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Jayne Dowle: We need social networking with a human face
THERE can't be many matters on which I'm qualified to agree with Baroness Greenfield, neuro-scientist, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution.
On the issue of social networking sites, however, we are as one. In a report for the House of Lords, she warns that the proliferation of social networking sites such as Facebook are changing children's brains, resulting in selfish and attention-deficient young people.
It isn't doing adults much good either. She says it is "infantilising" the brain, turning adults into children who live only for thrill of the moment.
I know of one marriage which has ended because of
Facebook. "She spent all her time on Facebook when she was supposed to be looking after the baby," says the husband, whose (now estranged) wife gave up work to look after their daughter. "Nothing got done in the house, and our little girl would be crawling around crying in a dirty nappy. When I came home she could barely be bothered to look up from the screen."
In the end, she left for a former boyfriend who had become one of her Facebook "friends". Believe me, it is a scene being repeated at kitchen table laptops across the land.
I know that being stuck indoors with a screaming baby can drive any woman to acts of madness. In my day though, and we're only talking a couple of years ago, we strapped the child in the pushchair and went out for a walk.
But Facebook offers so many possibilities – so many alternative scenarios – that you don't even have to leave the house to commit mental adultery. You can be who you want to be in this virtual world, and edit out all the bits you don't like, such as the husband at work and the smelly nappies.
I should say that I haven't subscribed to Facebook, Bebo,
Twitter or any other social networking site. I spend enough time in front of a computer for work. The last thing that I want to do in my precious free time is to sit up half the night posting banal comments to someone who I haven't seen since university. I realise that this makes me sound like a total Luddite, but I've got email, text and telephones. Devoted as I am to Google, that's enough technology for me.
My husband thinks I am hopelessly old-fashioned. He works away a lot, and has friends all over the place, so has been a Facebook devotee from the start. It helps him to stay in touch. But let's just say this. When he broke his collarbone last autumn playing football with our son, he posted a note and pictures of his arm in a sling!
Out of all his so-called online "friends", only the ones he saw or spoke to regularly anyway bothered to offer any kind of sympathy. The rest just carried on posting inane witterings about themselves. Far from encouraging emotional bonds, social networking, as Baroness Greenfield says, can lead to self-obsession and an "inability to empathise".
It is also dangerous. "Cyber-bullying" is becoming all too
frequent, in the workplace, in schools and in colleges. Imagine how you would feel if you were a dedicated teacher, doing your job, day-in, day-out, to find that your pupils hated you and were waging on online campaign posting hurtful comments about your teaching abilities and personal appearance? It could destroy your life and your professional reputation, and it is happening in a school near you.
Or what if your son or daughter found themselves on the end of a vicious online hate campaign? A few years ago, bullying by text message was all the rage.
Now, it's out there in cyberspace, so the whole world can join in, posting comments without having to take any responsibility. Even being shunned by a Facebook "friend" could cause psychological damage when everyone else is happily posting away.
I teach part-time at a university, and we have started to warn our students about being wary of what they reveal about themselves on social networking sites. Potential employers have ways of finding out what the candidate with the apparently flawless CV is really like, including their recreational drugs of choice.
The irony of social networking is that although it is all about the purely personal, everything you write can become public property.
But the problem is the brakes are off. Individuals are forgetting how to relate to each other as real people, so the established checks and balances of "normal" friends just
don't exist. It is all about the here and now, not the long-term consequences.
The Government has had its cage rattled, and is reported to be appointing a social networking specialist to investigate what all this means for society.
But what can they do? They can't legislate against free speech. So with that in mind, I'm taking a personal stand against the Facebook masses. Let's put the "social" back into social networking, and remember that real friends never pull the plug.
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Friday 25 May 2012
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