Today, it's the FT's San Francisco correspondent, April Dembosky (who is on neither Facebook nor Twitter), telling us, in the strapline of her latest article, that "therapists fear that social networking is changing the way we relate to each other". The correct reactions to this assertion are:
1. I don't give a creamed turd what therapists think about anything...
2. ...but, yes, social networking is changing real-world networking. Well done for noticing. While you're here, could you explain me to what that rather ursine-looking creature is doing in that area of heavy flora? (See, anyone can sound 'scientific' if they try).
3. And, anyway, this isn't a bad thing.
For a start, it enables the wonderful practice of fisking. Allow me to demonstrate:
Then the groom pulled out his iPhone. “I wrote my vows on Evernote,” he says, referring to the note-taking application for mobile phones. “I pulled out my phone to read my vows.” Technically, it was a breach of the couple’s pre-nuptial agreement: no mobile phones at the wedding, no checking in on Foursquare, no posting to Facebook, Twitter or Path, the social networking site where Matt works.
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It is perfectly sensible to put restrictions on where and when anything distracting can be used. I'm sure the couple didn't want people juggling coconuts, reading newspapers, listening to transistor radios or playing cards during their wedding either. But the fact that something necessary to the ceremony was written in pixels on a screen rather than scratched on to paper with ink does not equate to some pernicious invasion of our lives. Let alone the most sacred bits of the most intimate bits (whatever the Blackberry that means).Technology is pervading every moment of our lives – even the most sacred of our most intimate relationships.
(We then get some statistics demonstrating that a lot (I mean, like, OMG loads!) of people use the internet and that a lot of those people use social media).
As much as platforms like Facebook have become an online scrapbook for people’s lives, they have become public portals, almost performance spaces, for people’s relationships. They are not only places for sharing momentous events in a couple’s history – engagements, weddings, first dog – they are also a play-by-play chronicle of the couple’s every date, love note and even fight. As Matt says, “A guy will get in a fight with his girlfriend, then post photos with his arms around other people.”
Etiquettes are still evolving concerning the levels of privacy and think-before-you-post dilemmas on such sites. If you are naturally self-obssessed, boorish and indiscreet then the temptation to be self-obssessed, boorish and indiscreet on your Facebook timeline is probably too much to resist. It is unpleasant, to be sure. In terms of the charting of human relationships, it is not a massive leap away from the hatch-match-despatch sections of local newspapers, making an ex jealous by dancing with your new paramour at the local discotheque, or boasting about a conquest at the office party. Social media may amplify the outcome of how we behave. It does not change that behaviour, per se.
some relationship counsellors and mental health experts are concerned that online socialising is compromising the quality of real-life relationships
And those whose livelihood does not depend on therapeutic claptrap, are not concerned. In fact, quite the opposite. For there are equal claims that social networking improves the quality of our real-world relationships and increases the quantity of meaningful social contacts.
These sites are so engaging, so addictive, that people are choosing to spend time in front of their screens instead of face to face with their loved ones. “People are coming home and getting on their computers instead of having sex with their partners,” says Cameron Yarbrough, a couples therapist in San Francisco and a friend of the reporter. “I see couples break up over this stuff. This is real.”
Interesting anecdote. Show me the statistics. While you're looking, how about disentangling cause and effect? What really happened with these couples? Were they at it like rabbits, morning, noon and night? Did they hourly test the structural integrity of every piece of furniture in their house to destruction every day? Then one of them got an iPad and that was it? Or was it, rather, that the spark and chemistry had long since gone and interacting with technology filled the gap? The same way that TV used to. And reading did before that. And cave-painting before that. "Oh I don't know, Dr Ug. He used to have my bearskin off before he'd barely got in the cave after a day's hunter-gathering. But now he's just addicted to drawing pictures of spears and mammoths with his mates on next door's wall".
Some people, young and old, are choosing to communicate with each other through texting and social networks specifically to avoid the ambiguity and awkwardness of telephone and in-person conversations.
You're damn skippy we do! And we also use medical technology to avoid the awkwardness of dying (up to a point, obviously).
But it is through those ambiguous, awkward moments that people truly get to know one another. It is by interpreting facial expressions, tones of voice, and half-finished sentences that we figure each other out, and become sympathetic to others’ points of view.
Relationships that happen only through the prism of Facebook updates, blog comments or Twitter @s are, of course, very different from those that occur through working and playing in meatspace. However, I'm not convinced (and no science is offered in the article) that bantering with someone on my virtual timeline tells us that much less about each other than mixing it up over a pint. But even if it did, why can't you just do both? We're complicated and messy beings. Take the simple pleasure of restricted-character communications at one time; enjoy the opportunity for deeper face-to-face psychological insight at other times.
Some experts worry that the more people habituate themselves to these rational, binary communication channels – thumbs up, thumbs down, smiley face, frowny face – the less they pay attention to, and tolerate, the nuances of emotions.
