Even in ancient Greece, the importance of face-to-face interaction over mere words on a page was recognized. Socrates warned: “Every word, when once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it.”1 Nowadays, the screen provides the opportunity for abandoning interpersonal interaction on an unprecedented scale, and with that abandonment comes a wholesale reduction in the risk of embarrassment and feelings of unease in social interaction. No one can see you blush, hear your voice go squeaky, or feel your damp palms. But then again, nor can you pick up on these all-important cues for working out how the other person might be reacting.
In 2012, the British communications watchdog Ofcom produced its ninth annual Communications Market Report. The director of research for Ofcom, James Thickett, was acutely aware of the significance of the decline that year’s report found in the number of mobile calls, which dropped by 1 percent, and in the number of landline calls, which decreased by 10 percent. He concluded:
In just a few short years, new technology has fundamentally changed the way that we communicate. Talking face-to-face or on the phone are no longer the most common ways for us to interact with each other. In their place, newer forms of communications are emerging which don’t require us to talk to each other, especially among younger age groups. This trend is set to continue as technology advances and we move further into the digital age.2
Ofcom reported that the average person was now sending fifty texts a week.3 A staggering 96 percent of young people ages sixteen to twenty-four were using instant message (non-oral) communication—email, text message, or a social network—every day to contact friends and family. Meanwhile, verbal communication over the phone or in person has become correspondingly less popular, with only 63 percent talking face-to-face with friends or family daily.4
Although Digital Natives may prefer non-oral communication through text messaging or the Internet, the type of emotional support that can be provided by these forms of communication turns out to be very inferior. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison asked the following question: could the content alone of an emotionally supportive conversation between a parent and a teenager convey reassurance, or would the tone of voice and/or physical presence of the parent also play a role?5 In the experiment, teenagers performed a stressful task, and were then comforted by their parents over the phone, in person, or through instant messaging, or had no parental contact whatsoever. Salivary levels of cortisol (a marker of stress) and oxytocin (an indication of bonding and well-being) were measured afterward. Teenagers who spoke with their parents over the phone or in person released similar amounts of oxytocin and showed similar low levels of cortisol, indicative of a reduction in stress. In comparison, those who instant-messaged their parents released no oxytocin and had salivary cortisol levels as high as those who did not interact with their parents at all. Thus while the younger generation may favor non-oral modes of communication, when it comes to providing emotional support, messaging appears comparable to not speaking with anyone at all.
The extent to which this increase in communication online is not just a symptom but a cause affecting young people’s ability to socialize and empathize in face-to-face conversations has not yet been empirically established. Such reluctance to make human contact with someone, especially a stranger, may be the product of a fear of, or simply a lack of practice in, this most basic of human talents. However, neither alternative bodes well for society. Imagine that you’ve never had much practice at face-to-face communication because, from an early age, you’ve interacted with others mostly through a screen. Instead of body language, tone of voice, and physical contact, the dominant vehicle for expression is words. It’s hardly surprising that many people complain that they’ve been misinterpreted when chatting through social media. However much you may discuss your emotions, the statements just cannot live up to true facial expressions.
