R.K.: You know, it's interesting because when I asked Craig Newmark, the inventor of Craig's List, about the big new app on the web, he talked about trust. And actually there are apps for trust, if you go to Amazon or eBay or all kinds of places, people have ratings and trust is something that has been, is there a verb for apping something? Appetizing something? They turn trust in to something that is app'ed really.
H.G.: I have to smile at that, I mean I think it's a prototypically transactional way to think about something. Namely, if this person wants to sell a watch are they going to cheat you? And I think that could be manipulated but it's probably fairly trustworthy.
That's totally different, Rob, from "I just had something really terrible happen to me or to my child and I need to be able to talk with you in confidence and get your advice and get your back and things like that." So to me it's almost Erikson's first life crisis, which listeners who remember their psychology1 will remember is the establishment of basic trust or mistrust and that is established in the relationship between the infant and the parent, almost always the mother initially, and it's being held, warm, face to face, deep, it's right out of the greatest art of the Western Hemisphere. And to me that's almost a perversion to talk about that in terms of Craig's List or eBay. And not to belittle those things, but it's a verbal sleight of hand.
R.K.: I agree with you, when you bring up Erikson's concept of it, he's really talking about the idea now of attachment and we have this new concept of attachment disorder and I wonder whether apps are feeding in to the problems of attachment disorder.
H.G.: Well, you know that Sherry Turkle's book which Katie mentioned, and which was a Bible for us is called: Alone Together. And Alone Together is a terrific oxymoron because on the one hand we're connected all the time when we connect with many, many people and yet at the same time Sherry is making the claim that that's not a genuine, deep attachment. To use the word I used a few minutes ago, it's transactional and transactional is the opposite of deep and transformative.
K.D.: Yeah and I would add I think that this is the good point to bring up in terms of attachment disorder, one of our findings that parents increasingly have a very close relationship and keeping tabs on their kids for longer and longer and more and more throughout young people's lives and at least in Western society, part of growing up means getting a sense of autonomy from one's parents, but it's very hard to do when your parents are texting you and you start texting your parents at college, there's evidence that young people either text or call their parents on average thirteen times a week and you know when Howard and I went to college that was a time when we were striking off on our own and didn't have that much contact with our parents.
We have this one anecdote in our book where the camp counselors that we talked to, one of them told us about a practice that some parents engage in where they send their children to camp with two cell phones and one of them is to give up publicly to the camp personnel because of course at many camps you're not allowed to have cell phones, the second one is to hide underneath their pillows so that they can update their parents on what they're doing and I think that's very telling and a bit concerning about just the high level of involvement that today's parents continue to have in their children's lives.
H.G.: Katie reminds me of a rather different anecdote which we also heard. Most of our discussions were with middle class teachers, psychotherapists, religious leaders, who dealt primarily with middle class kids though we did have sessions with people who dealt with more disadvantaged kids.
One of the questions that's often raised is, "to what extent is the digital world different for kids who don't have many privileges?" and I think so far the data indicates that the differences are not particularly striking, but it came up almost by accident about, what happens when there's a big snowstorm and it turns out that if you're affluent and there's a big snow storm you have a company that comes and plows your snow, if you don't have the means to do that, the snow gets plowed but it get plowed by the parents and not by the kids.
So in both cases, you have got kids who are sitting inside watching TV or playing games, playing angry birds while somebody else is doing the snow shoveling and I don't want to exaggerate that but it is a sign of less independence. You know when I grew up kids were expected to do chores and I think I did a pretty good job with my own kids on that, but between the apps in the one hand and the helicopter parents on the other, whether they're wealthy or not, we may have less autonomy, less independence, and therefore less senses of identity. Which I guess, thinking aloud, is fine if it relates to communitarianism and to more of young people helping out old people and so on, but if it's narcissistic and egotistic then it's not good at all.
R.K.: In a way, what you're talking about is kind of a loss of individuation, one of the biggest parts of becoming an adult is going through, becoming an individual and separating from the parents. The whole, Oedipal conflict is a rejection of the parents to become your own self, really. It sounds like this is what you're talking about. I mean, this is a big deal if this is what's happening.
H.G.: I think you're right, and we are, as they say, softly ringing that alarm but the reason for bringing up the distinction between App Dependent and App Enabled is just because we have things which help us do things efficiently doesn't mean we can't strike out on our own. It doesn't mean we can't put the devices away, it doesn't mean we can't reflect, but there may be a tendency to go in that direction unless we are vigilant, and I guess we and Sherry Turkle and the others who are on the "digital is not utopian" end of the spectrum are calling attention to those less utopian possibilities.
R.K.: Now, one last thing on intimacy, you talk about the difference between being connected versus connecting.
K.D.: Yes, so being connected is quite different from actually connecting with someone and this is something that we have touched on a little bit in this conversation today is young people are connecting or connected to many, many people. Their hundreds if not thousands of Facebook friends and their Twitter followers and Tumblr, the latest social media platform, there are a lot of people that congregate on each of these platforms so one might say that they have lots of friends, lots of connections, but as Howard has already made this distinction, when you have so many people that you're connected to, you have to wonder how deep any one of these connections actually is, and it does seem that they are more transactional than they are transformational where two people are intimately connecting, and through that connection, transformed in some way for the better.
They've learned about themselves and they learn about themselves in relation to other people, and it seems that there is quite little time for that sort of a connection when you're spread so thin across all of your different social networks.
H.G.: Now one thing which we haven't mentioned before but you brought it up Rob, with the issue of individuation; it used to be when we talked about identity formation which takes place in the latter part of adolescence, people would try out different identities, it was called identity exploration and it was seen as being a positive thing because you don't want to have a premature closure on being a certain kind of person in a certain kind of outfit, both physical outfit and more psychological outfit and when the digital media first came to the fore, experts like Sherry Turkle speculated that this would be a time for wonderful identity exploration where in games and communication you could try out many different kinds of things, end up with a more robust identity because you hadn't just put on the first mask, but with the advent of social media, exactly the opposite has happened.
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