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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."
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.
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
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
As all those tween girls frantically posting to Slasdot all day.
Multitasking between various digital devices, communicating online, and watching video ARE normal social skills nowadays.
For the same reason we have TV aimed at children.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
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."
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.
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
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.
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.