Scarier still is the idea that real, nonverbal communication might be subverted by a parallel cyberuniverse in which the skills of interpersonal interaction are not sufficiently rehearsed; if they are not rehearsed, it is unlikely that you will be any good at them. So perhaps many younger people, brought up with the safer option of communicating online, prefer not to risk looking them in the eye, giving a hug, or taking a chance that their voice may rise up an octave. In turn, this might mean that online relationships are indeed very different from real ones. Professional matchmaker Alison Green has found she faces unique problems when dealing with Digital Natives: they appear to struggle to communicate face-to-face, and have shifted the development of romantic relationships online, with couples preferring to get to know each other first through the distance and safety of their smartphones.6
The big question is whether such a trend is to be welcomed or not. Sherry Turkle has suggested that Facebook gives “the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.”7 But in a relatively recent review, Paul Howard-Jones concludes that, all in all, the Internet “can benefit self-esteem and social connectedness.”8 Reaching a similar conclusion, Moira Burke from Carnegie Mellon University surveyed over a thousand English-speaking adult Facebook users for two months around the world, recruited through an ad.9 The results showed that Facebook increased bonding and decreased loneliness with direct communication. But, tellingly, as users passively consumed news they felt they had less access to new ideas being generated by others. Most important of all, loneliness was experienced in proportion to the amount of content they consumed. These findings highlight a possible crucial difference between actively supporting existing friendships and the passive consumption of other people’s social news. Favorable outcomes from relationships on social networking sites appear to apply only to those communicating with existing friends. It turns out that using the Internet to make new friends actually has a very different result. A long-term study of the relation between adolescent boys’ and girls’ computer use and their friends and quality of friendship reveals that using the Internet to make new friends is now linked to lower levels of well-being.10
Along similar lines, drawing from a sample of preadolescents and adolescents, researchers found that online communication was positively related to the closeness of friendships.11 No surprises there. However, this effect held only for respondents who communicated online primarily with already existing friends and not for those who communicated mainly with strangers. It was the socially anxious respondents who perceived the Internet as more valuable for intimate self-disclosure, and this perception in turn led to yet more online communication. So it seems that real-world social intimacy and Facebook intimacy are far from being the same thing—a distinction borne out by a recent survey.12
This crucial dissociation between the number of cyberfriends and real-life emotional ones also applies to older generations. This time a study examined the relationships between use of social media (instant messaging and social network sites), network size, and emotional closeness in individuals ranging in age from eighteen to sixty-three.13 Perhaps not surprisingly, time spent using social media was associated with a larger number of online social network “friends,” but it was not linked to larger offline networks or with feeling emotionally closer to offline network members. So, in general, how might online socializing differ fundamentally from that in the real world? One difference might be in the development of interpersonal communication skills, and consequently in empathy.
The ability to care about and share others’ emotional experiences is something that clearly differentiates humans from most of the rest of the animal kingdom.14 Studies have found that even babies and toddlers show empathetic behavior. One investigation with thirty-four-hour-old infants showed that even very young babies cry to the sound of another newborn’s cry, and that the cry is a response to the vocal properties of the other’s cry. The babies exposed to the crying of another newborn cried significantly more often than those exposed to silence or those exposed to a synthetic newborn cry of the same intensity.15
However, full-flowering empathy is not necessarily guaranteed as part of our birthright. It would be hard to imagine a complex trait such as empathy being completely a product of our genes. For example, although work by Ariel Knafo and his team at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem indicated a significant genetic contribution—indeed, an array of genes will inevitably be necessary for the realization of the diverse cognitive traits of the healthy human brain—the actual ability to empathize with others keeps maturing well into our twenties.16 So there is ample time for the environment and the experience of relationships to play a significant part in determining our ability to empathize.
The term “emotional intelligence” has increasingly crept into everyday language to define the “ability, capacity, skill, or a self-perceived ability to identify, assess, and manage the emotions of one’s self, of others, and of groups.”17 Whether or not emotional intelligence is part of or different from more general intelligence is an interesting question—but not our immediate priority here. Suffice it to say that if it’s something that, like intelligence itself, varies from person to person, then emotional intelligence cannot be a feature that is determined at birth. As mentioned in Chapter 4, a survey of fourteen thousand U.S. college students suggests that levels of empathy may be declining.18 While this survey, like all surveys, cannot provide a causal link between the soaring popularity of social networking sites and the decline in empathy, the somewhat eerie correlation is undoubtedly worth considering.
A particularly interesting approach by Miller McPherson was to compare ideas of friendship in 1985 with those in 2004. McPherson’s team discovered that the 2004 subjects had fewer people they could really talk to, with the number of available confidants down by about a third. Even more alarming, the proportion of those having no one at all with whom they could discuss important matters had nearly tripled.19 While there were losses from both within the family and in friend groups, the largest deficits in confidants occurred in the community and neighborhood. McPherson and his colleagues raised the possibility that respondents might have interpreted the question as pertaining to strictly face-to-face discussion, and if so, the shift from oral to online communication may account for the apparent decline.
