My wife and I have often commented on the potential negative impact of everyone being continually plugged into their mobile devices. While in this blog and my blog on emergency management I work on understanding what this means for crisis and emergency communications, there is a deeper question: is this a good thing? Is it good for people to be tweeting and texting and watching their smartphones while having dinner with each other? Is it good to never be far away from the phone, email, text or social media, as I saw on the golf course yesterday. Lynne (my wife) and I watched with real sadness one day as we saw a teenager of about 15 having dinner with his grandmother but spent the entire time texting on his phone. I don’t think the two of them said one word.
Now Elon University and Pew Internet Project have published a study showing effects of hyper-connectedness on our youth. Here is their quick summary:
Many of the experts surveyed by Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center and the Pew Internet Project said the effects of hyperconnectivity and the always-on lifestyles of young people will be mostly positive between now and 2020. But the experts in this survey also predicted this generation will exhibit a thirst for instant gratification and quick fixes, a loss of patience, and a lack of deep-thinking ability due to what one referred to as “fast-twitch wiring.”
The study was done by through an opt-in, non-random online survey of experts in this field of study. The overall feeling seems to be that the impact will be more positive than negative but some serious concerns about impact. I was a bit disheartened to see that the focus of the report seems to be on performance, on decision-making, on making our way in this world. There seemed to be less interested in what really happens to us as human beings, in how we relate to each other, the care of our souls. The answers to those questions may be hidden in the depths of the report but I haven’t taken the time for in-depth analysis, just a quick scan and impatiently at that (which by the way, is the sign of a hyper-connected person).
However, I think there were some brilliant analyses and insights provided by the many experts who participated. Here is an example from Barry Chudakov, a Florida-based consultant and a research fellow in the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto.
He wrote that by 2020,
“Technology will be so seamlessly integrated into our lives that it will
effectively disappear. The line between self and technology is thin today; by then it will
effectively vanish. We will think with, think into, and think through our smart tools but their presence and reach into our lives will be less visible. Youth will assume their minds and intentions are extended by technology, while tracking technologies will seek further incursions into behavioral monitoring and choice manipulation. Children will assume this is the way the world works. The cognitive challenge children and youth will face (as we are beginning to face now) is integrity, the state of being whole and undivided. There will be a premium on the skill of maintaining presence, of mindfulness, of awareness in the face of persistent and pervasive tool extensions and incursions into our lives. Is this my intention, or is the tool inciting me to feel and think this way? That question, more than multitasking or brain atrophy due to accessing collective intelligence via the internet, will be the challenge of the future.”
(emphasis mine–but I think Chudakov comes close to the soul of the matter with this comment)
