Communications technology and human behaviour
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I'm interested in the impact of all forms of communication technology on human behaviour – how we relate to each other as individuals and how we view the world around us. There seems to be a paradoxical development in that we seem to be becoming more connected up, in a hardware sense, but more disconnected and atomised in other respects.
What are the implications of all this for promoting socialism, I wonder?
By chance, I stumbled across this link while surfing the web which suggests that emotional sensibility is something that is stunted by the excessive use of mobile phones among children.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563214003227
The conclusions of the study are a bit troublesome from a socialist point of view – at least, as I see it. In the opening para, the authors comment::
For several millennia, humans’ primary method for social learning and communication has been face to face. In the 21st century, as mobile technology and the Internet became available to most of the world’s population (Internet world stats, 2013), digital media have become an increasingly prevalent factor in the informal learning environment (Greenfield, 2009). Children today, ages 8–18, spend over 7½ h a day, seven days a week using media outside of school (Rideout, Foehr, & Roberts, 2010). Moreover, teenagers, ages 12–17, report using phones to text message in their daily lives more than any other form of communication, including face-to-face socializing (Lenhart, 2012). The extensive time that children and teenagers engage with media and communicate using screens may be taking time away from face-to-face communication and some in-person activities (Giedd, 2012). Indeed, one longitudinal study found that the amount of non-screen playtime decreased 20% from 1997 to 2003, while screen activities (i.e., watching television, playing videogames and using the computer) increased (Hofferth, 2010)
To what extent is emotional sensibility or receptivity important to us as socialists (as I believe it is) and, if such a thing matters, what do the above developments mean in terms making headway in the promotion of socialist ideas? How do we respond to the challenge it presents?
This is an interesting question but I don't know if I have any answers.To some extent, I think the development is too recent to judge properly the impact these new ways of socialising and communicating will have on us all. It all happened very suddenly and have permeated our society from top to bottom.I had high hopes of the new media during the so-called "Arab Spring", when young people were using mobiles, Twitter, etc., to communicate. But as we know, it all came to nowt.Also, when they were staging the recent protests in Hong Kong, I read an article about them linking up their mobiles using some kind of dynamic local networks which were below the radar of the authorities.So I think there may be some positive future uses of new communications technology for use in protests but as for the influence on children's emotional receptivity I just don't know.
Hi Meel Here are a few links that might be of interest regarding the impact of computer technology On children http://futureofchildren.org/publications/journals/article/index.xml?journalid=45&articleid=205§ionid=1343V on virtual realityhttp://aeon.co/magazine/science/can-we-tell-if-reality-is-a-computer-simulation/ on social networking http://news.softpedia.com/news/Social-Networks-Influence-How-We-View-the-World-181632.shtml on the workings of the brainhttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-565207/Modern-technology-changing-way-brains-work-says-neuroscientist.html And on how computers are beginning to think like humanshttp://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429932.300-computers-are-learning-to-see-the-world-like-we-do.html Hope this all helps….
Those are some very interesting looking links, robbo203!My take on this is similar to that of Meel, i.e., the technology is in its infancy and we don't really have enough history to draw firm conclusions.It seems to me that any technological society is, on the one hand, an atomised society and, on the other hand, a mass society. A mass of individuals lacking the traditional social connections. Technological society seems to require a mass of isolated individuals in order to ensure a malleable population geared to efficiency. The French author Jacques Ellul wrote about this and about the resulting need for constant propaganda to keep humans "adjusted" to a society based on what Ellul termed "technique". (http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Technological-Society-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394703901)Regressive political parties and movements have embraced social media and the Internet and I think that progressive movements like ours should do the same. Technology probably will have long term effects on human behaviour but the technology is here to stay. I think this is something that requires a lot more study but in the meantime we should use Twitter, Facebook and text messaging to get the socialist message out there, especially to a new generation like the pre-teens in the Science Direct study you mentioned. Those pre-teens are bombarded with capitalist propaganda extolling the consumer lifestyle. By the time they're twenty, those pre-teens will be good little consumers , office workers and temp workers. Capitalists know how to get their message out, do socialists?