It is easy to see how these two trends—a decrease in empathy and an increase in online relationships—could be linked. As the psychologist Larry Rosen has pointed out, if you hurt someone’s feelings but cannot see the other person’s reaction, you’ll lack sufficient cues to understand what you’ve done and apologize or take some other compensatory action.20 The increase in feelings of isolation may be connected with the ease and speed with which personai information can be posted, which may encourage people to thoughtlessly send potentially damaging information out into the world. And if empathy arises from the experience of interpersonal face-to-face communication, but we are good only at what we rehearse, then the reduction in face-to-face communication would reduce our ability to empathize. Empathetic connections in the real world could be a good analogy for the networking between individual neurons that occurs in the brain (recall Hebb’s famous words about neurons: “cells that fire together wire together”). However, if you have no one whom you feel cares about you, you might be all the more tempted to be uncaring to others or just care less about being so. And what effect might this indifference have on our own view of what is important and appropriate to share?
Beyond empathy, excessive Internet use could lead more generally to a reduced ability to communicate effectively, as it has been associated with a lack of emotional intelligence, including poor performance in interpreting facial expressions.21 Perhaps it is unsurprising that people who spend excessive amounts of time on the Internet have deficits in face processing. One particular study used a visual detection system to compare the early stages of the processing of face-related information in young excessive Internet users by analyzing their EEGs.22 By presenting subjects with images of faces and objects, researchers had discovered that the brain waves elicited by the viewing of faces were generally larger and peaked sooner than similar responses elicited by objects. This meant that the faces had more significance for the average observer than the objects. However, excessive Internet users generally had a smaller brain wave response than normal subjects, whether they were looking at faces or at tables. This result suggests that for heavy Internet users faces were of no more importance than everyday inanimate objects. Although it’s still unknown whether these impairments would extend to deeper processes of face perception, such as face memory and face identification, these observations indicate that excessive Internet users have deficits in the early stage of face-perception processing, an impairment that is in turn associated with a range of disorders including psychopathy and autism.
In the United Kingdom alone, more than half a million people—around 1 percent of the population—have a form of autism. Autism spectrum disorders are characterized by a triad of impairments: (1) difficulty with social communication, both verbal and nonverbal, such that patients often find it hard to “read” other people; (2) difficulty recognizing or understanding other people’s emotions and feelings, as well as expressing their own; and (3) difficulty with social imagination, namely, understanding and predicting other people’s behavior, making sense of abstract ideas, and imagining situations outside their immediate daily routine. Traditionally, autistic spectrum disorder is diagnosed within the first two years of life. Hence some specialists claim that it is impossible to link autism to social networking, since very young children won’t be accessing such sites. Yet Dr. Maxson McDowell, a psychoanalyst, has pointed out that individuals who obsessively use social networking could still develop autistic-like traits, such as avoiding eye contact. In infants, early eye contact initiates the ability to connect with others’ subjective experiences that is so essential for social communication and interaction, an ability that is impaired in autism.23 Indeed, infants’ inability to track their mother’s face is often associated with a future diagnosis of autism.
Meanwhile, three academics at Cornell University, Michael Waldman, Sean Nicholson, and Nodir Adilov, have explored possible associations between technology use and the later development of autism. They considered a variety of screen activities, including watching television, watching videos and DVDs, watching films in a movie theater, and using a computer. A link emerged between early TV watching and autism. If TV can be a factor, it would hardly be surprising if the screen world of the Internet turned out to have an impact as well.24
So if we accept the broadening of the term “autistic-like trait,” the Cornell findings might suggest that we shouldn’t exclude environmental factors in some cases. Rates of autism diagnosis have been increasing rapidly in the past two decades, and the increase cannot be attributed solely to genetic causes. One study by Irva Hertz-Picciotto and Lora Delwiche at the University of California, Davis, showed that even after taking into account changes to diagnostic criteria and the broadening of the autism spectrum, a significant proportion of the rise in autism cases was still unexplained.25 We should not dismiss out of hand the possibility that there are triggers in the environment, such as prolonged and early exposure to the world of the screen, where no one looks you in the eye. Humans have an evolutionary mandate to adapt to their environment, and when that environment does not provide opportunities to rehearse the interpersonal skills essential for empathy, one result might be the development of autistic-like difficulties with empathy.
