The Good and Bad – Social Networking and Kids

Recently I was asked by Lancaster University Press Officer Gillian Whitworth to answer some questions about social networking for a local newspaper, specifically:

What do you think about social networks?
Are there any health risks related to people using social networks? If so, is there any evidence?
Is there any evidence that children who use social networks on a regular basis find it more difficult to concentrate, etc? If so, why do you think that is?
Has the standard of teenagers handwriting and communication declined over the past few years? If so, do you think that’s because of the continual use of social networks and why?

Here are my answers:

In ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ the Earth is described as ‘mostly harmless’. The same is true of Facebook. My opinion is that, in general social networking sites like Facebook etc are a great personal benefit, enabling me to keep in touch with friends and colleagues around the world, being able to see, in an informal and casual manner, the sorts of things they are doing, what they are interested in, what music they are listening to and so on. In some cases the information provided has been very important – for example, telling me that friends in Australia were safe when there were those tremendous bushfires in Victoria, or the floods in Queensland. But in general Facebook provides me with an everyday, regular diet of casual and relatively harmless distractions provided by my friends and those who have a very similar view or sense of humour. I imagine many people, children, teenagers, experience and value their social networking sites in exactly the same way – sometimes more so, sometimes less.

Like any technology or application, the Internet and the social networking sites that exist on it come with both opportunities and risks. Of course, opportunities and risks are linked. Personally, I tend to stress the opportunities. This doesn’t mean that I ignore the risks, simply that I would like them to be placed in proportion along with a recognition that technology rarely transforms our lives, for better or worse, overnight. The sociologist Harvey Sacks addressed exactly this issue when he pointed to the ways in which people expect technology to magically change their lives, when what actually happens is that the technology is made ‘at home’ in a life that is already organized in various ways. What this means is that social networking sites are used, are made ‘at home’, by, for example, groups of teenagers who already spend enormous amounts of time with their friends and classmates at school, who already go out with them, tell jokes, play tricks, are unkind etc; who already have a good or bad relationship with their parents. Joining a social network site isn’t going to change much of that – its just yet another site where they can display any existing propensity for what Harvey Sacks called ‘their niceness and nastiness’, where they can be nice or mean to their friends and parents – but it doesn’t make them nasty or nice in the first place. Social networking hasn’t dramatically changed many people’s lives even if it has increased the speed and quantity (and perhaps quality) of communications.

So what are the opportunities and risks of social networking sites? Well I think Sonia Livingstone identifies them (and has researched them) rather nicely. The opportunities appear in the form of enabling young people to manage their image and ‘presentation of self’ (you only have to look at the photos they post or their identification of ‘favourites’ to see this in action); and to build up a wide circle of friends whilst at the same time managing their privacy and the degree of intimacy of their relationships. In this sense Facebook is like an online version of a teenager’s bedroom wall (except its easier to keep parents out!) Social networking sites also enable teenagers to engage in a wide range of behaviours, playful interaction, flirting etc, that are often embarrassing face-to-face. The risks arise, of course, when teenagers fail to adequately do these things or protect themselves – when they inadvertently disclose too much and thus lose their privacy, when they get bullied or harassed online or subjected to stalking or other unwanted attentions or online content. So for example the UK Children Go Online survey from 2005 found fairly high numbers of young people had seen online pornography, or violent or racist materials or been subjected to sexual comments or harassment or bullying. It may be that it is easier to make these kinds of comments, or access this kind of material online – but it is easier to ignore them too and the current evidence suggests that teenagers are increasingly wary of giving out their contact details online.

I suppose some might argue these kind of things constitute a kind of mental ‘health risk’ and there are other instances of unhealthy behaviours being facilitated (if not promoted) by online sites, in particular extreme dieting and in a few rare cases suicide. But again there is another side to this argument that argues that obtaining health related information is actually a major benefit of the Internet and social networking sites – since health related matters are an area that is most enquired about online by teenagers – such things as exercise and fitness, sexual health, problems with drugs or alcohol, quitting smoking etc – and again they can be enquired about with some degree of anonymity and thus lack of embarrassment. (One other health related issue, the use of online pharmacies to order drugs, is predominantly an adult issue, and mainly concerns the order of Viagra and related drugs (though this similarly illustrates the potential of the Internet to ameliorate embarrassing situations).

Other, very well qualified, researchers have made rather more dramatic claims about the impact of social network sites on health. Sigman for example in the ‘Biologist’ makes claims that they can increase dementia, heart disease and cancer. Professor Susan Greenfield has argued that social networking impacts on the structure of the brain and can lead to or encourage a range of generally anti-social behaviours such as attention deficit disorder. Unfortunately whilst these kind of rather spectacular and fanciful claims grab headlines they aren’t really supported by the evidence – as Ben Goldacre demonstrates on his ‘Bad Science’ website. The most that can be said for these arguments, or rather, opinions, is that if people sit around a lot, such a sedentary lifestyle may lead to a range of associated health problems. This is a long way from ‘Facebook Causes Cancer’, though obviously not as headline grabbing. Similarly the fact that people mess around on Facebook, that they click on different links and so on, is a very long way from proving the infantilisation of the brain (Greenfield) or that we are being made ‘stupid’ (Carr) or ‘lazy’ (Collins). Personally I think these are silly arguments that actually get in the way of trying to develop any informed understanding of the complex interactions involved when people are using the Internet.

Arguments about handwriting or the ‘lost art of conversation’ are, I think, equally silly and just another part of that very old phenomenon, the demonization of the young. I remember similar arguments being made about the use of biro (which we were forbidden to use in school); I imagine they were made about the fountain pen too. People are frightened of teenagers and so, necessarily, everything they do must be bad. Give teenagers a break! – life is hard enough, (certainly harder than when I was a teenager), and most of them eventually turn out OK, and no more screwed up than many (most) of the adults I know. This may be a radical suggestion, but if parents are worried about the time their children spend in the bedroom online, go and talk to them about it – or alternatively think about what else their children might be getting up to (indeed what they as parents got up to), and how much worse that might be.