As Digital Citizenship week ends, I just realized it is a good time to continue this most recent thread. In my last post, I discussed continuous partial attention or CPA #1. In this post, I want to explore what I call CPA #2: Continuous Public Attention. I mentioned in the very first post in this series, I am coming at this topic more as a parent than school administrator. If you are the parent of a teenager, and you inspect your child’s smartphone regularly then you may note a high volume of posts via iMessage or social media sites. Life, for today’s teens, is often lived in the public eye via social media.
For those of us that grew up before smartphones and social media, this behavior may seem shocking at times. If everything is shared, what is private? In fact, it may seem that privacy is now the exception and not the rule.
What might be the impact of constant public attention? Here are summaries and key quotes from few good reads I recommend:
This fascinating Pew Research Report on Psychological Stress and Social Media Use (in adults).
This report pays particular attention to social stress. This kind of stress comes from exposure to stressful life events. It is not directly a measure of whether someone feels that their own life is overloaded. Rather, it assesses people’s stress by understanding their social environment. Those who experience stressful life events often suffer a range of negative physical outcomes, including physical illness and lower mental health. It is possible that technology users — especially those who use social media — are more aware of stressful events in the lives of their friends and family. This increased awareness of stressful events in other people’s lives may contribute to the stress people have in their own lives.
This recent NY Times article, “Stop Googling. Let’s Talk:
This article rehashes numerous “frontier science” studies often cited on the Internet about the negative impact of devices and social media on human interactions. What interests me the most is the notion that a device connecting you to your “public learning network” may impact empathy (and other social skills) as well as the ability to embrace solitude:
Across generations, technology is implicated in this assault on empathy. We’ve gotten used to being connected all the time, but we have found ways around conversation — at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, in which we play with ideas and allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable.
This article provides a nice, neutral summary of issues in both the (much longer) Pew Report and the NY Times article (negative in tone), so if you read only one external link try this one. It ends with an oft-quoted bit of tech wisdom:
The technology itself is not good or bad — it depends how you use it.
So, how do we help our children with these concerns and issues created by constant connection? First, help them to understand while it is a totally natural human urge to crave connection to others, it is also valuable to have private moments for reflection-that being alone provides time for reflection, relaxation, and release. If being connected taps us into the stress of others, then we need times to let some of that stress go. Second, help them understand that because their IS a digital world they really are not missing anything when disconnected-it is all being documented for later. I always tell my daughter, “all those texts and status updates will be there when you wake up.” If anything, we may miss what is happening in the physical world if we are too consumed by our digital world. Finally, consider coaching your child to maintain a private journal. So much of everyone’s lives are documented online today (and maybe often portraying a fake or ideal version of self), so help your child see the value of documented and processing the bad and the good outside the public eye-help them “be real.”
In my next post, I will discuss the third CPA: continuous peer advice.
