The kids aren’t all right, but neither are the parents.
When I was a college student, the internet played a minimal role in my life. I still remember my first email account. We got assigned them as students during Week One of my freshman year at St. Olaf College. My friends and I didn’t know what to do with them. Our assignments were given to us via the paper syllabus the professor handed out at the beginning of the semester, a paper we guarded with our lives for the next three months–we three hole punched them, slipped them into plastic sleeves, kept them safely tucked away in three-ring binders to avoid the embarrassment of asking the professor for a new one. To turn in our assignments, we printed them on the dot-matrix printers in the computer labs and handed them in during class. Our social calendars were kept in our heads–usually we made plans over meals in the cafeteria or at the smoking spots outside the classrooms, dorms, and student center or, failing that, over the phone–not cell phones, mind you, but the beige telephones with spiral cords affixed to the walls of our dorm rooms. Occasionally we used the internet for research, but this was strongly discouraged by the professors because the sources couldn’t be verified; sometimes a forward-thinking professor would use email as a discussion tool between classes, but that was as far as it usually went. My friends and I eventually found a use for email–we used it for an endless series of inane banter in a discussion group we called “The Menage,” which we gradually abandoned as a waste of time; and it proved useful, perhaps overly so, for long, torrid emails between lovers so dripping with adolescent amour they would have made Emily Brontë swoon. I made a few friends on a bulletin-board system, or BBS, called ISCA, that served all the Midwestern colleges, but tried not to spend too much time on it, as people who spent too much time with their virtual friends instead of their real-life friends were generally considered a little unbalanced and were much worried-over behind their backs.
So when I hear that a long-term study of college students states that a 40% drop in students’ abilities to feel empathy can be traced to their use of the internet, it gives me pause and makes me wonder about how much things have changed in the ten years since I graduated from college.
I’m not a luddite. I have a blog, obviously. I have a Facebook account that I check often, probably too often. Of my 200 or so friends on Facebook, I’ve met around 95% of them in real life and have spent time with them in person. They’re friends from college, previous jobs and gigs, our local summer theater festival, shows my bands have played, friends I’ve met through other friends, and friends I’ve known for the majority of my life. And of these friends I know well, I know that what is true for me is also true for most of them. Nearly all of us are in our thirties–meaning that we were in high school in 1995 when those commercials appeared on TV announcing that something called “The Internet” was coming. But what is true for my friends and I is not true for those just a couple of years younger than me. In fact, demographers will place my friends and me in an entirely different generation from people who are now twenty-eight or twenty-nine –as though they are as different from my friends and I as we are from our parents. People under thirty are called Millenials, and their internet habits, including the habits of the people currently in college, are radically different from those of today’s thirty-somethings.
A study conducted by the Pew Charitable Trusts in February of this year claims that Millenials consider their internet use to be the distinguishing characteristic of their generation, in spite of the fact that the internet first came into existence when Gen X was still in high school. The Millenials spend more hours each day on the internet, and conduct more of their socializing through the internet, than any other generation. They have a better understanding of social media and mobile device apps than anyone in their thirties does—except, maybe, for marketers and media professionals who are bending over backwards to make their products seem relevant to Millenials. Witness the explosion of Twitter usage by every media outlet from Democracy Now to Fox News, and by every journalist from Perez Hilton to Bill Moyers. It’s not the Baby Boomers they’re trying to win over by tweeting OMG BP SPILL FML, or even my Gen X-ers who, according to the demographers, are supposedly too cynical to care. Or is it?
These same media outlets that are kissing the, em, feet of the Millenials are also the first to trumpet the results of the studies like the empathy study I mentioned previously as soon as they come out. The New York Times, which has added social media icons left and right in an attempt to woo the younger audiences, posted this article the day after the empathy study came out, entitled “The Culture of Narcissism.” The author laments the self-centeredness of today’s youth, but wonders how this new data jives with that other data that came out in February, the Pew study—how could the young be narcissistic if they’re spending more time volunteering than any previous generation? I think a better question might be how they can spend so much time volunteering if they don’t understand why they’re doing it. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that school guidance counselors have been terrorizing young people for years with the prospect that they’ll never be able to enter a crowded and competitive job market if they don’t have something on their resumes that distinguishes them from their peers and shows that they have some kind of relevant work experience…hence, volunteering. Nonprofits are always in need of volunteers; corporations, not so much. A self-serving and society-serving generation is born.
The question no one ever seems to ask when faced with a single petulant and misbehaving youth, let alone an entire generation full of them, is how they got to be so spoiled rotten in the first place. But that question makes the older generations uncomfortable, because it turns their own argument around and puts the focus squarely on them. It has never ceased to astonish me that parents don’t understand that spoiling their children—giving them everything they want—is not selfless generosity, but rather a form of narcissism. You do your child no favors by setting them up with the expectation that the world owes them something. And yet parents do it all the time—having beautiful children with everything they want is another visible yet socially acceptable sign of affluence in mainstream America, like owning a palatial suburban home (or multiple homes), an SUV, and season tickets to all the local sporting teams’ games. It’s not conspicuous consumption, say the parents—it’s family values. And given what I’ve learned from the handful of Millenials I’ve had the opportunity to really get to know, when I’ve been able to tear them away from the internet for a few hours, I would say that their time on blogs and chatrooms, or playing video games, or Twittering away on their iPhones, has less to do with narcissistic self-worship than it does a basic fear of the real world—one instilled in them, perhaps, by narcissistic helicopter parents who’ve sheltered them from the evils of the world that the media are ceaselessly repeating on a 24-hour cycle. Maybe it’s time we look at some of those other studies—such as this one from several years ago that said the perception of kidnapping is at an all-time high while the incidence of kidnapping is at an all-time low, and the result is that children are treated as prisoners in their own homes, kept happy and compliant with an endless stream of toys to occupy their time. Perhaps they’ve had to resort to the virtual world as a way to escape from their prisons, as a last and desperate resort to form some bonds of attachment to other people besides their parents and the few real-life friends they are permitted to have. Perhaps the internet is the one thing that’s saved these shut-in youths from becoming total sociopaths or psychopaths—a generation of clean-cut, outwardly obedient Norman Bates types whose capacity for empathy is zero.