Richard wrote:Regressive political parties and movements have embraced social media and the Internet and I think that progressive movements like ours should do the same. Technology probably will have long term effects on human behaviour but the technology is here to stay. I think this is something that requires a lot more study but in the meantime we should use Twitter, Facebook and text messaging to get the socialist message out there, especially to a new generation like the pre-teens in the Science Direct study you mentioned. Those pre-teens are bombarded with capitalist propaganda extolling the consumer lifestyle. By the time they're twenty, those pre-teens will be good little consumers , office workers and temp workers. Capitalists know how to get their message out, do socialists?This is so true, Richard. The best book I've come across on the influence of consumerism on kids is Juliet Schor's "Born to Buy". Here is a summary of it (http://www.thesimpledollar.com/review-born-to-buy/). I would recommend it to others here. It is an impressively researched work which throws considerable light on the array of forces we revolutionary socialists are up against It may well be too early as you and Meel suggest , to draw any firm conclusions on the impact of communications technology on human behaviour and ideology in general. However, tentatively, what we can say on the basis of the evidence that is already in is that such technology is a double edged sword. For sure, technology itself is not something neutral that stands apart from society and develops under its own momentum: technology is shaped by society and by the values that pervade society. It is some time since I last read Andre Gorz's book "Farewell to the Working Class" but Gorz's thesis was that the the way in which technology has developed under capitalism with its increasingly complex division of labour was such that the "nature, modalities and objectives of work are to a large extent determined by necessities over which individuals or groups have relatively little control" (p.9) . We confront , in other words, a form of alienation that is inherent not only in the capitalist relations of production but "in the socialisation of the process of production itself: in the workings of a complex, machine like society"(p.9). This led him to conclude that the productive forces have been rendered incapable of being accommodated to a "socialist rationality" (p.15) and that this impossibility has been "deliberately created in order to guarantee capitalist domination" (p.31). It was only outside the sphere of formal paid heteronomous work, and in the sphere of autonomous activity (think here of the role of computers, for example and the "gift economy" that is the internet), argued Gorz, that we can hope to find emancipation; paid work is here to stay because the nature of technology is such that it requires the compulsion of a wages system in order to ensure that such work gets done. I disagree strongly with Gorz who I think adopts a rather mechanistic reductionist approach to the whole subject but he does have a valid point when he says the development of technology is not something that is value free but is shaped by the imperatives of capital itself.
Yes, some interesting links. I haven't been able to access the one about the future of children yet, but wil try again.i don't really believe that the brain is infinitely malleable and plastic, however, it seems that it can change to some extent as a result of certain stimuli. There's lots of research still to be done on the brain from what I gather, lots we still don't know……..i am interested in the power of imagination to effect changes in the brain, and how the placebo effect works, for example – apparently doctors prescribe many more placebos than we are aware of and merely believing that something works, seems to be able to produce chemical changes in the brain. Strange.Anyway, more pertinent to this discussion, one thing that worries me about the intense use of the Internet by children and young people is its effect on their self-image. With pornography being so easily available, it is causing great anxiety particularly among young women, but increasingly among young men, regarding their looks. This is fuelling such things as plastic surgery for for various bits of their bodies for young people, excessive body building, with or without steroids, for young men, with the accompanying mental health problems – and warped expectations of their future sex lives.i just hope we'll see much more of a reaction against these pressures.
robbo203,I read the review of "Born to Buy" and it sounds interesting. My question is how do you talk to children about consumerism when many adults themselves act like kids in a candy shop due to consumerist propaganda? I think most people would agree that marketing to children is wrong. The province of Quebec has had fairly strict laws regarding junk food marketing aimed at children since 1980. But the problem seems to be that most adults see nothing wrong with wanting more and more "stuff" and they pass these values, or lack of values, onto their children. We're all stuck in the marketing machine and it takes a lot of effort to unstick yourself!I've never read Gorz but he looks interesting. However technology can, I think, be neutral. Take television for example. TV could have been the greatest boon to adult education in generations but instead it became the "idiot box", the "boob tube", spewing vacuous programming and insane marketing at its audience. The medium of television was taken over by large corporations with large bank accounts and used for their own ends rather than as a public service. I see the Internet going the same way (thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster for AdBlock Plus!). This is why I think that progressive political movements shouldn't shy away from using social media. Social media users tend to be young adults and those are the people we most need to get our message to. Regressive political movements understand this and are already past masters at using social media.
Meel wrote:i don't really believe that the brain is infinitely malleable and plastic,Maybe the brain doesn't need to be infinitely malleable. Maybe it just needs to be malleable enough to respond to stimuli within a narrow band. Human beings like to own things that we need for survival, marketers simply manipulate this natural tendency to create "needs" for things that we don't need for survival. They convince us that we need certain things for social survival; to keep up with the Joneses. Marketing is all about manipulating the mind to create false needs often using natural urges as a basis and the brain has to be just malleable enough to allow this creation of artificial needs.
Recently some poor guy in Telford succeeded in throwing himself to his death because of the encouraging shouts of "Jump", "Get on with it" and "How far can you bounce?" from a crowd of "Workers" below him. Some of these fuckin cretins were filming this horror on their smartphones then uploading it onto "social media" for a laugh. This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened. Well the smartphone phenomenon is making our glorious "working class" anything but smart. Let's face it they were a shower of stupid bastards before all of this…now made even more stupid with the emergence of this technology. They are more addicted, more myopic, more desensitised and more detached as a consequence. This is what you are dealing with now. The masters are turning them all into DRONES! You only have to look at the kids. World Socialism? That'll be right…FORGET IT!
