The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (27 page)

Allison, fourteen years old, is hardly unique in transmitting a tsunami of texts to an expanding group of contacts, nor in attributing her peripatetic attention to her online habits. “Once you reach a critical mass in your network of friends, you begin to text them all the time, and they expect you’ll do that, and you expect them
to do that,” said Amanda Lenhart, author of a Pew Internet Project report on teens and texting. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, she might have added. Just as most adults are tethered to their wireless devices, so are teens to their cellphones, clinging to them even more tightly than adults, given that developing and grooming a loyal circle of friends is a major adolescent milestone. Four thousand texts a month was average for most teenagers in 2012, according to several reports, which translates to about six or seven for every hour that teenage girls are awake. Meanwhile, the former mainstays of adolescence—phone calls and hanging out in person—are way, way down. Two-thirds of American adolescents text “their people” multiple times a day, more than three times as often as they call them, send emails, or see them in person.
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The upside is instant access. The downside is that the medium is even more stripped down than email: brief, no eye contact, no tone of voice to shade or soften a message, and emotion and irony expressed minimally, through emoticons. That’s why texting can be wildly fun but also brutal, such as when a guest arriving for lunch instinctively slid her buzzing phone out of her pocket and discovered, in the midst of joyous greetings and hugs, that her best friend had just died of breast cancer. As opposed to real chatting, texting is more like lobbing news bulletins; Clive Thompson, writing in
Wired
magazine, calls it “lightweight contact.” While a conversation involves two or more people volleying a number of ideas back and forth, spinning from one topic to the next, each text represents a single thought.

Still, nine hundred texts a day? My incredulity is not about whether texting is good or bad. After all, first there was the Pony Express, then telegrams, then telephones, then IMs and emails, then SMS, etc., etc. Given that I enthusiastically exchange texts and use Skype to connect with my far-flung children, colleagues, and friends, I’m hardly a technology rookie. Wireless communication is just a blip in a series of brilliant inventions that connect
people separated by geography who can’t—or won’t—talk face-to-face. Which brings to mind one of the questions adults think about. Why do teenagers text people who are sitting in the same room when they can have so-called
real
conversations? Does the technology bring them closer, say, by adding a layer of complicity, like a note passed in class? Or does it add a layer of distance, making it easier for shy (or sneaky) kids to express things they can’t bring themselves to say to each other face-to-face? Do the Internet and, especially, social networks expand adolescents’ social horizons? Or do they make some kids, say, the more vulnerable ones, feel even weirder and lonelier than they did before?

These are fairly urgent questions and they’ve been tricky to answer, not only because the technology is in flux, but because adolescents’ brains are too. The prefrontal cortex is the neural area where planning, problem-solving, and decision-making take place. This is the stationmaster within your brain, the organizer that shifts your attention from place to place, initiates an activity and then stops it, decides what you’re going to do and when you’re going to do it. But unlike other cortical areas, it’s a late bloomer. In the visual cortex, for example, synaptic development ramps up quickly after birth and peaks by six months of age. By age five, development of the visual cortex has wound down completely, meaning that by the time preschoolers enter kindergarten, they are perceiving and parsing visual information as well as they ever will. But synaptic connecting and pruning go on in the prefrontal cortex until late adolescence or even early adulthood, depending on the person.
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In other words, before their frontal cortices are fully functional, we expect kids to drive cars and make fateful decisions about their careers (enlisting in the army, for example); we expect them to vote responsibly and craft online personae that won’t mortify them when they’re applying for jobs a few years later. Yet most teenagers won’t develop adult levels of planning and self-control until they’re twenty-one or older.

Despite this cognitive gap, most of the research about the online world deals with its impact on adults.
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The received wisdom seems to be that what’s true for adults holds for teenagers too, and that all technologies—and all teens—are created equal. But can a fourteen-year-old pinged with twenty-seven thousand texts a month, along with gossipy emails, “sexts,” and Facebook updates, focus on algebraic equations or think far enough into the future to imagine the impact of her online postings? In short, at a time of life when friends mean everything to you, what does it mean to have 1,700 of them?

TEENAGE ANGST, MEET THE INTERNET

In the year 2000, a sprightly blond thirteen-year-old girl and her parents came to my psychology office with what was a fairly unusual predicament at the time. A boy from the girl’s seventh-grade class was persistently harassing her through IM and email messages. The girl, who lived in a semirural area and came home to an empty house while her parents were still at work, was scared. Her parents were bewildered and came to me for advice, having been referred by their pediatrician. This boy was the son of good friends, and at first they thought their daughter should be able to handle it. She could give as good as she got, they told me. But when they read his creepy messages and realized that their daughter was afraid to stay home alone, they reconsidered.

Cyberbullying was new to me at the time, but I knew that without adult intervention the secret taunts would escalate. Based on my experience with garden-variety bullying and knowledge of the research of Norwegian social scientist Dan Olweus (the first to address schoolyard bullying systematically), I advised the parents to inform their friends, the boy’s parents, as well as the school. As parents who’d been trusted with their daughter’s confidence, they had a responsibility to help her by letting the boy know that his behavior was out of bounds. And that if his cyberbullying
continued, there could be serious consequences, such as a suspension from school or a call to the police.

