Let’s begin with a few
statistics. In 2010 the Nielsen Company
conducted a study that examined dependence on texting among 60,000 mobile phone
users. As would be expected, teenagers
scored the highest, averaging 3,339 text messages a month. The average texting among female teens topped
out at 4,050 messages a month. That’s
one text message every seven minutes of a sixteen-hour day. Tellingly, the researchers also noted that voice
communication among teenagers dropped by fourteen percent in just one year.
What is the impact of this trend?
We are losing sight of what is important
and what is urgent. Let me define my
terms. Importance is our highest calling—our personal mission—founded on
such principles as love, integrity, understanding, forgiveness, and
transcendence. In contrast, urgency is the interruptions—the loud,
demanding voice that shouts, “You need to pay attention to me right now!” Text messages—and other faceless
communication—that do not advance a personal mission are examples of
urgency. To be clear, a text message
that says “I love you” is mission-based (although such intimate messages are
better suited for face-to-face encounters).
Text messages that are glib, trivial, pompous, or sardonic are seldom principle-centered. It’s not that living a life of urgency is wrong;
in the long run, it is just not very emotionally or spiritually fulfilling.
Yes, there are times when urgency is
in alignment with one’s mission. For
example, if your son were in a serious accident, you would drop everything to
get him to emergency. That’s an example
of something that is both urgent and important.
But that’s the exception. We
spend the lion’s share of our lives responding to interruptions that are urgent
but unimportant.
Consider texting and driving. A 2011 report by The United States Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention reported that roughly half of eighteen- to
twenty-four-year-old Americans send and receive text messages while
driving. Personally, I think the number
is higher. When I was teaching at
Washington State University, all my students admitted they routinely texted
while driving.
Texting behind the wheel is the
perfect example of tending to what is urgent but unimportant. It’s like saying, “I ran out of gas because I
was too busy driving.”
But
is it possible that texting (along with our love affair with selfies, iPads,
Twitter, and Facebook) is eating away at our very character?
A 2013 University of Winnipeg study
reported that low-texting college
students identified with life goals that were moral, aesthetic, and
spiritual. In contrast, high-texting students (punching out over
four thousand messages a month) reported an affinity for life goals that
centered on wealth and image.
I’m not suggesting that the Winnipeg
study is evidence of a cause-and-effect correlation. But I do think it is representative of a
cultural trend—a move from community to individual desires, from empathy to
narcissism.
Technology has another downside. Our youth have come to equate the number of
cyber connections with intimacy. At the
end of a course on interpersonal communications at WSU, I asked my students
what they could do to make their relationships more meaningful.
“I’m going to build greater intimacy
with my friends,” one student said.
“That sounds noble,” I offered. “How do you plan to do that?”
“I will text them more often.”
Ouff, that hurt. If he had been even marginally attentive
during the term, he would have known that texting and intimacy are not
synonyms. Texting may be efficient, but
it is not intimacy, for intimacy is qualitative, not quantitative. It evolves through face-to-face transparency,
non-judgment, and empathy—all of which takes time.
In today’s society, when a young,
sensitive person seeks more from a relationship than a ream of cryptic messages,
the other will often become impatient.
The French author and journalist, Jean-Louis Servan, said it
succinctly: “With the slightest
disruption or inconvenience, we have the sensation of being wrong about the
other, and we determine that it is easier to simply drop the person.”
There is a physiological reason for
Servan’s observation. Antonio Damasio,
director of USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute, explained that deeper
emotions—such as empathy—“are inherently slow.”
Although the brain reacts instantaneously to threat, it takes much
longer to respond to the psychological suffering of another person (a phenomenon
of the brain that can actually be observed on a magnetic resonance imaging
machine).
Nicholas Carr, author of the
Pulitzer finalist, The Shallows: What the
Internet is Doing to Our Brains, explained that the synapses in the brain
become permanently shaped by repetitive functions. In a phrase, we become what we practice. On the average, Americans spend eight hours a
day on their screens—computers, iPads, televisions, and cell phones. Their eyes
are constantly flitting from one point of interest to the next, not spending
more than two minutes on any internet page, and no more than ten seconds on any
image or text within that page.
Eventually, their brain synapses become “hardwired” to respond quickly
and superficially. As Carr put it, “… as the Net reroutes our vital paths
and diminishes our capacity for contemplation, it is altering the depth of our
emotions as well as our thoughts.” In
other words, as avid consumers of technology, we are training our brains to be
built for speed—and not for empathy or intimacy.
I know that I cannot turn back the
clock of technology. There is probably
not a teenager on earth who would set aside a smart phone for, say, an evening
of singing around the piano. But that
knowledge does not ease the pain of rejection when I reach out for a moment of
compassion—from anyone, young or old—when I say to a pair of darting eyes,
spellbound by flashing thumbs over a flickering screen, “Hello. Do you see me?”
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