The Cyber Effect (23 page)

I
nside her classroom at Coral Springs Charter High School, Susana Halleck was in distress. The Florida teacher, seven months pregnant, was suddenly experiencing labor contractions. She sat down in a desk chair and struggled to endure the pain—her mouth open, her eyes wide, one hand on her brow. That's when one of her students, junior Malik Whiter, class of 2015, pulled out his mobile phone.

It was time for a selfie.

In dreads, cap, and big sunglasses, Whiter flashed a big, happy-go-lucky grin for his camera while angling the lens to show his grimacing, pain-stricken teacher in the background. “Selfie with my teacher while she having contractions,” he tweeted.

Selfies bring new meaning to the word
self-conscious
. These quick, seemingly innocent self-portraits—typically taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media—serve many functions. They can be a preened vision of a public self, a bragging moment of accomplishment, a display of humor, or a declaration of irony to the world, almost a performance. The ubiquitous mobile phone with its mirror-image camera technology makes self-portraits easy to take, delete, filter, or fix, and even easier to share.

Some kids would call what Malik Whiter did, taking his own picture
with a featured but unsuspecting person in the background, a kind of photobomb selfie. It's a prank or joke. Photobomb moments are something like a tourist's snapshot souvenirs.
I was there
. But this time, the background wasn't Mount Rushmore or Niagara Falls. It was Halleck's suffering.

Whatever you call it, in the time it took for Halleck to reach the hospital to be examined by doctors, Whiter's pic was making the rounds on social media, first to other high school students at Coral Springs, and then quickly beyond. By evening, it was viral—and had been retweeted by thousands. When asked later by local TV news reporters what possessed him, Whiter said he was just hoping to record the unexpected event for himself and “for her.” He had asked Halleck to smile for the camera, he said, but when she refused, he had no other choice but to catch her “off guard.”

It went viral mainly because people found it funny. BuzzFeed raved: “Behold! The greatest selfie of all time.” Was it funny? Sure, if you don't take a moment to consider this act in a deeper way—and what it means to use a human being in distress as a visual joke in the background of a curated self-portrait shared on a public social network.

There are more troubling trends to notice here—invasion of privacy, breach of good manners, absence of empathy, not to mention a demonstrated lack of respect for pregnancy, motherhood, the classroom setting, and a teacher's authority. I could continue this list for another page. But let's be honest with ourselves: Nobody looks to teenagers as role models of civility and decorum. They can be jokesters, disrupters, provocateurs. Pushing the limits is what they do best. Why? In psychology we explain that they are forming
self-concept
, or identity, and enjoy experimenting with boundaries and taking risks.

They also crave feedback, which helps them figure out, eventually, who they are—and what the world expects of them. So when teenagers take selfies and share them, what are they hoping to discover? Probably themselves.

Prior to the Internet, this crucial time of identity formation was spent in the real world—a more intimate greenhouse where feedback, both positive and negative, was received from a real-world audience of friends, family, and figures of authority. The social norms and what
was expected of these developing human beings was fairly consistent. Twenty or thirty years ago, would a teenager have been allowed to take a photograph of a distressed teacher in a classroom and, without permission, been allowed to publish it in a magazine?

As for Whiter, his teacher's early labor was declared “a false alarm,” and she returned to the classroom two days later. By then, her image had become an online sensation, or “meme.” (It has since been retweeted 60,424 times and favorited 64,808 times.) Had Whiter crossed a line? Did he get in trouble? Halleck didn't mind, says Whiter (who got a B in her class). “I have honestly laughed until I cried looking at that pic on two different occasions tonight,” he tweeted. “Think I'm making it my wallpaper.” By the month's end—a long time in cyberspace—the picture had been appropriated by other pranksters online who cropped Whiter's smiling face from the classroom setting and superimposed him in the foreground of historical events like the crucifixion of Christ and the
Hindenburg
blimp explosion.

The Internet is now a primary adventure zone where teenagers interact, play, socialize, learn, experiment, take risks—and eventually figure out who they are. This chapter will try to grapple with this shift, and look at the impact of this new environment on youthful identity formation.

Could growing up in cyberspace change a teenager's sense of self?

The same year as Malik Whiter's cyber-celebrity moment, another controversial selfie was seen by millions. A lovely young woman with long blond hair, aviator sunglasses, white knit scarf, and matching hat was caught in the act of posing for her own selfie while, behind her, a suicidal man was hanging on the rails of the Brooklyn Bridge.

What, aside from basic psychopathic tendencies, would cause a person to be so cold and unfeeling about another human being's emotional crisis? Let's stop and contemplate this. Just as Whiter made a joke of his teacher's moment of physical crisis, the young blond (she would remain anonymous), whether she planned to share her selfie with a wide audience or not, was apparently making fun of a stranger who
was so emotionally troubled and confused that he wanted to end his life. Yes, her selfie seems more heartless than Whiter's selfie, but aren't the sense of disengagement and lack of empathy eerily similar? I am not the only person to notice this. The day after the Brooklyn Bridge moment, an observer's photograph of the anonymous young woman took over the entire front page of the
New York Post
with the apt headline “
SELFIE-ISH.”

This slap of disapproval only encouraged a new trend. (You know how
that
goes.) In 2014, when traffic was stopped on a Los Angeles freeway due to a man threatening to jump from an overpass, a group of drivers left their cars to pose—big smiles—for group shots and selfies with the suicidal man in the distance behind them. The same year, a policeman in Istanbul was called to the scene of the Bosporus Bridge, where a desperate individual was clinging to the rails. The suicidal man jumped three hours later, but before he went, the officer took a selfie. The bridge and the jumper were in the background. More recently, in March 2016—in perhaps the ultimate example of this trend—a hostage on an EgyptAir flight posed for a bizarre smiling selfie next to a hijacker in his suicide vest. (If you google “suicidal” and “selfie,” you can find more of these.)