Interestingly, David Amodio at New York University and Chris Frith at University College London have shown that one of the symptoms of autism is an underactive prefrontal cortex.26 Recall from Chapter 8 how essential this brain area is in ensuring that the brain functions cohesively. If this key area is underactive, there could be a profound effect on holistic brain operations, creating the mindset described earlier in which the sensory trumps the cognitive and nothing “means” anything: it just is what it is. A laugh, a frown, a blush, a smile might “mean” a lot less: what you see is what you get simply at (almost literally) face value.
Whether or not screen technologies could ever increase the possibility of autistic-like behaviors, it is well accepted that the reverse holds true, and autistic people are generally most comfortable in cyberspace. Catrin Finkenauer and her team at the University of Amsterdam investigated the link between autistic traits and Internet use in a longitudinal study and showed that people with a tendency toward autistic traits, especially women, were more prone to compulsive Internet use.27 This evidence suggests some kind of link between an attraction to the Internet and impairments in empathy, as was also seen in the study of heavy Internet users’ lack of distinction between faces and objects.
On the positive side, autistic individuals’ affinity for the screen has been already exploited for therapy. One notable example is the U.K.-based ECHOES Project, which helps schoolchildren with autism experiment with difficult social scenarios. ECHOES is:
a technology-enhanced learning environment where 5- to-7-year-old children on the Autism Spectrum and their typically developing peers can explore and improve social and communicative skills through interacting and collaborating with virtual characters (agents) and digital objects. ECHOES provides developmentally appropriate goals and methods of intervention that are meaningful to the individual child, and prioritizes communicative skills such as joint attention.28
Why should the screen hold such appeal for someone who has problems with empathy? The most obvious answer is that in such a world, there is no need to understand what might be going on inside the minds of others—what you see is what you get. Given the absence online of all the valuable nonverbal cues we have been discussing, perhaps we are all autistic-like when we go online.
To sum up: there is a link between atypical brain wave responses in problematic face recognition, characteristic of autism, and also of heavy Internet users; a link between autistic spectrum disorders and an underfunctioning prefrontal cortex, indicative of a more literal take on the world; a link between early screen experiences and later development of autism; and a link between autistic conditions and the appeal of screen technologies. While it is impossible to establish cause and effect between these various links, and indeed to draw any firm conclusions, there appear to be some parallels between heavy Internet use and autistic-like behaviors that deserve further exploration. This line of thinking inevitably brings us to question what we mean in any case when we talk of a relationship. Surely, to be a true friend, you need a real understanding of a person, of how he or she will react in a host of different contexts. The big difference between online and offline relationships is that in the former you show only what you want to show, often just cataloguing what you like and dislike. No one sees how you really deal with problems or suffer in stressful situations that have real and permanent consequences. By contrast, you cannot so successfully hide from a real friend in a face-to-face situation what you may be truly feeling, especially if your friend is adept at using all the three-dimensional and sensory clues needed for real empathy.
The lack of opportunity online to rehearse social skills might well foretell a decline in deep and meaningful relationships. An important consideration is that a preference for online rather than face-to-face communication could result in greater distrust of people. After all, trust grows from empathy, which in turn is best established through face-to-face communication and body language.
