FACEBOOKâS Mark Zuckerberg is king of all he surveys in social media. His next horizon is near-mythical: techno-telepathy. Direct mind-to-mind contact is âthe ultimate communications technologyâ, .
âYouâll think a text or update and send it,â affirmed his experimental tech director, Regina Dugan. The old Arthur C. Clarke line that âany sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magicâ seems evergreen in 2017.
Look around your streets â or better, a mall, lobby or campus â and youâll see a generation of humans already deeply entangled in, and entranced by, their communication devices. As the next incessant blink, buzz or chirp pulls you towards the touchscreen yet again, havenât you ever felt the urge â accompanied by a twinge of your carpal tunnel â to just respond, or receive, in a purely mental way?
Advertisement
Zuckerbergâs aspiration to go from iPhone to psy-phone seems more like a shift in degree than kind. Yet what Ray Kurzweil once called âthe age of spiritual machinesâ sometimes has to deal with the sweaty, fleshy, emotional reality of human beings as they are, particularly younger ones budding through those (so far) unavoidable heaves and surges we know as adolescence and early adulthood.
Going by these two fascinating ethnographies, even the digitally naturalised Generation Z (the kids of Gen X) are hardly ready for the direct and pure mingling of minds. Not while thereâs selfie-taking, sexting, cyberbullying or âYik Yakkingâ to be done, day after day.
Yik Yak â a controversial Twitter-style app which shut down in April this year â provides Donna Freitasâs The Happiness Effect with its malevolent subtitle. Through hundreds of interviews with undergrads and graduates in 13 US colleges, Freitas lays out the regime of nervy identity construction through social media that occupies much of their emotional lives.
âNervy identity construction via social media occupies much of studentsâ emotional livesâ
Whether itâs due to their awareness that their timeline is a potential CV, or that their âlikesâ are an indicator of social status on campus, they are under pressure to display their best and most positive selves at all times. âNow you donât have to wait for your 10-year high school reunion to show off how great your life is,â says junior student Brandy. âItâs like that every day.â
The anonymised Yik Yak app released a torrent of mutual abuse through some of Freitasâs campuses. Out from under the compulsion to display public happiness, the Repressed returned with a vengeance. âYik Yak was like a bad soap opera,â said one. Another abandoned the service âbecause I was overwhelmed by the racism and homophobia that exists on my campusâ.
So many of the tales here are about trying to establish some kind of autonomy over, or even just etiquette around, the endless connective demands of social media and smartphones. Ethics and mores are being established on the fly. Among Freitasâs students, the general attitude towards visually led dating apps â where you display your wares to engage in âhook-upsâ â was an extended âeewwwwâ. For these febrile, nervy souls, steamy liaisons still need sociable encounters first.
Consistent with this reserve, the new ritual for courtly romance would seem to be the declaration that oneâs new boy/girlfriend is now âFacebook officialâ. When a couple agree to change their relationship status on the platform, they are (in one male studentâs words) âstanding on top of a mountain and shouting it out to the worldâ.
So far, so sweet, so familiar. The ecstasies of online communication are tempered by recognisable real-world (and real-body) anxieties and modesties.
Freitas is obviously a good pastor and counsellor to these fluttery kids, even as she mines them for research. But her matronising tone does remind you that Facebookâs founding circumstance was as a campus social network, profiting from playing around with the status anxieties of Harvard University students.
The idea that the stifling managerialism behind Zuckerbergâs network is seeking to enter your intimate mental life, at some stage in the neurotech future, feels like something that would invite neo-Luddism, if not outright rebellion.
One might have a romantic notion â the agenda-setting SF novels of Cory Doctorow come to mind â that the kids from the wrong side of the tracks would be the ones who demanded something different, less managed, more edgy, from their communication platforms. (Freitasâs students are clearly attending prestigious universities, where pressures to succeed keeps things normative.)
Jacqueline Ryan Vickeryâs book Worried About the Wrong Things has a cast of quirky, eccentric and talented young digital users, circulating in and around a working-class school near the Mexican border, with the pseudonym âFreeway Highâ. But the tale it tells is how, amid circumstances of socio-economic distress, education fails to be the haven that can generate possibilities and progress. And one predictor of school failure is whether it uses digital technology from a âharm-drivenâ rather than an âopportunity-drivenâ perspective.
The book has an intriguing tension. The authorâs teacherly interests are evident â she promotes a âconnected learning modelâ that imagines it can bring all the âlearning momentsâ of a pupil, wherever and whenever they happen, into one educational framework.
âPetty and futile constraints on classroom tech use sets a tone of defeatism and alienationâ
Yet the stories that unfold when she talks to the Freeway High students are pretty difficult to assimilate into any inclusive teaching system. In complete contrast to the compulsive communicators of Freitasâs book, two sensitive young Latino high-school film-makers (Sergio and Javier) often chose not to post their material on YouTube because they are insecure about its quality, and worried it might harm their career prospects, precarious and tentative as they are.
Freeway High has a classic teacher-liberator of the Dead Poets Society type â a Mr Lopez who runs evening Cinematic Art Projects and Digital Media Clubs for the pupils. But, as Vickery charts in great and persuasive detail, the schoolâs prevailing âharm-drivenâ view of social media muffles and excludes the digital creativity that already thrums through these kidsâ lives. Petty and futile constraints on classroom tech use, and on the kind of digital material that children can bring in from their own enthusiasms, sets a tone of defeatism and alienation among some of the Freeway High kids.
The author has an obvious favourite pupil, a disruptive, deprived but poetic girl called Selena, with whom she spends considerable time. But she hears later that Selena has dropped out of school in the midst of her college preparations, and now has no connection with her. The book is strewn with tales of exclusion and struggle, in which parental backgrounds are chaotic and the demands of care, commuting and finding a place to live bear down too heavily on digitally ambitious youth.
Across both studies, and no matter the social positioning of each set of users, these young people evidently know they have a new kind of tangible social machinery in their hands (and minds): a machinery made of devices, networks and digital information, with which they can make a mark, pooling their knowledge and consciousness.
As responsible pedagogues, Vickery and Freitas are institutionalised (and institutionalising). And with Mark Zuckerberg â as with any Silicon Valley visionary mogul â you have to follow the profit-driven interest, not just gawp at the transhuman ambition.
Somewhere between the caring educators and the corporate disruptor, Generation Z is forging its own new society out of a digital revolution still in its early days. The streets will have their uses. And young, yearning bodies wonât be ignored, either.
Donna Freitas
Oxford University Press
Jacqueline Ryan Vickery
MIT Press
This article appeared in print under the headline âBest behaviour?â
