Full disclosure: The last time I wrote something about digital culture, I didn’t own a smartphone. Now I do, but before this new status as a participant-observer boosts my credibility higher than it ought to, let me admit I still don’t do Instagram, Snapchat or Twitter, and my personal relationship with Facebook is shaky at best. However, I remain so deeply interested in our social media culture it would probably be fair to call me an amateur digital anthropologist.
You might ask why this informal brand of expertise is any better than President Donald Trump’s opinion that scientists know nothing about the reasons for climate change — and yes, it’s an embarrassing question. It explains why I recently joined my wife and daughter to hear Dr. Devorah Heitner, author of Screenwise: Helping Your Kids Thrive (and Survive) in Their Digital World. Heitner is the founder of Raising Digital Natives, an organization committed to helping people “cultivate a culture of responsible digital citizenship.” She spoke on Sept. 27 at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, sponsored by Good Beginnings of the Upper Valley and the Norwich Women’s Club.
We arrived well before Heitner began her talk, and she approached to ask about our own “digital native.” Our daughter described her 13-year-old son’s occasionally difficult relationship with his smartphone and online games. When our daughter introduced us to Heitner, the author said she was delighted to find grandparents in her audience and mentioned one of the major themes soon to appear in her talk: mentoring over monitoring. We can, she said, show our grandson by example how to use, say, Instagram properly without seeming to check on him.
As retired teachers who believe it’s more important to help students find their strengths than to penalize them for their weaknesses, we’re both drawn to Heitner’s notion that we can model good digital citizenship for our grandson. But it’s not likely to happen. We’re still struggling with how to text readable prose, and my skepticism has grown regarding the influence of social media on our manners, the quality of our prose, our politics and even our eating habits.
Take the word “survive,” tucked away in parentheses within the subtitle of Heitner’s Screenwise. Its force right now has much to do with the role of social media in our political communication. And the problem seems bigger than presidential tweetie-pie nuclear diplomacy. Well before our recent rancor-filled presidential campaign, it was apparent that social media sometimes foster name-calling, threats, misunderstandings, narcissism, resentment and dishonesty.
Initially, the most appealing part of Heitner’s talk for me was this advice: Be prepared to help your “digital native” understand when a texting relationship is becoming unnecessarily contentious and needs to be a face-to-face conversation. But it’s hard to imagine situations in which parents or grandparents will have opportunities for offering that kind of advice. Unless we’re careful, we’re more likely to be drawn toward monitoring technologies that delete dirty words or stop the use of “hate speech,” methods unlikely to educate responsible digital citizens.
One problem might be that Heitner and other social media scholars who compare concerns about this technology with earlier worries about radio or television tend to underestimate the power of social media companies in our competitive “attention economy.” These are not just powerful technologies. Much of the power is invested in companies that profit from keeping us returning to their sites, and as studies of Facebook’s “like” feature have shown, they are very skillful at manipulating our responses and inducing addiction. One recent study revealed that millennials check their smartphones an average of 157 times daily.
YouTube, Instagram and Twitter have adopted features similar to Facebook’s “like,” and in addition to pulling us back to check on whether people appreciate what we have done or said or photographed, this strategy invites us to function as our own public relations firms. So we get typical Facebook posts that invite us to marvel at photographs of sumptuous-looking food and beautiful landscapes or accounts of thrilling parties and wonderful vacations. Heitner suggests that when Snapchat and Facebook make our kids feel they’re not living as well as others, we remind them of this: People tend not to share sad or bad experiences on social media.
But you can’t expect to convince kids that life is tough even for people who post photos of beautiful sunsets in the mountains or selfies taken while partying joyfully at weddings. Glossy images used in advertising wouldn’t work as well as they do if it were that easy. However, my granddaughter recently introduced me to a young human rights lawyer from London, who suggested an approach that might begin to turn around the self-publicist problem and invite us to think, and maybe even laugh, about levels of candor in the social media.
The young lawyer told of a friend from Scotland, Duncan Grant, who grew impatient with the dominance of my-life-is-rich-and-beautiful postings on Facebook. “I’m so fed up of sunny holiday shots on Facebook,” he posted, “so I’m going to start posting soul-numbingly bleak photos from now on. Got some great ones in Aberdeen today. Here’s the first one. Bleakness level 76% #bleak.” Posting scenes of murky weather, gloomy architecture, melancholy landscapes and moldy bread and a dried-out office plant on his desk after he was away on holiday, he invites others to post photos, for which he assigns bleakness ratings and provides commentary.
Kids I know are drawn to satire, and while comedians mock the president and the people around him, Grant lampoons a folly most of us are in danger of committing on Facebook. Admittedly, it can be a little painful to acknowledge our personal PR efforts. Still, if Grant’s “Bleakness Project” were to go viral and inspire other efforts to show how silly social media manipulation can make us appear, our kids would probably catch on quickly.
But while laughing at how people often portray themselves on social media, we shouldn’t forget it’s very serious business. That’s a lesson the late-night comedians have been teaching many of us about politics. And the satire doesn’t mean the social media are necessarily a bad influence. My granddaughter and NPR (“Using Social Media To Get Help To Where It’s Needed”) recently reminded me of the technology’s potential, reporting how journalists, techies and activists used Facebook and Twitter to bring food, water and tools to places where they were needed in Mexico City after the last earthquake. Social media allowed volunteers to organize thousands of other volunteers in the way a more prepared government would have done.
Maybe we’re just beginning to learn how to use social media well.
And maybe it’s more like television than I thought.
Bill Nichols, who retired from the faculty at Denison University in 1998, lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.