Con: Technology Stunts Social Development

By Mary McChesney-Young

The Internet has created a new brand of globalization, which makes possible across continents communication, organization, and action which previously would have been hindered or limited to relatively small areas due to the boundaries of time and distance.

Social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook, both of which have well over 100,000,000 registered users, are incredibly popular among teenagers and young adults. According to a July 2007 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, "nearly 60 percent of those age 12 to 17 and 80 percent of 18- to 21-year-olds use social-networking sites." Through these sites, people can find each other based on location, school, or interest, and become friends. Often they serve as an extension of established friendships: instead of seeing a friend at school, going home separately, and waiting until the next day to interact again, people can now continue their social interactions as soon as they get home.

Many other sites with social networking aspects are more specialized, but all rely upon one thing: user-generated content. LiveJournal, BlogSpot, YouTube, and Flickr (and their ilk) play host to blog or journal entries, essays, fiction (sometimes novel-length), amateur music videos, professionally-made short films and documentaries, and an amazing array of photographs and art. They foster users' creativity for the sake of creativity--and of comments, which is where the networking aspect comes in. People who otherwise would never share their creations, or perhaps never even create them because they felt they had no audience, can now oftentimes receive instant feedback on the content they post. They can collaborate or debate with people halfway across the world and join communities of people who share their interests.

According to a summary of findings from the Digital Youth Project, "Youth engage in peer-based, self-directed learning online. In both friendship-driven and interest-driven online activity, youth create and navigate new forms of expression and rules for social behavior. By exploring new interests, tinkering, and 'messing around' with new forms of media, they acquire various forms of technical and media literacy. ... By its immediacy and breadth of information, the digital world lowers barriers to self-directed learning." As an unschooler, the concept of self-directed learning resonates deeply with me. I think that the digital world is an incredibly rich source of learning opportunities for young people who explore it. The Wikipedia effect--looking something up, clicking on a related article, then another, then another, until you find yourself reading about Mihály Csíkszentmihályi or something similarly unrelated to your original search--can also be played out with other websites and blogs, because of the ease of linking. This seems to me to parallel the kind of complex, connected thinking that children learn to do as they grow older.

Technology doesn't just help people to make friends; it can also help to lessen the pain or difficulty of separation when friends and family members live far away. My sister moved to Texas a couple of months ago and I certainly miss her, but I also can keep up with her by reading her blog, checking out her Flickr, interacting with her on Facebook, and calling or texting her on her cell phone every day or two. And my mom always excitedly calls me over to the computer to come see whenever my cousins e-mail pictures of their kids. Technologies like Skype (online phone calls) and video chatting allow people to connect with each other no matter where they are.

Growing up in this environment--a global, connected, creative digital world--fosters a new attitude towards others, encouraging kids to be fully aware of the world around them rather than to be constricted to their hometown or state or country or even continent. Communicating with somebody in another country automatically makes you conscious of that country's existence and place in the world, and creates a recognition of that country's citizens as real people, with many similarities (and fascinating differences) to those of your own country. In addition, the digital world helps connect people close to home, helping to develop deep and highly social relationships between peers.

Two of my favorite examples of social connection online are: From 52 To 48 With Love and PostSecret. ♥

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