Let's try to consider the mind-set of these people—not the distressed suicidal individuals, but the selfie-takers.

Were they conscious of what they were doing? Or were they so lost, so separated from ethics and empathy, that they weren't able to clearly consider their actions? Are they emotionally impaired, or has cyberspace impacted their judgment?

A condition that results in lack of empathy toward another person's distress is
narcissism
. This is a personality trait that exists to varying degrees in almost all human beings and can be facilitated by cyberspace. I'll have more to say about this later in the chapter, but for now, I want to acknowledge that a little narcissism can be a good thing, psychologically speaking, and even necessary. It can be one of the drivers behind achievement—leading individuals to seek attention, acclaim, fame, prizes, or special treatment. Actors are famously perceived as the ultimate narcissists, and the psychologically healthier ones even crack jokes about it. They aren't necessarily heartless people. But a narcissist's
desire to be noticed and become a focus of attention can override a concern for other people—and result in callousness about their suffering.

As with so many personality traits, psychologists have defined a spectrum of narcissism—generally assessed by the
Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI). Individuals with high scores demonstrate an inflated sense of their own importance, grandiosity, extreme selfishness, enormous self-regard, and a deep need for admiration. Behind the mask of ultraconfidence, their self-esteem is very fragile and vulnerable to criticism.

Why get into all this?

Because teenagers (as well as children) can display narcissistic-type traits due to the simple fact that their sense of self, or “self-concept,” is still being formed. They can seem to be uncaring about others because they are distracted by the work of creating an identity. Teenagers will try on new selves and new clothes and new hairstyles to the point of total disengagement with anything else going on in their family life or home. For a teenager, this sort of experimentation, along with risk-taking, is one way that identity is formed. Going too far is part of the process—almost a requirement.

Who am I today? Who do I want to be tomorrow morning?
They look for answers in the feedback they receive from their peers. And today, to a greater and greater degree, this feedback happens online, not just from their friends but in free online astrological profiles, personality questionnaires, and a plethora of phone apps that will analyze their handwriting, music tastes, food preferences, and even bathing styles. (My favorite: an app that analyzes your personality based on how you take a shower.)

This incessant need for personality feedback is what fuels the popularity of annoyingly ubiquitous online tests, like BuzzFeed's “Which Disney character are you?” and the online permutations of the Myers-Briggs personality inventory, now loosely applied to an array of scientifically dubious outcomes, like “Which Personality Type Makes the Most Money?”

Teenagers are consumed by their own reflections, in other words, hoping to figure out who they are. What happens when the bathroom
mirror, where teens used to stare at themselves, is replaced with a virtual mirror—a selfie that they just took with their phone?

In a famous study done forty years ago, great apes—chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas—born in the wild were placed before a full-length mirror on a wall. At first, the wild chimps reacted as if another chimp had appeared in the room; they vocalized and made other threatening gestures at the mirror. After two or three days, they began to understand the image in the mirror as a reflection of themselves in some way. Interestingly, they began exploring their own bodies before the mirror—studying parts of themselves that they hadn't seen before, or couldn't see without the use of a mirror.

In psychology, one way to describe what happens in front of a mirror is called
mirror-image stimulation
, referring specifically to “a situation in which an organism is confronted with its own reflection in a mirror.” An animal that shows signs of recognizing the image in the mirror as its own is said to have “passed the mirror test,” which is strong evidence of having developed
self-concept
. This is not innate, but learned.

Self-concept
is used in human social psychology to describe how people think about, evaluate, or perceive themselves. The actual definition is “the individual's belief about himself or herself, including the person's attributes and who and what the self is.” A monkey that has self-concept demonstrates an awareness of a self that is separate and distinct from others, as well as constant.

Early socialization has been shown to impact a monkey's behavior in front of a mirror—and presumably its development of self-concept. In a comparative study of rhesus monkeys born in the wild and rhesus monkeys raised in captivity or isolation (“isolates”), there were distinct differences in mirror studies. Wild monkeys raised around other wild monkeys, and therefore socialized, grew uninterested in the mirror eventually—and returned to a live group of fellow monkeys for physical interaction. But monkeys raised in isolation did not.
The isolates
remained fascinated with their own reflections to the point of disinterest in others.

This study may tell us something important about children and teenagers, since looking at your own image on the screen of a mobile phone is a form of mirror-image stimulation. I know I'm comparing teenagers to monkeys, but bear with me.

What are teenagers learning about themselves by looking at their own selfies? Could this impact the development of self-concept? The study also raises this question: Could young people who have grown up with too much technology and not enough face-to-face interaction with peers remain more isolated, like the monkey isolates, retreating to the comfort of their own digital reflection rather than turning to their friends or family for comfort and physical interaction?

Could this cyber effect encourage children or young teenagers to lose interest in others—or never develop it in the first place?

Since there hasn't been time for proper developmental studies in this area, we just don't know. But in the case of many human and primate studies, the similarities are worth noting—and it would be a mistake to dismiss them. When humans are born with visual defects and then undergo operations that give them sight for the first time, their initial response to a mirror is the same as a monkey's initial response: They believe they are looking at another person, not themselves. Human babies respond similarly, first seeing their reflection in a mirror as a playmate. Most children don't show signs of
self-recognition until they are approaching two years of age.

Humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers's work is valuable in terms of illustrating how a young person develops identity.
He described self-concept as having three components: