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Study Finds Growing Up WIth Gadgets Has a Downside: Social Skill Impairment
PolygamousRanchKid writes with this excerpt from a CNN story:"Tween girls who spend much of their waking hours switching frantically between YouTube, Facebook, television and text messaging are more likely to develop social problems, says a Stanford University study published in a scientific journal on Wednesday. Young girls who spend the most time multitasking between various digital devices, communicating online or watching video are the least likely to develop normal social tendencies, according to the survey of 3,461 American girls aged 8 to 12 who volunteered responses. The study only included girls who responded to a survey in Discovery Girls magazine, but results should apply to boys, too, Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor of communications who worked on the study, said in a phone interview. Boys' emotional development is more difficult to analyze because male social development varies widely and over a longer time period, he said."
Then why do we have social networks aimed at children then?
Where do you think the whole middle-aged-guy-living-in-parents-basement meme comes from?
The only new thing here is that it happens to girls, as well as guys.
which seems to be the case, then by spending all your time on facebook and twitter you will fit right in socially.
You would expect introverts to spend more time on gadgets, so the direction of causation here, if any, is not determined. I hate to use a cliche, but "correlation != causation" never seemed more apt.
The only new thing here is that it happens to girls
I've recently had the "privilege" of venturing back into the dating market after more than a year of being single. Imagine my surprise when I learned that it's virtually impossible to date these days without an unlimited texting package. Nobody knows (or at least nobody I've dated) how to talk anymore. It's as if asking for conversation in more than 160 character bites is too much. The distressing thing is that this trait seems to be independent of education and background. I've dated women with backgrounds ranging from GED to Ph.D candidate and have encountered this with all of them.
Perhaps I'm old fashioned but I'm a techno geek who still appreciates the value of a good handshake and eye contact. The lack of these skills doesn't just screw you with dating; it screws you in the business world as well.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Please define "social problems"
Please do it in terms of something other than "the old farts say it was always done this way, so it should always be done this way".
Welcome to your children's world.
-- Terry
least likely to develop normal social tendencies
Well, from what I remember of "normal social tendencies" in high school, maybe it's better that fewer people develop them.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
Or, they could consider the idea that as on-line communication becomes rooted in our social ecosphere, social skills are changing to more closely integrate on-line interactions.
15 years ago, online dating was satire. 5-10 years ago it was socially frowned upon. These days, it's damned near normative.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Problem is, what is normal? Suppose for instance we thought that Amish social culture and relations between teenagers was normal. Then we might say that the excessive use of cars and shopping malls and fast food led to the development of abnormal attitudes to social relations among teenagers. Suppose we thought arranged marriages the norm. We might say then that excessive levels of consumption of mass market women's magazines led to abnormal attitudes to marriage, including resistance to proper levels of parental influence over future marriage partners. We really need to get away from this crazed desire to have everyone be something identical called normal. These girls and guys will, almost all of them, just find their way through life in the end, get married, have kids, have jobs. And the ones that will not, well, its doubtful their lives would be any happier deprived of tech. They'd either find something else, or they'd be miserable.
Seriously?
n: 3461 - pretty good
Inclusion criteria: Girls 8-12 who replied to a magazine survey - pretty bad
Measurement: Self-reporting of multitasking, self-reporting on social ability - reliable?
Interpretation: Can also be applied to boys - where the fuck did this come from??
Author: Clifford Nass a "self-described technologist of 25 years".
The author seems to be one of those self-promoting weirdos who picks a topic he knows will be controversial, does some easy "science" with it, and comes up with a controversial conclusion. He says he finds the results "disturbing".
Well Clifford, I find the fact that Stanford employs someone like you quite disturbing. I find you job title "technologist" disturbing. And I find your name dropping of Google and Microsoft disturbing. Most of all, I find the complete lack of scientific method in this study incredibly sad - it's just made for pop-science articles. Shame on you.
That's because phone calls are fucking annoying.
If you want to have a conversation with someone, take them out to dinner or some other activity where you are together.
Otherwise, unless you're stuck across the country and can't see each other, stop expecting people to accept your interruptions to their day.
paintball
My social skills are fine, asshole!
paintball
I think that it's a pretty good article. I think 8 to 12 year range is kind of too narrow and it wasn't a longitudinal study, so we don't get the clear big picture here. It's been mentioned here that social skills are changing overall. Yet, we're still bound by human intuition in terms of how to interact socially(Whether or not they're intrinsic to humanity or not; that's another point. They're certainly nearly universal). These kids are still going to need to get jobs, meet people who aren't geeks etc.
There's an awesome quote that made the apple fanboy part of me die laughing.
FaceTime and Skype are not replacements for actual face time
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
As all those tween girls frantically posting to Slasdot all day.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Yup. I was going to say it if you hadn't.
Multitasking between various digital devices, communicating online, and watching video ARE normal social skills nowadays.
You know, I'm sick and tired of all these articles about "studies" proving this and proving that, where that "study" refers to a fucking poll! That is NOT science, that is not a study, that is not a good way to draw conclusions. Period.
Sysadmin here.
I rapidly switch between Skype, E-mail and the Phone.
I hate my life, I hate your life, I hate the world, and I'm voting Republican in 2012 in hopes that the Earth will be destroyed.
Social problems much?
I'm saying the following as a software developer (among other things), which may or may not be ironic: I've always had the concern for the potential (often actualized) of information technology to be socially detrimental. From evolutionary psychology we know that despite the appearances of a very flexible psyche, significant components of most of our behaviors and thinking are hardwired by biology. Nurture only has so much leeway within the boundaries set by nature. Millions of years of evolution have created a social animal that is well fit to a specific environment of foraging tribalism. Civilization has already in a mere 10k years taken us quite far from that, and we've built a sort of human zoo for ourselves. For all the benefits this has brought, many detriments have come about as well, a lot of them having to do with people's actions today often influencing people with whom they have no personal relationships (contrast a tribe where everyone knows everyone else in the tribe and members rarely had influence outside the tribe), much more indirect links between appropriate behavior and reward (creating stress), and so on. Information technology is taking us further yet from our biologically optimal environment, and I have no confidence it will turn out well. Our social interactions have become a perverted version of what we've evolved for, and patterns of interaction through technology abuse the neurological mechanisms responsible for controlling communication and other social aspects of the mind, in the same way that spaghetti programming abuses the goto statement.
[This part of the post is a bit tangential and may be skipped.] Some people would say that everything will be fine because eventually technology and biotechnology will be used to directly enhance our minds and bodies, so that we can exceed our biological constraints. These people ignore the problem of our moral/ethical frameworks, which are grounded in the brain's evolutionary heritage, being incapable of guiding us in such a future as there is no precedent in the evolution of moral/ethical behavior. Simple example: 60 years in the future a person begins being slowly "enhanced" by replacing one by one his neurons, and then other cells, with artificial or bioengineered ones that initially duplicate function and then bring online enhanced functionality; eventually the whole person's consistence has been replaced; now contrast this to, instead, making a recording of all relevant information about the person, building an artificial copy, and killing the original; same result, yet the second version feels wrong to most people. Our morals/ethics are not equipped for situations that have no analogy whatsoever to anything in our evolutionary past. If we extend ourselves, we would have to extend our morals and ethics too, and the latter extension is basically arbitrary.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Is this really the best that medical research can come up with?
There's a ton of potential correlations that people have noticed which would be medically relevant if only someone would take the time to check them out.
How about looking into the supplements people take to see if they have any effect? Not just the "trace doses on a population of subjects with a known genetic cause seems to have no effect" kind of study, but a real studies which could validate or dismiss the various claims that people make about supplements.
Does taking extra vitamin D correlate [inversely] with SAD? Or depression in general? How about correlating people who take iodine supplements with depression? Do magnesium supplements help? Does vitamin D help prevent cancer?
How about looking into diseases and conditions for which there is no known cause? Post prandial syndrome? Keratolysis exfoliativa? How about eliminating one or more proposed "possible causes", thus encouraging people to look elsewhere and to not spend money on treatments which can have no effect?
The research in the article has little obvious significance, throws very little light on what appears to be a non-problem, and since there is no sense of importance it doesn't inform policy. (Is this a problem? Should we be concerned? Does this cry out for regulation?)
By way of contrast, Erin Brockovich is looking into an apparent disease (or condition) affecting teenagers in western NY. It's salient, important, and useful both from a medical and political perspective. Even if she finds nothing, her research will eliminate one or more proposed causes.
Shouldn't we be doing that type of research? You know - the type that actually tries to help people?
And this from the article is just WTF:
So someone who is good at multitasking is worse at juggling various activities? What does multitasking even mean if not juggling?
I have experienced older relatives getting upset when I'm just reading to myself, sending e-mails, or surfing the net, instead of talking to them. Social does not mean I HAVE to socialize with YOU.
tl;dr: It's difficult to tell because adolescent boys are already mostly crazy.