Surely it is when time spent on online relationships replaces time spent on real human interaction that the potential to miss out on deeper intimacy with others is more likely. So we need to think about the impact of Facebook-type relationships on lifestyle in general. Too much social networking can cross the line into interpersonal dysfunction and damage, even demolishing careers and marriages. It can displace time spent on relationship maintenance, and lead to an increased opportunity to communicate with ex-partners or potential future partners, either of which leads to temptation or to jealousy in current relationships. A 2013 study found that high levels of Facebook use were associated with negative relationship outcomes, leading to more cheating, breakups, and divorces. This effect was influenced by how much conflict the couple experienced in relation to Facebook.29
Social networking sites now expose users to information to which they wouldn’t otherwise have access, such as photos of an ex with a new partner. Thus Facebook can feed the insecure and jealous side of human nature.30 One friend told me that she left Facebook because it started making her feel paranoid, even though she wasn’t an inherently jealous type: “But suddenly there was this information that I could know about my partner, that I didn’t want to know, but I couldn’t help myself looking for.” There are formal studies evaluating and recognizing just this reaction. One investigation was based on an earlier finding that continuing offline contact with a former romantic partner may disrupt emotional recovery from the breakup.31 Results from 464 participants revealed that those who remained Facebook friends with their ex-partner, compared to those who did not, reported sexual desire and longing for the former partner, combined in a toxic mix with lower personal growth. The researchers concluded: “Overall, these findings suggest that exposure to an ex-partner through Facebook may obstruct the process of healing and moving on from a past relationship.”32
Of course, this is true in real life as well. It’s hard to get over people when you continue to see them routinely. But Facebook makes this unhealthy perseveration so much more accessible and more difficult to resist. Historically, our relationships would be periodically pruned—for example, through the demise of an intimate relationship, a falling-out with a friend, a change in jobs, schools, or residence, or simply losing contact with someone. Now, thanks to Facebook, we can much more readily cart around all that emotional baggage from the past into our present.
Moreover, greater access to others’ personal information has led to a culture where snooping on individuals is not only allowed but expected. The Facebook vernacular is “stalking,” but social networking site researchers have softened the term to “social surveillance.” Regardless of the semantics, the ability to pry freely and anonymously into the lives of others is a serious issue. You only have to look at the popularity of celebrity gossip magazines to realize that humans are inherently nosy. But this tendency can now be amplified through social networking, where interpersonal surveillance is a fairly common practice: 70 percent of college students (the behavior occurs irrespective of gender)33 reported using Facebook to check up on their romantic partner, with 14 percent reporting doing it at least twice a day.34 Indeed, an increased level of Facebook use predicts jealousy linked to the social networking site. Investigators argue that this effect may be the result of a feedback loop: Facebook use can expose people to ambiguous information about their partner that they may not otherwise have access to, and this information incites jealousy and further Facebook use.35
One law firm that specializes in divorce claimed that almost one in five petitions they processed cited Facebook.36 Flirty emails and messages found on Facebook pages are increasingly being used as evidence of unreasonable behavior. According to the British legal services firm Divorce-Online, Facebook was implicated in 33 percent of marriage break-ups in 2011, up from 13 percent in 2009. Mark Keenan, managing director of Divorce-Online, commented:
I had heard from my staff that there were a lot of people saying they had found out things about their partners on Facebook and I decided to see how prevalent it was. I was really surprised to see 20 percent of all the petitions containing references to Facebook. The most common reason seemed to be people having inappropriate sexual chats with people they were not supposed to.37
Time spent using technology is time spent away from the real world and real people. It is through seeing others or hearing their voice that we can try to understand how they feel. Too much time focused on the two-dimensional world of social networks may, as we saw earlier, be affecting young people’s ability to empathize with others, form meaningful bonds, and ultimately get the best out of their relationships.
In a debate in London in February 2012, I locked horns with Ben Hammersley, the editor of the magazine Wired. The motion was “Facebook is not your friend.” It would be unfair to Ben, who has no voice in these pages, to try to summarize the entire interchange of views. However, the reason I raise the occasion here is that in our summing up, Ben conceded that Facebook was indeed your friend because it was “just fun,” and obviously it was no substitute for real friendships. In the heat of the emotionally charged moment, I launched into a lengthy riposte, but in retrospect I wish that I had simply acknowledged that Ben had just proved my point. Social networking sites could be as much fun, as insubstantial, and as potentially compulsive as junk food. What seems irrefutable, however, is that such sites are having a significant impact on interpersonal communication and hence relationships. And if that is so, then, as with junk food, there will inevitably be still-wider repercussions for society as a whole.