Addict Nation (12 page)

—Anonymous mom

In some circles, talking is actually becoming uncool. Today’s young teens consider gabbing on the phone old hat and have replaced a lot of in-person and voice communication with texting. Half of American teens send fifty or more text messages a day. One-third of them send more than 100 texts per day.
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Think about it: 100 texts a day from a kid who is still in school? That’s laying the foundation for addictive behavior. I’ve covered news stories where parents have been assaulted by their own children when they tried to take away the kid’s cell phone. That sounds a lot like the fierce defiance of an addict who will fight to keep his or her drug of choice, no matter what.

Facebook and other social-networking sites have taken the place of in-your-face conversation. Twitter, the act of posting short personal texts to a group of followers, may seem like a ridiculous idea at first glance. After all, who really wants to hear that someone just picked up their dry cleaning or is late to the dentist? But millions of Americans have fallen in love with the notion of sharing their every thought in 140 characters or less. This has spawned an entirely new way of communicating. Kids, especially, have learned to replace the nuances of in-person communication with symbols, flash icons, and even keyboard art. Acronyms, shorthand spelling, slang, and capitalization are writing styles that have taken the place of body language, expressions, and voice. These short bursts of communication are known as microblogging. Social scientists call the ability to feel close to others via cyberspace communication alone “ambient awareness.”
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“This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update— each individual bit of social information—is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.”

—Clive Thompson, columnist for
Wired

But is communicating primarily through computers dangerous to our mental health? A
New York Times
article aptly titled “Antisocial Networking?” suggests “today’s youths may be missing out on experiences that help them develop empathy, understand emotional nuances and read social cues like facial expressions and body language.”
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On my show,
Issues
,
we covered a horrific story that proves there’s good reason to be worried that obsessive texting can lead to callousness and cruelty.

March 17, 2010. It’s another gorgeous day in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Fifteen-year-old Josie Ratley has just left her classes for the afternoon. She is at the school’s bus loop waiting to go home. Out of nowhere, a fifteen-year-old boy named Wayne Treacy storms up to her. He appears enraged. Cops say he begins to viciously beat the girl, pummeling her until she falls to the ground, then smashing her head onto the pavement, kicking her, and stomping on her face with his steel-toed boots, leaving her near death.

Doctors say every single bone in Josie’s face was broken in that attack. When she emerged from three weeks in a medically induced coma she was unable to speak or walk. She also suffered extensive and traumatic brain injury that required three surgeries on her skull. She will need long-term rehabilitative care.

Her Life Was Destroyed . . . All Over a Text Message

Prosecutors say Wayne Treacy had become incensed over a text message that Josie Ratley had sent Wayne referring to his brother, who had recently committed suicide. Hours before the beating, cops say Wayne began texting his friends about how he planned to retaliate against the girl for her text. Court documents paint a portrait of a young man whose texts are overflowing with rage. “Snap her neck then stomp her skull. Fastest way I could think of,” he allegedly wrote, describing his plan of attack. In another text sent about an hour before the beating, he purportedly writes, “This bxtch ran her mouth bout my bro who she knew is dead. Nao I want her head.” Prosecutors say Wayne’s final text was “I just tried to kill sum1. Im going to prison.” He was charged as an adult with first-degree attempted murder.
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If this young man had done less texting and engaged in more genuine conversation or, better yet, shared his pain over his brother’s suicide with a trained therapist, would his rage have built up to this level? As obsessive texting becomes a substitution for talking, we are likely to see more explosions of sudden violence from people who are not giving themselves an outlet to express and process their feelings.

“Our bodies are built for ‘fight or flight.’ We are supposed to go out and do things physically every day but don’t. We just sit there vibrating. Then we get these adrenaline surges but have nowhere to let it out. It drives us crazy. We have not adapted physically to our new virtual world.”

