinda Holdforth’s book Why Manners Matter (2010). Freedom of speech is also affected, for when individuals cannot put their case in a civilised manner governments feel obliged to make it illegal to offend someone. This ham-fisted censorship is both selective in its application and futile.

The effect of new technology on the mind has history. It is likely that the invention of writing did not at first greatly impress pre-literate societies that valued the memorising of sagas, family history and poetry. They may have thought of it as a crutch, and its ramifications could not have been imagined. The memorisation of poetry is now an almost extinct brain function.

We are now at the beginning of an electronic cultural shift that will lead to destinies unknown. Until recently it was expected that the human brain should be exercised in mental arithmetic, adding up bills, giving change, and so on. That is now almost a lost skill.

Brain size has been diminishing since Palaeolithic times, perhaps ever since organised societies relieved evolutionary selective pressure on individual cognition. Now that the brain has outsourced its functions to technological crutches, it is being under-utilised, and with continued atrophy it is likely to struggle to reason carefully, to synthesise ideas, discriminate, or remember details. Without its iPad, it won’t even have any details to remember.

A common speculation about the future is, “What will happen if machines take over the world?” Perhaps it has happened already with devices that are now out of control, but with the illusion of control being given to every human being connected to them. Furthermore, the use of the internet and phones by governments and spy agencies to track individuals gives unprecedented power to dictatorships and also increases the risk of instant flare-ups of cyber-wars, mob incitement and even physical conflicts. Is this Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere? If so it is a worrying beast.