In the past, when you wanted to get rid of a child born out of wedlock or unwanted, you would drop him off on the sly at the nuns’ or foundlings’. Today, when you lose interest in your child or when you are overwhelmed by the daily grind, you put a tablet or a smart phone in his hands as a nanny.
Which of the two has the better fate? If the first could hope for a better future thanks to an adoptive family full of good intentions, the second, parked in front of screens before even learning to speak, is transformed inexorably over time into a child-screen. That is to say, in a mutant of the digital age quickly caught off guard, since he is unsuited when he has to face people in the flesh, to enter into communication with them, to look at them in the eyes, to express his emotions and, above all, to feel those of other human beings who inadvertently present themselves in front of him.
Some will say that I exaggerate. Maybe a little bit. However, many researchers sounded the alarm long before me about the devastation that overexposure to screens can cause. Jean M. Twenge, a psychology professor at the University of San Diego who explored the ubiquity of screens in her excellent book, Internet Generationasserts that “iGen — the generation born from 1995 — is on the brink of the most severe mental health crisis seen among young people in decades.”
However, the book I would like to focus on here is that of sociologist Sherry Turkle entitled Eye to eye. This book of more than 500 pages deals with the negative effects of hyperconnection and certain digital technologies on the communication and empathy capacities of young and old who make excessive use of them – as is the case for most of them!
When screens screen
For Sherry Turkle, screens, in their compulsive use, end up screen human relationships, by turning into a sort of shield that prevents the social animals that we are from communicating in an authentic way. A communication which, normally, must rely on the face-to-face, the expression of the face, the tone of the voice, the hesitations and the things left unsaid so that what is at the heart of our social relations can germinate and even of our democracies: empathy. “We abandon the conversation in favor of the connection,” laments the sociologist. And the effects of this practice are devastating in terms of our ways of being, thinking, feeling and, above all, socializing.
Accustomed to interacting with the rest of the world, well sheltered in their technological cocoons, in their “frictionless world”, young people, like many of their screen parents, end up fearing “face-to-face” exchanges. , since they were considered too emotionally risky. They feel uncomfortable or anxious if they have to talk to someone on the phone and, even worse, if they have to meet their teachers in person or make a presentation in front of the class, for example .
When I was teaching, I was flabbergasted to find that, during the break, the vast majority of my students preferred to remain seated in class to consult their cell phones instead of going for a breath of fresh air in the hallway or at the cafeteria to socialize with their colleagues. Texting or videos, checking Instagram, Facebook or TikTok is so much less threatening to them. Thus camped in their digital and virtual “cockpit”, they do not have to face reality which drains with it its share of unforeseen events, emotions, confrontations; of all that is human, all too human!
Fragile and disconnected from life
Sherry Turkle, like Jean M. Twenge for that matter, observes that these young adults are not very emotionally developed, that they are emotionally fragile, that they have great difficulty putting themselves in the place of the other to sympathize with him, to guess what he feels. Moreover, the proliferation of trauma warnings, secure spaces, the invention of the concept of micro-aggression and this mania for censoring words, literary works or even rewriting history — all these behaviors which denote extreme fragility — could perhaps be explained by the fact that this generation was raised in a digitized, virtual and sanitized world, too cut off from reality and what is organic.
But what these young people dread above all, according to Sherry Turkle, is boredom. Staying alone in silence and doing nothing is an anxiety-provoking situation for them. Boredom, loneliness, which they confuse with isolation, scares them because, they feel it, in such a situation, they would have to talk to themselves, to explore their inner life. , to make an effort of introspection. Faced with this challenge, they much prefer to indulge in multitasking, stay connected, fidget on social networks, hold their mobile phone like a prosthesis that has been grafted onto their body, even if it means sleeping with it. to avoid at all costs the anxiety of disconnection and the fear of missing something.
There has been a lot of fuss over the past few weeks about the danger posed to humanity by the unbridled development of conversational robots such as ChatGPT. More than a thousand personalities have even asked that research in this field be put on hold for six months in order to undertake a reflection on the ethical implications of these new technological tools. All very well.
But then, how to explain this silence about the pernicious effects of screens and other digital tools that have been found day and night, for decades, in the hands of children and adolescents? I sincerely believe that it is time to also initiate a serious reflection on these questions.