The parents were stunned. Like many adults—including school personnel—they were reluctant to get involved in kids’ online lives. But with digital devices dominating adolescents’ social spheres, it had become clear that online interactions had morphed. Whatever went on offline was amplified online. Smartphones are perfectly designed for making and cancelling social plans. But they also serve to draw tight social boundaries, to convey power and contempt, and are being used as a tool to prey on others. According to a survey of 20,766 students in Massachusetts, the real online danger is not kids being contacted by strangers but being victimized by someone they know.
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In 2007, a study of nearly two thousand randomly selected middle-school students found that those who had faced bullying, including cyberbullying, had more suicidal thoughts and were more likely to have attempted to take their lives.
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While most online encounters between teenagers are profoundly boring, a single impulsive or vicious post can lead to catastrophe. The suicide of eighteen-year-old Tyler Clementi occurred just two days after his college roommate secretly filmed—and then broadcast via Twitter and live video feed—a sexual encounter between Tyler and another male student. In an instant, the Internet had transformed a commonplace event—consensual sexual exploration on campus—into a global happening with deadly repercussions.

In a 2008 survey, American Internet-use expert Amanda Lenhart found that 32 percent of teens had experienced online harassment. The same proportion (though not necessarily the same kids) had been contacted by strangers online, especially if they were girls.
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A similar pattern was unearthed by Dutch Internet experts Patti Valkenberg and Jochen Peter in a study of two thousand Dutch teens. They discovered that 22 percent had been bullied online and that two-thirds of those bullied were girls fourteen to fifteen years
old.
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Fifteen is a watershed year for defining one’s in-group, as any parent of a girl that age knows. Fifteen-year-olds everywhere, including countries as diverse as China and Iceland, are consistent in their definitions of friendship and mutual trust. Given that it’s the apex of bullying, fifteen is also the age for agreeing on what counts as social ostracism.
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BULLYING TIMES TEN

In yet another iteration of the Internet’s ability to exaggerate, online bullying amplifies what is already going on in the locker room, in the cafeteria, on the playing field—indeed anywhere adults aren’t watching, the research shows. And though the two types of bullying overlap, there are differences; cyberbullying is much more common among teens who spend lots of time online, far from the parental supervisory gaze.
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Two studies, one of 20,000 Boston teenagers and another of 7,500 American teens from across the country, found that 60 percent of cyberbullying victims were also victims of bullying at school, and that cyberbullying was especially rife during transitions—when changing to middle school or high school, for example. Girls and gays are the most frequent targets.
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Most parents of fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girls would not be surprised to learn that girls are largely the victims of cyberbullying, given that girls are also the targets of sly snubs, nasty rumors, and cutting comments from other girls. Online or off, mountains of evidence show that boys are more likely to use overt aggression when jockeying for status—insulting or physically attacking their rivals–while girls usually avoid in-your-face attacks. Instead they tend toward covert hostility, demeaning or denigrating other girls in order to exclude them from the group.

Why would they do that? Throughout evolutionary history, large groups were risky for women and experienced as something to be avoided, write David Geary and his colleagues Benjamin and Bo Winegard. The dangers for women and children in traditional
polygynous marriages, for example—where multiple co-wives had to compete for food, and where the odds of premature death for children were seven to eleven times higher than for those born to monogamous parents—put a lie to the notion that groups of women will immediately band together to help each other. In addition to neglect and abuse, “it was widely assumed that co-wives often poisoned each other’s children,” the evolutionary psychologists coolly write.
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A child’s likelihood of surviving was greater if his mother was the bossy, dominant type, as were his chances if the number of women in the immediate vicinity was smaller and the group tighter. The point is that social ostracism among girls emerged as a way of whittling the group down to size. Even now, girls and women (not to mention female chimpanzees) prefer smaller social groups than males do, and use bullying and ostracism to reduce the female competition.
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What’s really interesting is that teenage girls feel the pain of social exclusion so much more acutely than adults do. This makes sense, given that the neural networks that allow teenagers to understand social events are still in flux. One British study showed that teenage girls who feel they’re being purposely excluded from a game become much more anxious than adult women would in the same circumstance. The peak year for social rejection and its agonies is fifteen.
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Indeed, a low, low point in my parenting career was the day my daughter turned fifteen. That day, as a reverse birthday present, her locker was broken into; the school custodian later found the contents dumped in the trash. Then an anonymous hate letter (there was no Facebook at the time) full of invidious accusations turned up in her backpack. Worst of all, her group of female friends had mysteriously turned against her. Only a couple of stalwarts showed up for her birthday party at our house that evening. We later learned that a “queen bee”—a female bully who targets other girls—had her eye on a boy who was a mutual friend. She wanted my daughter out of the way so that she could make her move.
Building alliances with Eva’s friends, then siphoning off the more gullible ones, along with the break-in and the poison-pen letter, were attempts to diminish Eva’s social status. Vicious as it is, such psychological hazing is a rite of passage for teenage girls. Add those exclusionary tactics to the instantaneous carpet-bombing power of the Internet, and what you get is cyberbullying.

It’s important to keep in mind, though, that texting and online networks don’t engender teenage meanness. They simply transmit, without the emotional checks of face-to-face contact, capacities that are already there. Such harassment is a millennia-old primate tradition, especially during popularity contests linked to bids for status or attention, usually from a member of the opposite sex. In their riveting book
Baboon Metaphysics
, American primatologists Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth write that even if peaceful social hierarchies are the order of the day for female baboons, there are occasional upstarts who try to disrupt the social order. And that’s when all hell breaks loose.