—April East, Internet gaming addict

Cyber Sadism

There is a sense that cyberspace is a no-consequence zone. Not true. The anonymity of the Internet gives many people a perverse courage to be their worst selves. Teens routinely text, e-mail, and post nasty things about each other that they would never have the courage to say to someone’s face. One girl told the
New York Times,
“It’s easier to fight online, because you feel more brave and in control . . . on Facebook, you can be as mean as you want.”
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Of course, she’s right. It’s a lot easier to write “you’re such a slut” than to say those same words to someone’s face. The Cyberbullying Research Center says it found that one in five middle-school students are being bullied via the Internet or text. One in five! That’s a cyberbullying epidemic!
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Vicious sexual comments, ethnic and racial slurs, and derogatory references to income and class are common. Often kids can do it anonymously.

To stay one step ahead of their parents, kids often jump from one social-networking site to another. Formspring.me is a relatively new social-networking site that was singled out by the
New York Times
as “a magnet for comments, many of them nasty and sexual, among the Facebook generation . . . it has become an obsession for thousands of teenagers nationwide, a place to trade comments and questions like: Are you still friends with julia? Why wasn’t sam invited to lauren’s party? You’re not as hot as u think u are. Do you wear a d cup? You talk too much. You look stupid when you laugh.”
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When a seventeen-year-old Long Island girl committed suicide in March 2010, cops wondered if the vicious taunts she had received on social-networking sites might have been a factor. Perhaps most horrifying, the online taunts continued even after her death. “She was obviously a stupid depressed—who deserved to kill herself. she got what she wanted. be happy for her death. rejoice in it,” someone wrote.
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One parent whose child was a friend of the victim noted, “There are posts of photos with nooses around her neck. It’s disgusting and heartless.”

Does this callousness have an addictive component? Of course! We know that teens are texting 50 to 100 times a day and then posting a slew of other messages on social-networking sites. That’s called being hooked. We know that addiction leads to moral bankruptcy. Alcoholism, for example, routinely leads to domestic violence in the home with spouses, kids, and even pets brutalized by the drunk family patriarch. Kids are not immune to this phenomenon of addiction-based cruelty. Addiction creates a single-mindedness that kills every other voice inside one’s head, silencing the conscience.

There is a growing obsession with being the cool, cold texter with the pithy putdown. Since all addictive behavior is progressive, it follows that the anonymous comments will become nastier as the teen’s texting addiction spirals out of control. This is a social contagion of the first order! So where are the adults? Getting and sending emails on their CrackBerrys, of course. Remember the first time you heard “You’ve got mail!”?

Ping! Ping! Ping!

It’s the tantalizing sound that tells us somebody is knocking on our cyberdoor. There’s that moment of suspense as we wonder . . .
Is
it her? Is it him? Is it that good news I’ve been waiting for? Is it that bad
news I’ve been fearing? Who is it? What do they want?
That moment of anticipation as we scramble to open the message gives us a dopamine rush. Dopamine, a chemical similar to adrenaline, influences our ability to experience pleasure or pain. It’s the same kind of rush a gambler gets as the roulette wheel spins.
Where will it land?
W hat will I win? What might I lose?
And then, if the message is a winner, we get another hit of pleasure, another surge of dopamine. This is really what it’s all about. Getting the rush from the ping!

I should know. I hear a lot of pings. Like many people who work in the news media, I have two BlackBerrys, one for work and one for personal use. I, too, text and e-mail dozens and dozens of times over the course of an average day. So am I a total hypocrite for beating my chest about cyberaddiction? Yes . . . and no. It always comes back to this:
What is my intention in using a given device to send a message?

Let’s All Get Honest About Why We’re Hitting
SEND

Two guys are standing on a street corner and each is holding a BlackBerry. Each is looking down and hitting SEND on an e-mail. They’re both doing the exact same thing. However, one of them is engaging in addictive behavior and the other is not. The difference is the emotionally sober person has a healthy motive for his actions, while the addict is using the device as a form of escape. Here are some very common, unhealthy reasons people will whip out their BlackBerry or other smartphone and start fiddling:

out of self-importance

to flash a status symbol

to escape boredom, depression, or other unpleasant feelings

to send a passive-aggressive signal that you’re not interested in what’s going on around you or the people you’re with