We do not leave our bodies behind when we enter cyberspace. You can re-create yourself as a sexy 20 year old, when the person behind the smartphone or laptop screen is in fact a 53 year old middle aged person, munching on a big bag of chips. The task to make meaning through the body you are still remains, even if we employ multiple identities to do this in the concrete everyday life world or a fantasy world created through social media and hi-tech computer games.

My concern for a quite a while has been that we are rearing a generation of young people whose ability to empathise is being diminished. Interaction with other people is more and more filtered through a screen and boundaries of the real and the imagined get blurred. Watching a video of someone being de-capitated by an extreme Islamist group (ISIS) is very much the same as obliterating your foe in a fierce battle in a computer game. If our ability to empathise is dependent on mirror- neurons in the brain (neurological responses to the experience of other individuals, “feeling” the experience second hand as a necessary condition for empathy), isn’t this slowly being eroded away the less we relate to others face-to-face, voice-to-voice and body-to-body?

In a recent article, psychology professor Jean Twenge from San Diego State University views smartphones and social media as raising an unhappy, compliant ‘iGen’ (the generation born in 1995 and later as the first generation to spend their entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone). “They spend a lot more time online, on social media and playing games, and they spend less time on non-screen activities like reading books, sleeping or seeing their friends in face-to-face interactions. By the age of 18, they are less likely to have a driver’s licence, to work in a paying job, to go out on dates, to drink alcohol or to go out without their parents compared to teens in previous generations. They are probably the safest generation in history and they like that idea of feeling safe”.

In an interview, prof Twenge said that “around 2011 and 2012, I started to see more sudden changes to teens, like big increases of teens feeling lonely or left out, or that they could not do anything right, that their life was not useful, which are classic symptoms of depression. Depressive symptoms have climbed 60% in just five years, with rates of self-harm like cutting (themselves) that have doubled or even tripled in girls. Teen suicide has doubled in a few years. Right at the time when smartphones became common, those mental health issues started to show up. We know, from decades of research, that getting enough sleep and seeing friends in person is a good recipe for mental health and that staring at a screen for many hours a day is not.”

So perhaps, my concern is not that far off when reading about these symptoms. But what is the wider impact on society of a generation that is loosing the ability to “feel into” others, a generation more-and more isolated from warm human touch?

Also see: https://ewn.co.za/2018/11/13/smartphones-raising-a-mentally-fragile-generation-says-academic