So far we've had "concerned" experts and "worried" experts but no actual evidence-offering experts.
Our brains are increasingly colonising our hearts.
To be sure, our interaction with technology can influence
what we think and how we behave. From Marshall McLuhan's assertion that
"the medium is the message" to B.J. Fogg's captological Persuasive Tech Lab, the link is clear. Dembosky can't have it both ways, though. On the one hand, we're being told that social media is
making us more simplistic, more reactionary and less able to understand each other
properly. On the other, that cognition and knowledge are becoming too
influential over raw emotion. I think the author actually
means that hearts are taking over brains. Either way, and as I've said, humans are complicated. We don't always get the balance right, especially during periods of great upheaval and transition, whether political, social, economic or technological. But we do get it right in the end. We've learnt to co-exist, thrive and immeasurably improve the vast majority of lives across the globe while adapting to and exploiting, for example, radio, individual motor transport, the telephone, mass international travel, birth control, television, smaller households, the internet, e-mail and mobile telephony. I very much doubt that social networking will defeat us. Quite the opposite.
“Those parts of who we are as human beings are becoming less available as we become more attached to our technology,” says Michael Klein, a clinical psychologist and couples’ therapist in San Francisco.
Oh, give it a rest. We're not Borg. You're not Captain Picard.
An ex-Borg. Yesterday.
“It has a very negative impact on relationships.” In the past few years, Klein and other therapists have also noticed an increase in extramarital affairs facilitated by Facebook. “People reconnect with old flames from college or school, and there’s this easy way to flirt or chat,” he says. “And when people are dissatisfied in their marriages, which is a fairly chronic condition in our society, it’s easy for those flirtations to catch fire.”
OK. So it's very bad for some relationships. And apparently absolutely flipping fantastic for others. If you want to write an article on the fragility of marriage, be my guest. Just print it in the Lifestyle, not the Technology, section.
There is little quantitative research on these points. Various studies have been conducted about people’s use of technology and social media platforms, but few have examined the kinds of sensitive issues that arise in therapy offices on a larger scale. Many questions remain to be asked, let alone answered, about the effects online social networks have on our closest relationships.
Correct. So obviously it is better to write 4000 words for an international newspaper, wildly speculating about all this, based on a few tales from your commercially-interested mates, rather than do or commission the necessary research yourself. Good work.
We are in a transition. Humans have always created technology before figuring out how to manage it socially. Both benefits and pitfalls emerge, and humans adapt. Many people praise mobile phones and social networks for keeping them connected to loved ones, especially those they must be apart from – for work, school, or even military service. Humans are still identifying and balancing the pros and cons. Online social rules and etiquette have yet to be codified. But the trend is forging ahead, and people, young and old, are increasingly living their relationships online.
Think I've already dealt with this. Agree wholeheartedly. In which case: relax.
Silicon Valley is a land of introverts. Scores of geeks flock to the area to join or start their own technology company. They are idealistic and passionate about the computer code stored in their laptops. But social charmers, there are few. Many, though certainly not all, are painfully shy, quiet, awkward. They are reluctant to make eye contact, staring at the table while they describe how they get people to connect with each other online. They detest talking about themselves. And yet these are the young men Valley venture capitalists call “the geniuses of social”.
How these engineers define social in the online context is, of course, markedly different from how their psychotherapists would define it.
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“When we tweet and have lots of friends follow us, we get surges of dopamine and other neurochemicals that make us feel excited,” says Stan Tatkin, an assistant clinical professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, and a psychobiological couples therapist. “These reward circuits activate, and we want to do it again.”
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It is the ultimate revenge of the geeks.
Absurd, pseudo-psychological non-analysis, which laughably attempts to anthropomorphise social media platforms with the flaws of their creators. Grow up. Some people invented something that other people like doing. Get over it. Decent debate on this requires more than having watched The Social Network.
The article then meanders off into territory that it has already well covered, arguing that social media encourages us to denude our lives and self-promote, while avoiding dealing with real issues, concluding that:
It remains to be seen what kind of cases this shift will deliver to therapists in 10 or 20 years’ time. They could grow out of certain social networking habits in the same way teens grow out of a range of behaviours, and arrive in their adult relationships no worse, or better, than their parents did. Right now, all generations are navigating the lines of public and private, deciding what to share or not to share, according to their own starting points.
In which case (and I know I'm repeating myself here): relax. We're different at work to how we are at home. Different at, say, a football match, than having dinner with the family. Different in a world of 140 characters and quickly snapped photos to a world of lengthy conversation and true love. Sometimes all our worlds, the different corners of our lives, overlap. Occasionally, they may be incompatible.
Overwhelmingly, we adapt and adopt until we're comfortable. Then we find another complication. And its brilliant.
Now excuse me but I've got to share this post with my followers and friends before the cold sweats breakout.
"A friend of the reporter" is in bold, so I thought you were going to comment on that...?
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