The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (28 page)

High-ranking female primates can intimidate other females to the point where the victims can’t conceive viable offspring, or if they do, the mothers are so browbeaten they can’t raise them to maturity.
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This is the ultimate evolutionary put-down. Still, female bullying is more common among adolescents than it is among adults. In the case of the attack on Leko, Cheney and Seyfarth remark that it might have happened because an unusual number of sexually mature adolescent females were hanging around, who may have perceived Leko’s new relationship as reducing their prospects.
Who does she think she is?
could be one anthropomorphic interpretation, a phrase that might also have characterized the thinking of my daughter’s aggressor.

But overt aggression among female primates is rare. “Instead, most female dominance interactions take the form of supplants: one female simply approaches another and the latter cedes her sitting position, grooming partner, or food,” Cheney and Seyfarth note. When fights do occur, other females tend to chime in. “Uninvolved bystanders often give threat-grunts while observing other females’ disputes, as if indignantly reproaching the tiff from the sidelines,” they write.
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It’s an interesting parallel to cyberbullying. “Friends” can add fuel to the fire by posting online comments or photos—an update of the threat grunt. Or they can lurk out there in cyberspace, just watching.

One of the novel aspects of Internet bullying is that the humiliation is public at the same time as the teen’s experience is private. Less than 10 percent of cyberbullied teens tell an adult what’s happening to them.
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As for friends, it’s hard to marshal your allies when you’re home alone in front of your screen at the time you discover that a humiliating image or a rumor about you has just been blasted to
your virtual village: several hundred “friends,” who each share it with their own networks. With smartphones, cyberbullies can be cowards; they can follow you anywhere, camouflage their identity, and never have to see the expression on your face when the diss hits its mark. Strangest of all, the victim’s cyber community often goes along with the ordeal, as if they’re paralyzed by a dream or engrossed by the action in a movie. Very few try to stop what’s happening.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that a team of epidemiologists at the National Institutes of Health in Washington found that cybervictims experience higher rates of clinical depression than “standard” victims or bullies.
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If that weren’t sobering enough, a survey of nearly two thousand American teens in middle school (grades six through eight) found that 20 percent of those who had been cyberbullied were seriously contemplating suicide, while another 19 percent said they had already tried to kill themselves.
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With suicide the third leading cause of death among adolescents, according to the Centers for Disease Control, these figures should strike fear into the hearts of parents.

Also, cyberbullying is common. Seventy-two percent of Internet users between twelve and seventeen have been targeted once and one-fifth have experienced such attacks repeatedly, according to a survey by a pair of UCLA psychologists, Elisheva Gross and Jaana Juvonen. Though the marked overlap between harassment at school and cyberbullying—85 percent—suggests that the Internet simply “extends the school grounds,” as the researchers put it, when social media and webcams are used to intimidate, they up the ante on adolescent risk-taking. As with fast cars and alcohol, the use of social networks can become lethal if there is no adult oversight.

MISSING THE FUNERAL

I recently learned on Facebook that a childhood friend’s sister had died. But as I check my newsfeed only every few days, I missed the funeral. I should have been there. Had I been contacted directly,
I would have been. My friend’s sister lived alone and had fallen down the stairs. She had lain there for a long time before being discovered; it was a solitary, lonely death. I called my friend and left a message on her cellphone. I sent her a supportive email, copying it to her various accounts. I considered sending her a text but thought better of it. I’d known her for forty years, and her sister too. I wanted to hear my friend’s voice and for her to hear mine. But by the time we managed to communicate with each other, the week of shivah (in Judaism, the “social” period of mourning, when the bereaved are surrounded by friends and family) had come and gone. She had returned to her home in another city and resumed her daily life. I had gone back to mine.

Even when a life ends abruptly, a conversation with honest signals is no longer that common. The post about the sister’s death floated among the electronic flotsam—“likes” for a recently visited hotel, links to cats doing stunts on YouTube. The disconnect is less about the medium than about our outsized expectations of it. Assigning our devices supernatural powers, many of us assume they can create distance when we want it and closeness when we want it. Explaining why he and his long-term romantic partner don’t live together, for example, columnist Frank Bruni writes that they don’t have to: they can meet in on the Internet. “That’s the thing about our wired age: apart is actually the new together, because alone isn’t alone anymore. On top of calling, there’s Skyping, emailing, texting, sexting: a Kama Sutra of electronic intercourse.”
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Make no mistake, I enjoy reading the odd article a “friend” has shared as much as the next person, even if the site robotically advertises that I’ve read it and even if that “friend” doesn’t recognize me when I pass her on the street. But in its inability to filter out the dreck and its lack of emotional tenor, a social networking site is neither newspaper nor party line. You can read someone’s posts about her Memorial Day weekend or see that she’s won an award and hit “like.” But for the most part, her fallible, human side is invisible there. You
may share a history. You may know a lot about her. But when her sister dies, the two of you might as well be strangers.

THE GOOD NEWS AND THE BAD NEWS

It’s reassuring that there is some good news about teens’ enthusiasm for screens. Kids with lots of friends use their gadgets to keep their friends close at hand. One type of contact fosters the other, though this idea is an about-face of what the experts initially thought. In the late nineties, social psychologist Robert Kraus and his colleagues gave computers to ninety-three Pittsburgh families and followed everyone over the age of ten for two years, meticulously tracking their activities and moods. The researchers found that computers reduced the teenagers’ face-to-face social contact by replacing it with virtual experiences. The more time teens spent on the Internet, the less socially engaged they became and the lonelier they felt.
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As the team had tested the subjects’ moods before the study began, they could impute cause and effect. Instead of making teens feel connected, the machines fostered their isolation. The researchers expected the reverse, so they called this the “Internet paradox.”

