WiReD
How Gadgets Ruin Relationships and Corrupt Emotions
* By Dr. Sue Johnson
* 02.14.14
The average teen sends more than 3,000 text messages a month (and that
_was_
(http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/newswire/2010/u-s-teen-mobile-report-calling-yesterday-texting-today-using-apps-tomorrow.html)
a few years ago). But
here’s the thing: _Ten percent_
(http://adage.com/article/news/digital-apparently-texting-wait-sex/143705/) of
people under the age of 25 don’t see
anything wrong with texting during sex.
Even as technology helps us understand how relational we truly are, the
basic currency of social connection — face-to-face contact and simple
conversation — is becoming marginalized. Pamela Eyring, director of the
Protocol
School of Washington (which teaches social manners to corporate and
government clients) has identified four stages — confusion, discomfort,
irritation,
and, finally, outrage — of what she terms “BlackBerry abandonment”: the
feeling a person suffers when trying to connect with devotees of such
electronic gadgets. Since personal and business relationships rely on making
others feel valued, devices put these relationships at risk, so Eyring calls
an
obsession with iPhones “cell-fishness.”
But this is about more than an issue of gadget etiquette or a lack of
consideration for others. It’s about connection. While our electronic gadgetry
is keeping us more connected in some ways, it is a shallow connection — not
the deep emotional engagement needed for any kind of meaningful
relationship. Why? Because texting and e-mails are set up for volume,
velocity, and
multitasking — that is, the splitting of attention.
Our gadgets therefore create an illusion of connection. The danger,
though, is that they also set up a new way of relating in which we are
continually in touch — but emotionally detached.
The one thing that our gadgets cannot do — despite the vision presented by
movies like Her — is feel emotion; they offer a counterfeit performance
that imitates connection. Cleverly designed substitutions like robotic pet
hamsters, robot puppies for the elderly, and therapeutic seals for depression
“put the real on the run” (to use MIT professor Sherry Turkle’s phrase).
Reducing relationships to simple bytes that then become the accepted norm is
“defining relationships down” (to borrow a phrase from the late Daniel
Moynihan, noted sociologist and U.S. senator).
Because I listen to so many couples in therapy describing how they spend
their time, I see how tapping on iPads and watching TV diminish our
opportunities to engage with and care for another person. We become accustomed
to
the simplified, the superficial, the sensational; we turn to the endless
stories of celebrity relationships and online dramas rather than engaging in
our own. As political scientist Robert Putnam notes in Bowling Alone, “Good
socialization is a prerequisite for life online, not an effect of it:
without a real world counterpart, internet contact gets ranty, dishonest, and
weird.”
There is also a chicken-and-egg factor here. Isolation, I am arguing, is an
effect of our obsession with technology — but growing social isolation
also creates this obsession.
More than at any time in human history, we live alone: In 1950, only four
million folks in the United States lived on their own; in 2012, more than 30
million did. That’s 28 percent of households (the same percentage as in
Canada; in the UK, it’s 34 percent). As NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg
observes about these skyrocketing statistics, “a remarkable social experiment”
is occurring.
How does this shift fit into the “design” of the creature we call a human
being?
Western society long held the view that we are essentially insular, selfish
creatures who need rules and constraints to force us to be considerate of
others. Today, we are drawing a diametrically opposed portrait: we humans
are biologically driven to be associative, altruistic beings who are
responsive to others’ needs. We should, it seems, be called Homo empathicus.
Empathy is the capacity to perceive and identify with another’s emotional
state. The word, coined in the 20th century, derives from the Greek
empatheia, meaning “affection” and “suffering.” But the concept was first
developed by 19th-century German philosophers who gave it the name Einfühlung,
meaning “feeling into.” How strong that capacity is in human beings is being
proven in study after study.
Most fascinating, perhaps, is research showing that just imagining or
thinking that another person is in pain — especially a loved one — makes us
respond as if we are going through the exact same experience. Neuroscientist
Tania Singer and her colleagues at the University of Zurich found that when
a woman received a small electric shock to the back of her hand, the woman
beside her, who received no shock, reacted as though she had received it,
too: the same pain circuit was activated and the identical area of the brain
lit up in both women. We literally hurt for others.
Roughly, the way empathy seems to happen is: you see me (or even, as in the
experiment above, imagine me) experiencing a strong feeling, maybe pain or
disgust; you mirror my response in your brain; you mimic me with your body
(your face crinkles in the exact same way as mine does); you respond to me
on an emotional level and move into empathetic concern for me; you help
me.
As we imitate others in dimensions beyond the virtual, we also communicate
and show them that we feel for them. This creates instant connection.
Psychologists point out that the cooperation on which society depends is a
learned skill that until recently almost everyone acquired. Today, however,
fewer and fewer people have the ability to collaborate; instead they
withdraw from group tasks and social life. Real connection with others is
being
crowded out by virtual kinship.
(http://www.amazon.com/Love-Sense-Revolutionary-Romantic-Relationships/dp/0316133760)
When they become lost and desperate, the distressed couples that
come to me for therapy pick up solutions that seem to offer immediate
comfort but further distort our ability to really connect with another person.
As MIT’s Sherry Turkle suggested, our tools over the last 15 years have
begun to shape us and our connection with others, so that we now “expect more
from technology and less from each other.” Substitute pseudo-attachments —
even those with people online — can be seductive, but in the end they take
us farther and farther away from the real thing: a loving, felt sense of
connection that requires moments of full, absorbing attention and a tuning
in to the real-life nuances of emotion.
In that sense, technology reflects a profound lack of awareness about our
need for intimate emotional connection. In a good love relationship, if we
can turn off the screen, we can learn to say what really matters to us in
ways that build connection.
In Oregon State University psychologist Frank Bernieri’s study of young
couples teaching each other made-up words, pairs who showed the greatest motor
synchrony — that is, those who mimicked each other most closely — also
had the strongest emotional rapport with each other. In my own team’s studies
of forgiveness, nearly every injured partner told his or her lover some
version of, “I can’t forgive you until I see that you feel my pain. Until I
know that my pain hurts you, too.”
Adapted and excerpted from the book _Love Sense_
(http://www.amazon.com/Love-Sense-Revolutionary-Romantic-Relationships/dp/0316133760)
by Dr. Sue
Johnson. Copyright 2013 by Sue Johnson. Reprinted with permission of Little,
Brown and Company. All rights reserved.
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