Over Connected

Pre Reading Questions Rank the following communication devices and protocols according to how often you use each one on any given day ('1' being most often and '10' being least often): cell phones for text messaging; cell phones for e-mail; cell phones for calls; computers for instant messaging; computers for talking using VOIP technology (e.g. Skype); computers for social networking Web sites like MySpace.com, Facebook.com, or other blog sites; computers for e-mail; computers and Web cams; 'smart phones' such as BlackBerrys; two-way pagers for text messaging). Post Reading Questions a. What methods are today's teenagers using to communicate with each other? b. What is “Generation M”? c. According to the article, how do these forms of communication affect the way people speak to each other? d. According to Bobby Abramson, what is the major societal issue regarding communication on the Internet? e. Do you agree or disagree with his statement that “Online engagement is not a viable substitute for a functional in-person social life”? Why or why not? f. What benefit of instant messaging does Jessica Cohen find most thrilling? g. Why do you think adults are not as interested in instant messaging as teenagers are? h. What social benefits do text messaging and instant messaging provide to teenagers? i. Why do you think girls ages 15-17 use the Internet to communicate more than other demographic groups, as reported by the Pew Internet & American Life Project? j. Do depth, longevity and face-to-face contact matter in a friendship? Why or why not? Discussion Choose a device that you use to communicate with and answer the following questions: -What is your assigned device? -How do people communicate with it? -What is your experience with this form of communication? What role, if any, does it play in your daily life or the lives of people you know? -How much does it cost to communicate this way on average, per month? -What are the short-term and long-term benefits, drawbacks and other effects of this form of communication? -In ten years, how might a extensive use of this technology shape how you communicate with others, both positively and negatively? Consider social skills such as making eye contact and public speaking. How might it also affect your sensory abilities, such as vision, hearing, etc.? Analyze the following quotes: “The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate,” “The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it,”

The Overconnecteds By BETSY ISRAEL

IT sounds like the name of a painting: Lone Adult Outside Teenager’s Door, Knocking. Next to it let’s hang a portrait of the other side: Teenager Sends Instant Messages Amid Aural Mess — the iTunes, the TV and the DVD’s that form a wall of sound to camouflage whatever is being said into the cellphone. In the film version, Teenager eventually opens door, stares at Adult. Then, with excruciating patience and a huge implied “duh!,” Teenager explains that he/she is Talking. “To. My. Friends.” From deep inside the room, an I.M. door, the sound effect signaling friends signing on or off, slams shut. As they would explain if they had time, these teenagers, all members of Generation M (born circa 1980 to 2000), have hundreds more friends than you, the adult, had at their age, or ever. And without having to leave their rooms. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 87 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds, or 21 million children, are regularly online — 11 million at least once a day — and so the figures go for pages: 75 percent use instant messaging (82 percent of them by seventh grade) and 84 percent own cellphones and iPods (in a hierarchy of cool colors) as well as laptops, BlackBerrys and other P.D.A.’s. Those who cannot afford them still manage to “get on” — at friends’ houses, Internet cafes or libraries — and 78 percent use school computers to shop online or to check their e-mail. For Gen M (that’s “millennial,” according to sociologists, not “media”), to be “on” with your friends is a birthright. Many first played with computers in preschool, installed (then explained) the family TiVo at age 9 and opened AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM, accounts at 10. “It started in a baby way in second grade,” explains Laurice Fox, 16, a junior at Brooklyn Friends, a private preparatory school. “We all e-mailed because that’s when AOL first introduced AIM. Even if the computer was in the family room, and we were discussing play dates, we were there at the start!” Bobby Abramson, a senior at the Dalton School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, recalls watching his father surf the Internet “way back in the early 90’s, long before anyone else, and so it had this kind of magical quality.” He adds, “I still remember picking up the phone and trying to talk to the modem.” Now, as they move through high school, college and beyond, the generation’s seemingly obsessive need to connect has inspired concern and debate among many adults. To summarize: What are the psychological implications of simultaneously talking to 50 of one’s forever best friends, who are not actually present? Are teenagers likely to misinterpret the nature of these best-friendships? As Mr. Abramson, a 17-year-old who has “studied the societal implications of the Internet” since age 10, puts it: “There’s the issue of removal. Online engagement is not a viable substitute for a functional in-person social life.” And then comes the somewhat hysterical litany of issues: stalkers, cyberbullies, iPod-induced deafness, alleged attention deficit disorder and the fact that these children really don’t know anyone’s phone number. Nora Delighter, 14, a freshman at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, performs an exasperated eye roll, then, deadpan, says: “It’s not like we’re robot people who live in a fantasy world. Everyone, even us, has to leave their room. Because we go to school. Where we talk to other humans and get a sense of what they’re really like.” To ask average 14- or even 20-year-olds about the nature of their online lives is to invite such sardonic comebacks, as if to confirm the emergence of an allnew generation gap, with most 40-pluses earnestly but hopelessly stuck on the far side. “For these kids, I.M. is unquestionably their primary mode of social interaction,” says Dr. Sandra L. Calvert, chairwoman of the psychology department at Georgetown University and director of the Children’s Digital Media