LIttle Judy cant focus cause she is bombarded with blinky shit fighting for attention on every square inch of her life? dope-em! thats why its there, no need to be a parent and turn the shit off once in a damn while, let you 6 year old have 24/7 access to a smartphone, video games, tv and the internet ... how ever else will she learn how to use these things? I mean geez parents it took you like forever to push a button and click a mouse right?
That is either radically cool or a forewarning of doom for our society, probably both.
In a vacuum of other information, that's true. However if you can figure out a plausible mechanism by which you would have causation, then correlation turns causation into a pretty likely case.
Now the brain is a learning apparatus, and its neuroplasticity means that, not only do we learn things through practice, but a "use it or lose it" effect means that we also lose the abilities that we don't practice.
Now there's two effects of constant texting-based communication
The consequences should be pretty obvious: a lack or practice, and therefore skill, in expressing longer coherent streams of thought, and a lack of practice in processing the full sensory stream of facial expressions, body language, and tonal emphasis from face-to-face meetings. The other group that has problems with the latter due to excessive sensory sensitivity show significant problems interacting in social contexts. They are those with autism spectrum disorders.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
I'm not just asking rhetorically: the article is lacking any meaninful information, and begs many questions. It says that online interactions do not substitute for "real" interactions, but why aren't online interactions "real", and if they are distinctly different in character from offline interactions, what makes them worse, rather than better, or rather than simply different?
What social problems are we talking about? Are we talking about differences that young women would themselves consider problems? Or is it simply a preference for online interaction?
It's entirely likely that the actual study cites real problems. But like everyone else here, I've had a lot of experiences with people denouncing my interests as "not real" and inferior to "real" activities, and I'm conscious that there's a lot of social pressure on people in general and women in particular to conform to toxic social norms. So I can't help but suspect that the study is complaining that some women are nerds. And we like nerds here.
Siri and I were just talking about this
Every scientist dreams of publishing in the journal "Wall Street", known for their strict and reputable peer review process. But more importantly, isn't ocean acidification, NOT the warming itself, the most immediate threat to the ecosystem? And this idea that the models don't fit beyond the bounds of the plots shown to the public has been argued and debunked over and over again.
I would like to see a study that compares various technologies and the social behaviour of children. The reason is simple enough: there have always been children with poorly developed social skills. The difference is the technology that they bury themselves in.
Today, it seems to be telecommunications technology and social networking. That's what this study is about. In the 80's and 90's, kids buried themselves in computers and video games. In the 60's and 70's, there was the TV epidemic. Throughout the whole time, less social children have been engrossed in the most insidious technology of all: books.
So my question is this: is this 'desocialization' of children remaining at the same levels historically, or is it actually getting worse? Somehow, I suspect there has been little if any change because I suspect that children who are less social migrate to these technologies as an outlet. And if that is the case, can the new technologies improve socialization skills. After all, we are talking about communications technology these days. You use SMS or Facebook to converse with people. If you alienate people using those media, you are cut off. That should incentivize better social behaviour.
But all of this is speculation, since I have questions but not the tools to investigate it.
Um, I don't know what you are reading into his message, but I didn't see anywhere that he was still dwelling on high school. Remembering != dwelling, and remembering that many other people's idea of normal social tendencies in HS was adolescent cliques and follow-the-leader posturing does not comment on *his* social tendencies, then or now.
Why? I grew up with gadgets, the primitive ones. I'm no more socially awkward because of it. And yes, I have 12 tabs open right now. So what?
"The study only included girls who responded to a survey in Discovery Girls magazine, but results should apply to boys, too, Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor of communications who worked on the study, said in a phone interview. Boys' emotional development is more difficult to analyze because male social development varies widely and over a longer time period, he said."
I'm pretty sure that there is absolutely no correlation between the emotional development of young girls and young boys. Having been a young boy and being the father of a ridiculous number of young boys and girls, I can say with considerable authority that what one gender does and how they respond has nothing to do with the other gender.
Totally THIS!
We have this debate at family dinners quite often. We "don't keep in touch with our friends" is what the parents come up with. The fact is they don't understand modern social media. I don't need to take some random out to dinner once a year to catchup because I am always caught up. I don't need to send letters or mass emails to friends like my parents do updating them about their lives.
