To refresh your memory, here’s my “sum the sum” from part 10 of my summary of Hamlet’s Blackberry:
- Older technologies often survive the introduction of newer ones.
- Parents still read to their children, preserving the oral tradition.
- Therapists and trial lawyers engage in reflective question and answer sessions, preserving the Socratic tradition.
- Adults and children still read books, preserving the book reading worldview.
- The hinged door has not given away to the sliding door because the hinged door works with and is more expressive of, the body as opposed to the sliding door.
- Technologies that work well with the body tend to express what cognitive scientists call “embodied cognition.”
- Today, many digital technologies express “disembodied cognition”—mind dissociated from body.
- Carl Jung calls disembodied cognition “not body” or “weightless thoughts.”
- Embodied cognition is closely associated with procedural brain or body brain.
- We use procedural brain or body brain in such areas as surgery, piloting a plane or other aircraft, and driving a car.
- There is a dynamic relationship between body brain and mind brain.
- Internet technologies tend to disrupt the dynamic relationship between body brain and mind brain.
- This disruption is seen clearly in a potentially dangerous activity such as texting and driving.
- The conceptual clash between the analog worldview and the digital worldview has left many with no way to effectively bring order and coherence to an otherwise confusing world of stimuli and information.
- Rather than help people understand the nature of the conceptual clash that surrounds them and find effective methods of dealing with such a clash, we feed children and adults copious amounts of behavioral drugs more potent than cocaine.
- Political commentator Naomi Klein calls making money off the misfortunes of others “disaster capitalism.”
Lets get started with part 11 of my multi-part summary of William Powers’ book Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age.
On page 159, Powers expresses a concern that I share: humans are speciating into two different species. As I have blogged about before, I see humans speciating into “naties”—people who have grown up mostly in natural environments—and “virties”—people who have grown up mostly in virtual, screen-delivered environments. Here’s how Powers puts it:
I’ve heard middle-aged [baby boomer] people grumble that digital natives (those roughly thirty and under, who have grown up with screens) are effectively a new species of human being, innately incapable of holding a sustained conversation or thought.
Powers uses the term Homo distractus to describe digital natives or people who I am calling virties. But I disagree with Powers’ suggestion that digital natives will be innately endowed with an inability to carry on a coherent conversation. Powers’ frame gives innate behavioral systems a bad name. I would argue that the various behavioral systems (i.e., attachment, care, sex, language, etc.) are still there: It’s more a question of how well developed and integrated they are. Simply, being able to carry on a coherent conversation requires development of the Executive Function Skills such as mental planning, running what if scenarios, perspective taking, delaying gratification, mental time travel, etc. With poorly developed EF we essentially get Homo distractus. Here’s an example of what I am talking about:
The other day I ran across the following LiveScience article written by Stephanie Pappas:
Teen Speech Shapes Up On the Way to College
This article profiles research (being conducted at at Michigan State University) that shows that teens who aspire to study at the college level and plan (my emphasis) to eventually join the professional ranks (i.e., doctors and lawyers), reduce their use of non-standard language constructions (i.e., multiple uses of the word “like” within a single sentence) the closer they get to beginning their college studies. Interestingly, kids who plan to not attend college and stay in their local area persist in using non-standard language constructions.
So, is it possible that the non-standard language constructions of tweets and texts play two interacting roles: 1) their use plays a role in delaying development of formal language constructions (which are still used in the various professions), and 2) they linguistically mark delayed development of certain Executive Function Skills. And this is not a new concept really. Here’s an example.
In his 1996 book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, Robin Dunbar talks about what I am calling the My Fair Lady phenomenon. Here’s an excerpt from my summary of Dunbar’s book (contact the Foundation for a copy of this executive summary):
— begin excerpt —
Dunbar now turns to the phenomenon of “marrying up” for women. He maintains that the marrying up phenomenon has been around for centuries if not millennia. Dunabr makes an intriguing observation: the marrying up phenomenon requires a general or decontextualized [e.g., professional] dialect in order for the process to be brought to a successful conclusion. In essence, Dunbar is describing the “My Fair Lady” phenomenon. Allow me to quote Dunbar at length:
Marrying up the social (or economic) scale is still common today. This doesn’t mean that every working-class girl marries an upper-class boy, but it does mean that marrying into the class above is more common among women than it is for men, and it is more common among women than marrying down the social scale. The daughter of an earl marrying her local dustman attracts far more attention than does the earl’s son and heir marrying the dustman’s daughter. Given this, it pays girls to develop an all-purpose accent [the “Rain in Spain” scene of My Fair Lady would be an example] that allows them to move more easily up the social scale when the opportunity arises—or at least it pays their parents to encourage them to do so.
— end excerpt —
So, we could view First Lady Michelle Obama as an overbearing “digital prude” when she puts tight digital use restrictions on her two daughters Sasha and Malia. Or we could view the First Lady as displaying a desire (e.g., a future plan) for her two girls to gain access to the all-purpose accent of professional life. Recall that during his RYOL lecture, Nicholas Carr told us that tech company CEOs tend to send their kids to Montessori school because they have no- to low-tech learning environments.
It may sound a bit bizarre at first blush but maybe what the Internet has done for us is to give us a “universal local” dialect that may mark and/or bring about delayed development of Executive Function Skills. It’s a lot like feeling comfortable when entering a new town and first spotting the local McDonalds. McDonalds is a form of universal local dialect if you will. The Internet has provided us with a McDonalds feeling of “localized universality.” But one must still rise above this localized universality if one wishes to enjoy a gourmet meal.
