So the app I brought to this was an intellectual framework but I don't think we had to force-feed it, because in fact the crises that Erik Erikson described a half century ago are ones that people encounter in any kind of a modern developed society. Whether notions of identity, intimacy, and imagination would apply thousands of years ago or to very small communities, societies, we don't know but since everybody who we are looking at, everybody who reads this book will be aware of what it means to grow up in the world today.
The Three I's are a very convenient way of saying in what ways are kids who grew up with smart devices at their fingertips, allowing them to do things on demand and then what happens when they're not available. That's a very sharp delineation from people who grew up in a pre-digital, pre-app era.
R.K.: Now, you talk in your discussion about identity, about communitarian versus individualistic values and then you go on later to talk about how there's been a big increase in what looks like narcissism among young people and also about externalized versus internalized, the external locus of control versus the internal locust of control, and I'm throwing at you what you've written about twenty pages on. Can you comment on some of those ideas? Narcissism in particular, and internal versus external locus of control, it seems to me that these are things that tie in to Top Down versus Bottom Up and also that might explain why we're seeing more and more people with a Libertarian perspective.
K.D.: Well I can take a first stab at that. So a lot of that discussion in our book draws on work from other scholars, most notably Jean Twenge and Sherry Turkle, and so that there has been work showing that certain measures of narcissism have increased over the last couple of decades and you could, I don't believe there is a direct correlation, between that increase and digital media, but you certainly can draw connections when you think about this emphasis on the external brand-like nature of identity online. And I think that point that you made about that internal versus external locus of control is very interesting because if you think about an increase of narcissism, you think "oh well that must mean that kids have an inflated sense of ego and inflated sense of themselves" but actually, narcissism is associated with quite an insecure sense of self, so it's constantly outward focusing and feeling you need to get your validation from outside of yourself, rather than inside of yourself.
You're basically focusing externally and you often will think that events happen outside of your control and so therefore that whole idea of that external locus of control where you are not yourself in control of your life but it is being dictated from outside and so that is quite an unsettling way of being, and so this trend towards narcissism and external locus of control is one that we don't see as a positive one, and one that we do see as reinforced and encouraged by the types of identities that are promoted online.
H.G.: There are two other bits of data we discuss in the book, one is the amount of time and effort that young people, very young people spend looking at other people on social media like on Facebook and seeing the perfect ways in which the selves are typically being presented, you know everything goes well and happy, partying here and I'm important there, and if you yourself are somewhat insecure as almost every teenager is, the amount of time you spend looking at so-called well-packaged perfect looking visitors is going to be unsettling.
The other thing which we haven't mentioned yet but is something that the research team led by Katie spent a huge amount of time on, was looking at literary and graphic productions over the last twenty years. We were able to get kid's stories and kid's drawings and paintings from a twenty year period and we had them "scored blind" that means people did not know whether the particular works of art and literature were done in 1990 or in 2010, and while the graphic area was really quite impressive in what, in the number of things kids now do with the drawing and morphing and mashing and so on, the literary output was rather disappointing.
Kids twenty years ago were much more likely to write about other kinds of people living in more exotic settings, more blends of different personalities and work and so on, whereas stories now seem to be rather flat and humdrum and about ordinary folks doing ordinary things. That may suggest it's more difficult now for young people to put themselves deeply enough in to someone else's world that you can really re-create them, and many people have been reading about Donna Tartt's new book on Goldfinch, and apparently it's a great book in which she's really able to create full characters, the word Dickensian is used over and over again in describing the book and you really get to feel these are very different kinds of human beings that you're being given.
Katie has pointed out that kids nowadays are more tolerant than they were in earlier times and that's very good but being tolerant is not the same thing as being empathic. Empathic means really being able to put yourself in other people's skins and if you're spending too much time trying to make yourself look good, then you don't have a lot of time to really feel deeply about other individuals.
R.K.: Can you talk a little bit more about empathy and how the app generation is being affected? How their empathy is being affected?
K.D.: Sure. So we do talk about empathy in the book and noting that again we draw on research showing that in the last twenty years, young people seem to have had a decrease in their empathy. And again, we can't draw direct connections to the digital media but we can certainly think about what types of experiences one has online, and doesn't as well, and whether those facilitate and encourage empathy. And in some respects what we see online is very promising and positive.
Going online there's an opportunity to encounter different people who share a wide variety of interests and live all over the world and they may share perspectives with you that you have never seen, although it's questionable how much and to what extent young people actually do seek out these other people who are different from them. There seems to be a lot of evidence that they will seek out people who are like-minded, but I think more closely, when one is interacting with people who one already knows from offline but you're interacting with them online through a screen, you're not looking at that person face-to-face.
You're not really connecting in sort of a deep, vulnerable, intimate way which is really the basis of how you develop empathy and intimacy, and so in that regard we do worry about the connection between moving so much to computer mediated communication which many of the young people who we speak with say that it's just less risky, it feels easier to talk with someone online rather than face-to-face because you don't have to look at their immediate reaction, but that's troubling to us because you should have to look at someone's immediate reaction, you should be able to put yourself in their position and really empathize with them, and it's not as easy to do that when you're speaking to a screen rather than a person.
H.G.: Let me add from my personal experience here, I don't want to over-blow it but when I grew up in the middle of the last century, I had a few good friends and that's all I ever had, but that was enough and we got to know each other very well and in a few cases I'm still in touch with them, and now of course people have thousands of friends and they spend a lot of time deciding about adding and then de-friending when they've been insulted in some way or the other but it's totally different when you have to maintain relations with many, many people.
It's inevitably going to be superficial and one of the shocking statistics that came out from a Pew study said that a decade or two ago when people were asked how many people they really felt they could trust when they had a deep, personal, sensitive issue, the mean answer was three, and then when this was repeated a year ago the mean answer was two. Now you might say, well that's just one less but of course it isn't, it's a third less and it's quite troubling because what does it mean if you have a thousand friends, so to speak, but there are only two people whom you feel that you can trust.
And of course this is what empathy is about, is feeling other people's pain and their love and wanting to help and believing that they can help you and theycan be trusted not to post something or drop you right away. So these are things, I mean, our book is not an alarm call but there are things which we say we better pay a lot of attention to, because if notions of identity and intimacy and imagination are very different now than they were decades ago, we need to be aware of that and if we're losing things that are important, things that we value as Katie says, the ability to look somebody in the eye and talk about something that's difficult to talk about, if we lose that and everything is just through written messages where of course there is no tone of voice, maybe a smiley face, but that's not pain, that's a symbol.
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