Center. “Adults have to remember that this is how they communicate and that it’s thoroughly embedded. It’s like us and the telephone: blasé.” One intense parental issue — one suggesting a potential canyon as opposed to a gap — concerns what adults call rabid multitasking and children call normal life. In a recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 2,000 8- to 18year-olds from across the nation answered questionnaires and kept media diaries. The study showed that, across the age spread, children spent an average of six-and-a-half leisure hours a day switching among computers, TV’s, movies, video games, books, iPods, cellphones and texting. Perhaps most significant, those 14 and older spent additional hours on a social networking site, usually MySpace (crowded, wild, like a cyber spring break) or Facebook (graphically neater, mostly for students). These sites are like sprawling digital yearbooks, each page crammed with photos, text, videos and blogs. Only preapproved individuals (“friends”) are permitted to view someone’s page and leave comments, as they might in a guest book. But it’s not instantaneously interactive. Instant messaging, the near synchronous backand- forth between computers, is still the fastest, most popular means of communication. As AOL recently reported, 66 percent of Americans 13 to 21 now prefer it to e-mail. “Absolutely everyone, everywhere, I.M.’s,” says Julia Marani, 14, a freshman at Marymount School in Manhattan. “E-mail is slower, more the thing you’d use to write your parents or a teacher. I.M. is the Main Thing. Really, I don’t see how you could avoid it, even if you wanted to. And it is addictive. You can mean to go on 15 minutes, look up and see it’s 3 a.m.” As parents drift off to the sound some quaintly call typing, their children are deep inside multiple conversations with their “buddies,” pseudonymous pals listed vertically along one side of the screen. Pull a stealth P.O.S. (parent over shoulder) and you might catch a few screen alter egos — for instance, shebiscuit, kickflip10, latteladie, talkinghead88, Jesusraves, each with individualized sign-on sounds, audio cues reminiscent of the way each character in “Peter and the Wolf” is represented by its own instrument. But over-40’s are unlikely to follow the speedfreak scroll of conversation. And as those online would argue, they would also miss the point — miss just what it means to keep up with all those friends, all at once. Beyond the mundane — homework help, gossip, plan making, “Please sign my petition!” — instant messaging “provides precisely what it is teens need most: constant affirmation, lots of attention and the desire to distinguish themselves,” Mr. Abramson says. “We all know how impossible it is to get noticed in our society. It’s almost like you’ve got to graduate into life having a sponsor. So, think about it from, say, a middle-school perspective: to be suddenly talking to eight people at once — that’s a huge psychological boost!” Jessica Cohen, a sophomore at Bay Shore Senior High School on Long Island, sums up the exponential rewards: “You talk to everyone you know from school and camp and then their friends, and so you’re going beyond your core group to cross-pollinate and suddenly you are talking to, like, 200 people!” Most important, says Ms. Fox: “You can talk to them without the problem of facial expressions. This is great with new girls who might judge your appearance. It also covers those gaps with boys. You can be so much bolder online, and I don’t have to worry about being so witty or unique. It’s controllable; you have time to craft an answer, even if,” as she concedes, “that has a kind of questionable aspect, like you’re changing your personality and then when you see that person, uh, is it obvious you’ve been trying to impress them?” Ms. Cohen is quick to explain. “Of course you can be great in person. If we’re I.M.-ing with someone, then when we see them, the contact’s enhanced, not stilted. We’re stronger socially. It’s not like you’ve forgotten how to speak English; you’ve just spoken very carefully selected English.” While it’s about a decade too soon to know with certainty how these friendships will evolve, whether they will be stronger and longer lasting than earlier bonds, it’s not too soon to assess the immediate impact of the digital connection. The good news first: The I.M. culture has given shy students who might ordinarily have spent four miserable years quasi-mute a chance to develop connections with classmates once deemed unapproachable. If friendships do not

