A Stanford professor of communications who worked on a study
published in Discovery Girls magazine showed that young girls who spend the
most time multitasking between various digital devices, communicating online or
watching video are the least likely to develop normal social tendencies,
according to the survey of 3,461 American girls aged 8 to 12 who volunteered responses. This story ran on CNN Tech, January 25, 2012.
Professor Clifford Nass said that the study only included
girls but the results should apply to boys as well. He said that boy’s emotional development is
more difficult to analyze because male social development varies widely and
over a longer period of time.
I can attest to that last statement. In my opinion, young boys have early hormonal
influences that cause us to look and feel things differently than girls do.
"No one had ever looked at this, which really shocked
us," Nass said. "Kids have to learn about emotion, and the way they
do that, really, is by paying attention to other people. They have to really
look them in the eye."
What needs to happen is for
children to spend more time interacting face-to-face with people. Tweens in the study who regularly talked in
person with friends and family were less likely to display social problems,
according to the findings in the publication Developmental Psychology.
"If you eschew face-to-face
communication, you don't learn critical things that you have to learn,"
Nass said. "You have to learn social skills. You have to learn about
emotion."
The Stanford researchers were not
able to determine a magic number of hours that children should spend conversing
per week, Nass said. Social skills are typically only learned when children are
engaged and making eye contact, rather than fiddling with an iPod during a
conversation, he said.
Nass is a
self-described technologist of 25 years, who has worked as a consultant with
many major electronics firms, including Google and Microsoft. He said the
findings disturbed him.
I see this all
the time even with adults. At the Inn, many people have a hard time focusing on a
conversation with the other guests. If
they get a voice message, they stop conversation and right away pull out the
phone and message to the “important message.”
The immediate
guest to guest conversation is unimportant to the phone call or voice message
they just received. How did we survive
25 years ago without cell phones, I wonder?
Is the call or message that really important, or do we just make it out
to be what it truly is not.
I ride the TTA bus to work everyday, and many people, young
and old, are constantly pulling out an electronic device to Facebook, take or
make calls, play games, or scan the news.
No one talks to each other, although in some instances those that know
each other from riding the same bus, do seems to have some conversations.
Before riding
the TTA bus, I rode the bus from the parking garage to my office. That is when I really noticed the unsocialization
of young people. Us “older” ones would occasionally talk, but the younger
employees, rarely a word. Now mind you,
on the Duke bus, we all have something in common; we ALL work at Duke. Yet, the conservations were infrequent… like “I
do not talk to strangers”, even though we all have the same employer. No networking!
At least on the
TTA bus, those who were initially strangers seem to have more of an interest in
talking to the person next to them or across the aisle.
I hope the age
of electronic devices do not make us a society of nonverbal communicators. It so nice to hear a person’s voice compared
to the tap-tap-tap of a keyboard.
What Do You
Think?
Gary