They don't seem to realise that we are communicating in a different way. Facebook. Who need to catchup with people when they post their entire lives on their news feed? That random not very close friend from highschool, I can tell you where he works who he's dating, and his current big problems in life, they were all posted right there on his wall. Late night schmoozing on the phone from the bedroom? Screw that, lets sms, or if you need to talk to someone in realtime fire up skype or facebook messenger.
The study doesn't realise that we are now more social in very different ways. It may not conform to their world view, but screw it our view will be the new world view in 20 years.
Have gnu, will travel.
I asked my young niece, my sister's daughter, what she thought of this study. She said she disagreed with its findings.
I asked her why and after removing her left earphone she said, "Fuck you, that's why."
I would have been more disturbed about her reaction if I didn't understand that she had gotten that answer from hearing the way her mom and I have spoken to each other since we were kids.
You are welcome on my lawn.
What you fail to grasp is that just because someone multi-tasks, this doesn't mean they are any good at it OR that it is the right approach to take.
You seem to think that you are multi-tasking BUT are you doing any of the things you do as good as you could be doing them if you didn't have the attention span of a kitten? Don't even bother saying that when you try, it makes no difference, all that shows is that people who multi-task without being very good at it are just bad at single tasks as well.
I couldn't find that first supposed quote in the article. Adding your own quotes as fact to a piece of research? Gosh, let me add a bit of my own, when someone reacts so violently it is usually the case of the truth getting a bit to close.
It is well known that normal humans loose the capacity to fully focus on a individual task when more tasks are being added. You cannot just keep giving new tasks to a person and expect them to do them all equally well at the same time. Yet this is exactly what multi-taskers pride themselves on, they go against decades of research to make sure highly trained and focussed fighter pilots are not overloaded with tasks and claim they can do an endless variety of tasks without any loss in quality... makes sense, if you live in lala-land.
And being social DOES mean having to be social even if you don't always want to. Being a social person doesn't just mean only when you want to with who you want to but to be able to have as a normal human being even in less then ideal situations. Fleeing from a family gathering to check your email is the hallmark of a badly adjusted and anti-social person.
Trust me, you are talking on a nerd site, we know about these things.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
An online survey of 3,461 North American girls ages 8-12 conducted in the summer of 2010 through Discovery Girls magazine examined the relationships between social well-being and young girls' media use-including video, video games, music listening, reading/homework, e-mailing/posting on social media sites, texting/instant messaging, and talking on phones/video chatting-and face-to-face communication. This study introduced both a more granular measure of media multitasking and a new comparative measure of media use versus time spent in face-to-face communication. Regression analyses indicated that negative social well-being was positively associated with levels of uses of media that are centrally about interpersonal interaction (e.g., phone, online communication) as well as uses of media that are not (e.g., video, music, and reading). Video use was particularly strongly associated with negative social well-being indicators. Media multitasking was also associated with negative social indicators. Conversely, face-to-face communication was strongly associated with positive social well-being. Cell phone ownership and having a television or computer in one's room had little direct association with children's socioemotional well-being. We hypothesize possible causes for these relationships, call for research designs to address causality, and outline possible implications of such findings for the social well-being of younger adolescents. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).
I don't have access to the study itself. I hope that any peer-reviewed study would address the concerns you voiced (and many more). Obviously the CNN article is crap; in the absence of more information, I'll at least give the article the benefit of the doubt and suspend judgement.
Somehow the idea that multi-tasking not only is necessary but a GOOD thing has become entwined in our society, especially under the influence of women who claim they are better at it then men and that men with their single task focus are obsolete...
Yet, the military STILL likes to put TWO people in charge of complex fighting machine. If not more? Why? Especially in fighter planes there is no technical need for it anymore. So why still two people or more to divide the tasks? Can highly intelligent, well trained and physically fit fighter pilots not focus on more then one task at a time? No, not as good as two or more people can. It isn't just direct control of the vehicle, it is dealing with all the information that is needed. Awacs aircraft don't just pipe their data straight to fighter pilots to sort out, it is processed so that task is taken away from the pilot. Radio communication is limitted to what a pilot needs to hear, not all the chatter around to avoid him being overloaded.
OVERLOAD, that is part but not all off the problem. Our brain is not an infinite machine, proof? Magicians. Our eyes take in the photons of the whole act, yet by waving a hand here, we move a hand there. Often quite close to each other. Even our amazing eyes and massive brain can be so easily overloaded that we miss what must obviously be happen (we know there is not such thing as real magic) and be fooled by the lie we know is happening right in front of us. Try it, most people even if they KNOW the trick is taking place have trouble actually spotting it. This is why red circles have been invented as overlays to draw our attention within a image to a specifc spot.