Today the consensus is more shaded and can be summed up this way: the impact of the Internet on a kid’s social life depends on who is logging on. Personality plays a big role. Outgoing adolescents deploy their mobile devices to up the social ante. They contact people they already know, deluging them with pictures, pokes, and jokes that make them feel closer to each other and help them cement their social plans.
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For those lucky enough to have an expansive circle of friends, instant messaging and email correlate with face-to-face interaction. When one type of contact rises, the other rises in tandem. In other words, wireless communication exaggerates the extroversion of outgoing, well-adjusted teens: the socially rich get richer.

But what about more inhibited kids? Do the poor also get richer? Well, that depends. The Internet allows shy kids to share details
about themselves without having to look anyone in the eye, read their body language, or worry about other people’s reactions. This is a handy feature for teenage boys who are, by and large, less apt than girls to disclose their feelings face-to-face. And as sharing is a prerequisite for building relationships with girls, this stripped-down medium works quite nicely for many of them.
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Not only are the emotions of the other person invisible, the machine’s limits create a barrier that can be titillating. Think of Ovid’s young lovers Pyramus and Thisbe, who grew up in houses that shared a common wall. Forbidden to marry, they communicated through a chink in the wall; that tiny gap became their only way to reach each other. “The more the flame is covered up, the hotter it burns,” classicist Edith Hamilton noted of the romantic tension created by a wall.
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But without face-to-face contact, the socially poor also get poorer. Teenagers who communicate online with strangers feel lonelier than kids who use their devices to connect with people they already know. And it’s precisely the kids who already feel lousy who are most likely to communicate with strangers.
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Pundits have dubbed this “Facebook depression.” If teenagers already feel alienated—a mood that prompts many of them to turn to the online world for connection—their attempts to form relationships in the often anonymous world of the Internet amplify that feeling, making them feel more depressed than they were before. This is more likely to happen to kids with existing psychological problems. An Israeli study showed that teenagers with learning disabilities—who often feel like outsiders—felt more alienated when they used the Internet to connect with virtual friends. Lonely teenagers who look for love or social connection on the Internet (as opposed to using the web for information or bargain-hunting) felt even lonelier than they had before.
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Meanwhile, parents of kids with ADHD who remark that their teens’ restless minds are calm when they watch television or play video games are definitely onto something, though it’s not a negation of the diagnosis, as many hope. The attraction to screens
reflects the pleasurable dopamine surge their children’s brains get from digital media’s constant novelty and unpredictable rewards. These kids often act without stopping to consider the consequences and then are snubbed by peers because of their boneheadedness (I mean, impulsivity). It’s so much easier for them to turn to the screen for electronic companionship instead.
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“Children whose brains need neurochemical rewards seek out an activity that provides it. Children with social problems spend more time alone, facing a screen,” as Perri Klass has observed.
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In fact, depressed teens leave characteristic cyber footprints. Researchers at Microsoft who mined the Twitter posts of 489 people found that those at risk of a major depression tweet more late at night, and that their posts refer less to real social plans and other people and more to themselves and their own symptoms.
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Facebook, too, mirrors people’s mental states. Twenty to thirty percent of college students’ Facebook profiles refer to their profound feelings of depression, which should give parents and university officials a jolt, not only about the state of their kids’ mental health but also about their privacy.
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Even though people can opt out of sharing some of their posts, the Big Brother aspect of data-mining tells us two important things: first, that the number of college-aged teenagers who find themselves too depressed to function is underreported, and second, that teenagers’ online behavior may be communicating more about how they feel than what they’re actually telling you.

That’s because the shallow sips of digital exchange—the texts, emails, downloaded content, and tweets that are so useful in business, politics, and building one’s electronic tribe—don’t necessarily add up to a real conversation, as MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle points out in her book
Alone Together
. She quotes a sixteen-year-old boy who relies on texting to communicate almost everything he wants to say. “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation,” he told her.
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This sounds extreme, but the feeling resonates with many older adolescents, according to
a detailed portrait of five thousand American college students published in 2012. Having surveyed two previous decades of undergraduates (students during the eighties and nineties), the researchers found that “contemporary undergraduates are at once more connected and more isolated than their predecessors.… The image that comes to mind is a group of students walking across campus, each on their cell phone.” Led by Arthur Levine and Diane Dean, the study portrays the current college student as savvy with electronic devices but “weak in interpersonal skills” and often struggling to communicate thoughts and emotions face-to-face. From the book they wrote on the subject,
Generation on a Tightrope
:

I’m not suggesting that the majority of teenagers are social Neanderthals. In their ability to keep track of people, the opposite may be true. Social media now allow students to bring the formative friendships of high school along with them to college and to their first jobs. But some are still missing out. Instead of investing in deep relationships in the here and now, many settle for small digital snatches of the familiar, for hookups that don’t require much emotional capital. Their “villages” are dense, intense, and
interwoven but not all that local: it’s now possible to be hyperconnected and extremely lonely all at the same time. Even if alienation is any self-respecting teenager’s mantra, one has to wonder about the impact of diminishing day-to-day social contact on their learning and happiness. Jay Giedd, a neuroscientist and chief of brain imaging at the US National Institute of Mental Health, has pointed out that an enormous amount of the change in the adolescent brain is due to the impact of real social interaction.
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Why, then, are so many adults pushing them toward digital experiences at school?