RULE 37

Being connected does not mean you aren’t clueless.

Even with your IM, cell phones, iPods, satellite television, DVRs, and CD players, you can still be oblivious about what is happening around you. Do you have any clue what your parents’ lives are like? What they did today? What your brothers or sisters did? Even worse, when you shut off all that noise, the void amid the sudden silence could be the real you.

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Modern media allow you to fill your head 24/7 with an artificial life. But at least recognize that’s what it is: artificial, as in fake, make-believe. While surfing the vast matrix of modern technology, you can easily wind up living in a world of synthetic emotions and manufactured drama. As a master of multitasking, you have figured out how to use much of the media—music, instant-messaging, even Google searches—while doing things like homework. But stimulation is not individuality, and noise is not personality, and sometimes it is real people who get reduced to background white noise amid the digital clutter.

How quaint that two or three decades ago experts worried about the effects of television on the brain development of young children. A 2005 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that kids inhabited a world of digital saturation, spending an average of 6.5 hours a day with various media.152 But even this understates their exposure, because more than a quarter of the time, children were using more than one medium. So the foundation estimated that they were actually exposed to the daily equivalent of 8.5 hours of media content, crammed into the 6.5 hours they were “connected.”

Those 8.5 hours should be compared to the hour a day our “overburdened” and “overworked” kids spent on homework and the mere half hour a day they spent doing chores153 (and since this was self-reported, those numbers deserve to be regarded with some skepticism).

Despite what some antitechnology troglodytes might think, this isn’t all bad: at least you are no longer couch potatoes who passively absorb the wit and wisdom of Saved by the Bell—you now interact with your electronic universe. But the downside is that you probably spend less and less time sitting next to or talking with real people.154 That sort of eye-to-eye, in-the-same-room interaction has been the basis of families, friendships, and society since guys named Gog first learned to communicate interesting news about woolly mammoths.

The Kaiser study found that kids who spent a lot of time connected to media said they hung out a lot with their parents, but the quality of those interactions is questionable. Were they having dinner together and talking about the details of daily life? Or merely occupying the same physical space but different psychic universes? Nearly two-thirds of young people (63 percent) reported that the television was on during dinner. In a majority of homes, the TV was on “most of the time.” So what really gets the attention? How can Dad compete with The O.C.?

The temptation of media saturation, of course, is to treat people in the actual world—family members, professors, coworkers—as if they are TV; you may listen to them with half a mind while you are also answering e-mails, trolling search engines, or playing video games. The addiction to multitasking has gotten so bad that some colleges now ban laptops from classrooms, because professors found they were being treated like background noise rather than real people in real time.155

All of this connectedness can also erode self-reliance. “You get used to things happening right away,” says psychologist Bernardo J. Carducci, a professor at Indiana University Southeast. The world of instant communication, instant results, and instant gratification has consequences. “You not only want the pizza now, you generalize that expectation to other domains, like friendship and intimate relationships. You become frustrated and impatient easily. You become unwilling to work out problems. And so relationships fail—perhaps the single most powerful experience leading to depression.”156

And then there’s the content of the media swarm: the billions of bits of information, the unregulated flow of data, information, science, math, violence, pornography, truth, fraud, and pettifoggery streaming through headphones, high-speed connections, and video screens.

If there ever really was a battle over parental control, it is over and spectacularly lost. Marking the Great Surrender, most eight-to-eighteen-year-olds said their parents had no rules about watching TV. Despite ongoing controversies about violent video games, the Kaiser study found that only 5 percent of older teenagers said their parents had any rules at all about what they play; only 25 percent of younger teens had any rules. On the issue of games like Grand Theft Auto, somewhere between 75 and 95 percent of America’s parents had wilted like overcooked pasta. (And yes, the kids do play the games. In the Kaiser study, 62 percent of seventh-to-twelfth-graders said they had played Grand Theft Auto.)

In the same study, only a quarter of young people said there were any parental controls or filters on their computers; only 14 percent of parents checked parental advisories on music their children bought (or had the slightest idea that their little boys were listening to lyrics about bitches, hos, and worse); and only one in ten even bothered to check the ratings on games.157

In other words, in the digital age, you are on your own.