It would therefor make sense that setting a security guard to work watching a dozen monitors with each dozens of people is going to make it pretty damn hard to focus on all of them. And gosh, that is fact and why a lot of money is being put on AI systems that can do the looking instead.
But there is also another element to multi-tasking: avoiding spending your full attention to a single task. The bad students amongst us or those of us who know bad students are probably familiar with the ritual of finding the right music, the right snack, the right drink etc etc to make study easier... not it isn't, but because you hate the task of studying you add tasks to limit focussing on your study and voila, you only succeeded in making it harder for yourself and therefor will hate it even more. Meanwhile the good student just gets on with it in far less time by just focussing on the one task.
If you can only concentrate on one task at the time, then that is a mental handicap that is quite serious. But somehow the current fashion is to think of those who cannot concentrate on a single task at a time as natural multi-taskers. They might well be, but is that a good thing? It seems to taken for granted that because a person multi-tasks, they are automatically good at it and that none of their tasks suffer because of it.
There is a further problem, how you perform a task, matters. Sending an email to someone or a text is NOT the same as a face to face chat. And if you rather handle a dozen online conversations at the same time while avoiding your family downstairs... are you not just fleeing to your room to avoid a social situation you are unable to deal with? This is a nerd site, how many here posted on a friday night when they could have gone out and told themselves they choose to stay home alone? When you are a social misfit, at least have the courage to admit it.
I am not saying it is wrong but what would society look like if all PEOPLE were nerds? If I look fondly back on SWG memories rather then dates, that is just half a million people world wide. But if facebook users did the same, it might well affect the birth rate.
What I have noticed, as a MMO player is that more and more I am playing with young people who lack any awareness that if you group, you are grouping with other living human beings who have their own desires and goals and tho
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I know, I was one of them. But back when I was 10-12, we didn't have constant online access or cell phones or Facebook. The most I got was an hour of PC time at a computer lab on Saturdays, and what connection time I could steal from my best friend's house (I did have one of those, at least) since her family had a family computer and Prodigy. (I think I just dated myself.) So we were stuck with some mild social skills impairment due to natural introversion, but no other outlet for our desire for human communication. So I read books all the time instead.
I think it's easier when you're an adult. You can turn off the computer and go visit an actual real life friend and just get drunk with them, like I did earlier this evening. We actually turned off the television and just chatted for a few hours. Social skills can be acquired more readily once you're not a little kid.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Because anyone or anything that isn't "normal" must be eliminated. Why? Because I said so.
Everyone must enjoy chatting about 'pointless' things.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
So would you have been saying it BECAUSE he hadn't said it, or would have just been a coincidence?
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Is it by using technologies that you become socially impaired, or is it because you are becoming socially impaired that you used technologies? If my so called friends were not that annoying to me when I was a kid, I would probably not be a software engineer today. When I see "the survey of 3,461 American girls aged 8 to 12 who volunteered responses", I think that does not mean much. If I read something like "the sample was randomly divided in two, the first sample was given new hitech gadget every year, the second not" maybe that would be different.
It seems to me that modern kids talk to their friends a lot more that. I ever used to! When I was 15, being social was getting you mate to bring his computer around so you could play linked games by serial port. I had maybe 2 or 3 good friends I saw outside of school. Today our kids regularly talk online to many more people, have better grammar and writing skills and enjoy being social online. P.s. I met my wife on icq.
Pro Coffee Drinker
Based on my experiences working through one state's vocational rehabilitation system, I'd say the state defines "normal behavior" as what gets and keeps you a job. This has a lot to do with how people are expected to act in interviews and meetings and is thus determined by corporate hiring managers.
Teens continue to redefine normal, much to the chagrin of adults, again!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Isn't saying "the same should apply to boys", and assuming the reader understands why, relying on a similar level of sense as the conclusion of the article itself?
That was very nice how he politely got around the fact that boys social development, even under ideal circumstances, is so far behind the average females social development as to barely register as such. Unless we make a supreme effort to work on our social skills, and consciously try to "grow", we are social idiots. Basement/moms house memes have a basis in reality.
You hear about the person who didn't rely on anecdotal evidence to support his belief system?
The authors of this survey assumed that teenage boys had these problems since the beginning of time ;-)
Umm, did anyone else but me notice that it says, "PolygamousRanchKid writes..."?