follow, at least there’s the basis for a hello in the hallway. “Even if there’s still the social hierarchy,” Ms. Marani says, “at least it’s more flexible. I.M., MySpace, that’s where our friendships start, and who knows how they’ll develop.” Ms. Cohen adds, “Think about on a college campus, where it’s thousands of kids, you know that could be pretty powerful.” The list of more practical advantages runs as long as the average buddy list. 1) Online, you can meet and swap photos with your camp bunkmates or prospective college roommates. 2) You no longer veg out watching TV, instead TiVo-ing the few things you might want in the background while doing homework. 3) If someone seems to be in trouble, there are no longer just one or two good friends to the rescue but hundreds who send support via email messages, instant messages and text messages. 4) Students study together online. Then the day of the test, those who take it earlier pass the topics covered — if not the answers — to those who take the class later. (All this via texting from a bathroom stall.) “They may be sophisticated, very clever,” says Dr. Calvert, “but they’re still kids and they use the technology to carry out kids’ tasks.” Including those falling under the heading Classical Teen Girl (or Boy) Nastiness. For example, the cruel comments that used to pass back and forth in class via folded notes or slam books now appear, instantly amendable, in electronic postings. “Right now,” Ms. Cohen says, “it’s very popular to cut and paste someone’s notes and pass them around. Consider the damage you might inflict with one note. Now multiply that by 1,000. And, of course, there is nothing more humiliating than finding you’re not in someone’s top eight friends on MySpace.” Or as Ms. Delighter says: “You know the person you’ve just written is there and knows perfectly well you’re there. They’re screening the way people used to screen on answering machines. And you’re screening back.” And all of this leads to yet another question: Where do they get the time? Many students these days get home from school only after club meetings, sports events and play rehearsals. Factoring in dinner and unavoidable discussion with parents, that would seemingly leave time only for homework. Most, though, claim to spend upward of three hours online, pausing to do homework or doing both simultaneously. None of the students interviewed for this article said their grades had dropped because of their computer habits, and they could not think of anybody else’s that had, either. Some New York City teachers report a renewed rigor in study hall, where students work against the clock to finish their night’s assignments. Students say they use every possible minute to chip away at extra work. (A small sign of the times: Some lockers are not decorated as intensely as in years past. There’s no time, and many students save their best design impulses for MySpace or Facebook pages.) Still, there is a lot of work to be done at home, and often it is done after midnight. Members of Generation M do not seem to sleep as much as their boomer parents did. If some of those parents once carried Visine to hide telltale marijuana eyes, their offspring use it to suggest they were not, in fact, up at 4 a.m. resolving 12 best-friend conflicts and 10 geometric proofs (at the same time). For years adults have regarded this secretive online world as somewhat annoying. At the moment, however, a more accurate word would be “disturbing.” Many over-40’s — 62 percent of them, according to the Pew Internet survey — express serious doubt about the viability of online friendships, viewing the scroll of never-ending chat as a kind of electronic chain letter to nowhere. And many more, especially parents, mistrust or blatantly fear it all — the potential for misread cues on I.M. and the potential for much worse on the “friendship” sites. (Most teenagers take care to hide their password-protected pages from parents the same way teenagers have forever locked and shielded their diaries.) The Pew study reports that the most intense, committed users in the online universe — and winning by a wide margin — are girls 15 to 17. The report, based on a telephone survey of 1,100 12- to 17-year-olds and their parents or guardians, further notes that the intensity, the frantic attempts to keep up the number of buddies, starts to wane after age 18. As students leave high school, the emphasis seems to shift to a smaller number of good friends and academic peers with whom they share more substantial conversations.

“The whole thing gets tiring,” Ms. Marani says. “You’ve got eight or nine people and it’s 10 at night and you’re exhausted, you have work in six subjects, and here online you need a referee.” Ms. Delighter adds, “Sometimes you feel like you just want to go back to camp” — one of the few places on earth generally tech-free. “I mean, even your away message has got to be the cleverest, cutest, wittiest thing ever said, and it is actually stressful.” Finally, Ms. Cohen says: “The invisibility thing can get tricky. I mean, it’s still just really hard to know how you’re being received. Like, if you’re flirting online, you just can’t know if the other person is really perceiving you in the way that you meant.” Mr. Abramson believes that many troubling aspects of online life will fade with what he calls the new Web. A prime example, he says, is Facebook, the newer of the two primary social networking sites, which requires everyone to be identified by proper name. On MySpace and in chat rooms, he says, “it’s a complex world where you meet people who never reveal who they are; they’re not part of your everyday life.” He adds: “At best, this means you’ll establish shallow relationships under the guise of screen names, and I think at a point that kind of communication can come to seem not so valuable. A lot of people my age have been on the Web a long time. They’re sick of the noise and the visual clutter. They want to talk to their friends in peace.” Dr. Calvert concludes: “It will be interesting to see, in 10 years, how these friendships hold up. With Facebook, you’ve already got people out of college maintaining a very broad range of contact — college, high school, third grade. It’s a forum for connecting with others not physically present augmented by cellphones. And that, used responsibly, has limitless possibility.” And not only for the under-30’s. “It isn’t that adults aren’t invited,” Ms. Cohen says. “It’s just they didn’t grow up with it, so it doesn’t seem necessary. Sometimes I’ve wanted to say, O.K., imagine if everyone you knew sent you a Christmas card all on the same day. You wouldn’t actually see them but you’d have that comforting sense of being surrounded by the people you have known. Then maybe grownups wouldn’t be so lonely, and that is really the thing with us: Getting older, we are not going to be a lonely group.”