Truly a lot of this is speculation. As Powers puts it (still on page 159), “The struggle of employers to impose some sanity on the e-mail [and now Facebook and Twitter] burden is a reminder that, in the broad scheme of things, all [emphasis in original] digital technologies are still very new and we’re in the early stages of figuring them out.” I agree with Powers here, however, I do feel we should make an effort to “figure out digital technologies” as opposed to just letting them happen willy nilly. Again, Nicholas Carr reminded us that we tend to embrace new technologies before taking the time to assess for unintended consequences or “blowback” (i.e., increasing obesity rates, increasing distractibility, decreasing levels of Executive Functioning, etc.). Returning to Dunbar for a moment longer, consider this excerpt from my executive summary:
— begin excerpt —
Dunbar contrasts the fast pain channels of the body with the slow pain-killing channels (the latter channels depend on the release of opiate-like endorphins). “The body keeps two conflicting response systems in balance and in check,” so says Dunbar. As Bowlby discovered, attachment behavior and patterns are centrally about how the body goes about the business of keeping conflicting response systems in balance and in check. “It is easy to induce an endorphin high,” reveals Dunbar. “Any repetitive task under stress will trigger the endorphin system—caged animals pacing frantically in circles would be an example.” Autistic rocking, OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) washing, or ADHD (attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder) disruptiveness are all forms of repetition that have the potential to release the calming effects of an endorphin bath. Dunbar points out that marathon runners create an endorphin high by repetitive pounding. Workaholics bring about the same high by psychologically pounding on their brains. As Dunbar puts it, “Like runners, workaholics will show endorphin withdrawal symptoms once they stop pounding away.” Apparently both runners and workaholics will even get the shakes as they anticipate the end to a particularly grueling pounding session (whether on the pavement or on paper).
Dunbar points out that evolution is not above “hijacking an entire behavioral system of motivation for other purposes.” As an example, evolution hijacked the “feel good” endorphin system as a way of assuring that “close bonds of friendship would be formed as a protection against threat.” Likewise Bowlby discovered that evolution hijacked the motivational system of attachment as yet another way of assuring that close bonds of friendship and care would be formed as a protection against threat. … In essence Dunbar contends that what binds people and communities together is the release of endogenous opiates through face-to-face interactions. This begs the question, “Is there opiate release through social contact within virtual worlds?” Again, maybe in part this explains why we, as a society, are forced to feed our kids potent drugs such as Ritalin and Prozac. Maybe within virtual worlds opiate release will be purely exogenous—fed to us from the outside.
— end excerpt —
In his book The Shallows—What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr suggests that we get a squirt of dopamine when we repetitively click hyperlinks (not unlike rats in a lab experiment). Taking a cue from Dunbar, clicking hyperlinks may be our postmodern way of grooming the Internet. So, maybe it will help us to understand the digital world if we look at it as yet another hijacking, that is to say, moving the brain’s reward system from face-to-face interactions (and endogenous release of calming opiates) to hyperlink-to-hyperlink interactions (and exogenous delivery of behavior controlling drugs). If we accept this frame then we can look at feeding kids (and many adults) copious amounts of behavioral drugs as a part of a weaning process: from face-to-face to hyperlink-to-hyperlink. And, yes, we should expect to see an increase in such social maladies as autism spectrum disorders, compulsiveness, repetitive behaviors (5,000 texts a week would be an example), dehumanization, localized universality, etc., as this weaning process progresses.
And what of the Executive Brain? Will it survive on the other side of this cosmic wean? Honestly, I have no idea. I don’t think anyone does. But I think First Lady Michele Obama and tech company CEOs have the right idea: develop EF functioning while you can because in a world with reduced EF functioning—if such a world should eventually fully arrive on the scene—those with the ability to think executively will probably have the greatest chance of not only surviving but also thriving. I think when Bowlby talked about how secure attachment could (if all goes well) lead to the development of open and flexible Inner Working Models (which are part of the EF system), he was making a similar case. To paraphrase a popular saying from the 1970s, “Executive Functioning will get you through times of no order better than chaos will get you through times of no Executive Functioning.” Just keep in mind, the rain in Spain does stay mainly in the plain … for naties anyway.
I’ll end here. Here’s my sum the sum for part 11:
- Central question: are humans speciating into “naties”—people who have grown up mostly in natural environments—and “virties”—people who have grown up mostly in virtual, screen-delivered environments?
- Central question: are digital natives (people who are thirty or younger) essentially forming the new species Powers calls Homo distractus?
- Central question: are we really looking at a new species, or is Homo distractus more about un- or underdeveloped Executive Function Skills such as empathy, perspective taking, mental time travel, mental modeling, delaying gratification, planning, etc.
- Research suggests that kids who aspire to join professional ranks tend to give up their use of non-standard language as they enter college.
- Giving up non-standard language as a way toward professional ranks could be framed as the My Fair Lady phenomenon.
- What the Internet has done for us is to give us a “localized universality.”
- Whereas before we derived a dopamine buzz as a part of face-to-face interactions, we now seek out that buzz in the hyperlink-to-hyperlink interactions that characterize localized universality. If that buzz is not forthcoming, we can turn to all manner of behavioral drugs to take up the slack.
- In the same way that a McDonalds on every street corner makes us feel safe, we find safety in the localized universality of the Internet. Both must be transcended if we wish to find and enjoy a gourmet meal.
I’m sorry I stayed mainly on one topic (and essentially one page) from Powers’ book, but I think the topic of human speciation and the Internet is an important one. Stay tuned for part 12. I’ll try to get it out as soon as I possibly can. And I’ll endeavor to cover more topics and terrain. In the mean time, consider reading Powers’ book Hamlet’s Blackberry. If you have read Hamlet’s Blackberry, feel free to leave your comments concerning the information that Powers presents.
