This morning, I woke, flipped on the radio, stumbled out of be bed, turned off the radio, cracked open my laptop, checked my email, went to digg, and then remembered an article I'd been meaning to read about how people are using more technology (such as laptops and mobile devices) right when they wake up, before breakfast even.
I've had a lot of conversations like this article: we all agree that the internet and cell phones have changed the ways we live. We spend more time staring at these lil' screens that weren't in our lives 10 years ago, which certainly seems weird. But so what? "Weird" and "interesting" just doesn't cut it for me anymore. Before I can give this topic any more thought, I need to think of plausible positive and negative outcomes of networked technology use.
Let's start w/ the assumption that there are three levels of use: no use, light use, and heavy use.
1: Heavy use strengthens bonds with peers (friends & co-workers) but weakens bonds with family or domestic partners. This will lead to domestic dysfunction, resulting in increased rates of depression in all members of the household and will effect young children in the house especially negatively in terms of their cognitive and emotional development.
This seems to be behind the "technology eats into our family time" worries. Most of what people do w/ these devices IS social, so its not the worry that we might have when someone is playing video games by themselves or watching TV by themselves. To put it in Granovetter's terms, we might say that heavy use erodes our few strong ties and replaces them with many weak ties. For light users, weak ties are simply added to our social mix, but heavy users experience a weakening of the strong ties: less time w/ close ones, less sharing of deeply personal feelings, etc.
2: Heavy use cultivates a new kind of social bond, one that has some characteristics of a strong tie (lots of time devoted to a person, intimate knowledge of that person, tendency to share intimate secrets, similar interests and opinions) and some characteristics of a weak tie (not feeling bad if you can't make it to an important event in their lives, shorter in duration, more plentiful, not as many common links between the two). These new kinds of social ties are, on some unconscious level, easily mistaken for strong ties. The heavy user thinks they are creating a secure, lasting bond, but is actually creating a weak link that is as susceptible to dissolution as any other weak link. Over time, this leads to increased life dissatisfaction and decreased domestic harmony which leads to cognitively/emotionally deprived children.
It is important to note that this claim is not based solely on whether these people met online or IRL, or on whether one uses an online identity that is somehow linked to their real world identity (it is assumed that the online identity is linked to real-world identity in some way, as this is far more common a practice than sustained, anonymous relationships). The real question is: does your brain categorize the person as a member of the relatively small, real life community or as a member of the almost endless online community. I think that is determined in part by whether you met online or IRL, but also by the heavy use of networked technologies to maintain an existing bond, especially if that technology is used heavily in the early stages of the relationship. Part of your brain says, "this person is really close to me. They know things about me that no one else knows. We talk all the time. Our relationship is unique." Another part of your brain says, "there are other people whom I could communicate with in similar ways. Search technology is getting better and better. Perhaps I could find someone who is like this person, but without those annoying flaws and incompatibilities." That part of the brain assembles a composite friend or mate from various blogs, videos, articles, and internet detritus, thinking "these super-cool characteristics exist out there, and they're real. They're not just some fabrication of Hollywood screenwriters. Its realistic to think that there's a person with those characteristics."
This leads to a kind of cognitive dissonance, or worse, an inability to see what is creating the dissatisfaction. Heavy users may start to think of themselves as the kinds of people who weren't meant to have many close friends, as transient, somewhat alienated individuals who are a bit unhappy, but are resigned to their fates and have hope of achieving some kind of domestic bliss in the distant future once they "meet the right person." Really, they are different than a person who has achieved that domestic harmony not in terms of who their core selves are, but only in terms of the ways they chose to communicate and form bonds with others. If a link between heavy use of networked technologies and long-term life dissatisfaction (or domestic harmony, in which kidz suffer somehow) could be made apparent, then a heavy users might have something outside of their own flawed abilities to tell the difference between a strong tie and a weak one, who is compatible and who is not.
3. Those who do not use networked technologies will feel an increased sense of alienation and depression. Because they're not in the social loop, they get the feeling that people are talking about them behind their backs (which may or may not be true), they don't get invited to as many social events, and generally are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to forming strong or weak ties. They meet people in real life, but when they refuse to maintain that relationship w/ networked technologies, the relationship withers, as the other person thinks, "this is just too hard to maintain. Its easier to bond with this other person who is more social." I wonder about this possibility every time I hear someone say "I'm not going to let my kid have a cell phone or a facebook account no matter what his or her friends have!"
So, one important project would be to re-examine what is meant by "strong tie" and "weak tie." Lots of sociological work, including everything derived from Robert Putnam's work, makes certain assumptions about the characteristics of these ties that need to be rethought. And then, how the fuck do we go about measuring any of this? I suppose Putnam's and Granovetter's studies lay the groundwork. Is it just a matter of asking how much you use social media, how happy you are, and including the right moderating/mediating variables? How do you teaste out the personality traits and worldviews that result in low life satisfaction from the use variables? Maybe some focus groups with heavy users in which we discuss relationship satisfaction would be a first step. In any case, this will all take years to play out. Part of my claim is that the duration of strong ties will be shorter, maybe 5 years average as opposed to 10 or 20.
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