Ozymandias wrote:Recently some poor guy in Telford succeeded in throwing himself to his death because of the encouraging shouts of "Jump", "Get on with it" and "How far can you bounce?" from a crowd of "Workers" below him. Some of these fuckin cretins were filming this horror on their smartphones then uploading it onto "social media" for a laugh. This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened. Well the smartphone phenomenon is making our glorious "working class" anything but smart. Let's face it they were a shower of stupid bastards before all of this…now made even more stupid with the emergence of this technology. They are more addicted, more myopic, more desensitised and more detached as a consequence. This is what you are dealing with now. The masters are turning them all into DRONES! You only have to look at the kids. World Socialism? That'll be right…FORGET IT!Capitalism encourages this sort of "F**k you, I'm okay!" attitude. This attitude seems to be built into human beings but capitalism draws it out and exacerbates it. We're taught that the whole point of life is to "get ahead" regardless of who you have to kick in the head on the way up. We're taught that other human beings are really just objects, not worthy of whatever empathy we may have. Combine this with the endless litany of violent images that we've all been exposed to and this incident in Telford doesn't surprise me one bit! I feel very sorry for the man who was not only driven to suicide but made the object of ridicule in his final minutes. I feel sorry for the people who shouted at him and ridiculed him. I won't return hate with hate, that road leads nowhere.Capitalism divides people and thus weakens them; keep 'em stupid, at each other's throats, and distracted with shiny baubles. The people at the top profit from this division of the rest of society. Divide and conquer: the oldest game in the world!
Ozymandias wrote:Recently some poor guy in Telford succeeded in throwing himself to his death because of the encouraging shouts of "Jump", "Get on with it" and "How far can you bounce?" from a crowd of "Workers" below him. Some of these fuckin cretins were filming this horror on their smartphones then uploading it onto "social media" for a laugh. This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened. Well the smartphone phenomenon is making our glorious "working class" anything but smart. Let's face it they were a shower of stupid bastards before all of this…now made even more stupid with the emergence of this technology. They are more addicted, more myopic, more desensitised and more detached as a consequence. This is what you are dealing with now. The masters are turning them all into DRONES! You only have to look at the kids. World Socialism? That'll be right…FORGET IT!Ozy, its an appalling incident , I agree but I seriously wonder how typical it is. Here in Spain for example there have been cases of ordinary folk, harassed and driven to despair by the efforts of banks to repossess their flats, plunging to their deaths on the street below. Far from provoking the kind of reaction you describe at Telford. it has induced a sense of horror and widespread outrage. There have been two ore three case of this in my local city of Granada I remember when I worked as an admin penpusher for a view years back in the 1990s at a London university. college, there was an incident involving a student who jumped from the eleventh floor of Engineering Faculty block. As I recall, what happened is that he had just been diagnosed with an incurable cancer. The shock – even trauma – that this incident caused among my colleagues was pretty much palpable. I can assure you. Most people I believe are fundamentally decent and caring when it comes down to it, and this shows particularly when disasters or catastrophes of some sort happen Of course there are always the exceptions that prove the rule but don't be so disheartened Ozy! There are a lot of good folk out there who don't buy into the dog eat dog worldview Just as a matter of curiosity do you have a link to this incident at Telford? I would love to run it past my local FB group and see what sort of reaction it elicits CheersR
robbo203 wrote:Ozymandias wrote:Recently some poor guy in Telford succeeded in throwing himself to his death because of the encouraging shouts of "Jump", "Get on with it" and "How far can you bounce?" from a crowd of "Workers" below him. Some of these fuckin cretins were filming this horror on their smartphones then uploading it onto "social media" for a laugh. This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened. Well the smartphone phenomenon is making our glorious "working class" anything but smart. Let's face it they were a shower of stupid bastards before all of this…now made even more stupid with the emergence of this technology. They are more addicted, more myopic, more desensitised and more detached as a consequence. This is what you are dealing with now. The masters are turning them all into DRONES! You only have to look at the kids. World Socialism? That'll be right…FORGET IT!Just as a matter of curiosity do you have a link to this incident at Telford? I would love to run it past my local FB group and see what sort of reaction it elicits
gnome wrote:robbo203 wrote:Ozymandias wrote:Recently some poor guy in Telford succeeded in throwing himself to his death because of the encouraging shouts of "Jump", "Get on with it" and "How far can you bounce?" from a crowd of "Workers" below him. Some of these fuckin cretins were filming this horror on their smartphones then uploading it onto "social media" for a laugh. This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened. Well the smartphone phenomenon is making our glorious "working class" anything but smart. Let's face it they were a shower of stupid bastards before all of this…now made even more stupid with the emergence of this technology. They are more addicted, more myopic, more desensitised and more detached as a consequence. This is what you are dealing with now. The masters are turning them all into DRONES! You only have to look at the kids. World Socialism? That'll be right…FORGET IT!Just as a matter of curiosity do you have a link to this incident at Telford? I would love to run it past my local FB group and see what sort of reaction it elicits
That confirms my suspicion. For every scumbag-cum-stupid bastard, there are many many more who are not. There is hope for socialism yet. Ozy!
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