• Question: how do you think social behavior would change depending on how technology currently controls modern adolescents?

    Asked by Jazzmeme to Adrian, Iroise, Joe, Rachel, Ria on 14 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Ria Vaportzis

      Ria Vaportzis answered on 14 Nov 2016:

      Surely the modern world uses technology a lot, but I wouldn’t say that technology controls adolescents. How do I think that social behavior would change? I think that it has already changed, and I can give you a few examples to illustrate. A couple of days ago I was going to my office. Two university students were walking from opposite directions. Both were playing with their mobiles not looking ahead of them. They bumped onto each other. I found it hilarious, what surprised me though was that none of them apologised or seemed to be annoyed. They just kept walking and playing on their mobiles. How odd I thought!

      To further illustrate, I paste below a couple of quotes from my own research. These are from group interviews with older people who overall think that younger generations overuse technology.

      “I was having lunch with a friend and there was a family, parents and a young child and two early teenage ones, and they sat and they never, ever stopped playing for two hours. Head down.”

      “What I do worry about is I wouldn’t want to be sitting on the bus and talking the way that everybody seems to and everybody has got this phone and sometimes they put it on the table when they’re out and things. I don’t appreciate that.”

      “I was on the bus whenever it was and this mother, she got out her phone and she’s busy doing that and there’s a toddler […] You know, looking out the window, making a noise, and she is not there. So I think that there is a problem that we should be addressing, to some extent because that child is not getting the same ‘Oh look for a bus’ conversation.”

    • Photo: Joe Bathelt

      Joe Bathelt answered on 14 Nov 2016:

      That is a very interesting question, but I don’t think that is one that has an easy evidence-based answer. I did some research to look into published studies on how social behaviour may be influenced by technology in adolescence. There were opinion pieces and original studies that warned of potential detrimental effects of technology use in adolescence. The basic argument was that technology is taking away time spent in social interactions. However, this may have been a valid argument when these studies were conducted (around 10 years ago), but more recent technology looks very different.
      Nowadays, it’s more about social media and mobile technology. There are studies looking at the nature of social interactions on social media platforms that find that social interactions are more self-gratifying and less deep than face-to-face interactions. Authors also lament multi-tasking behaviours that are linked to a shallow mode of processing.

      I think that there are too many unknowns. For one, it’s not that mobile conversations are necessarily replacing face-to-face interactions. There is far more scope for social interactions, because mobile technology enables this type of contact. Maybe adolescents are adapting to this and value their face-to-face meeting more, while causally keeping in touch between meetings. We also do not have a good comparisons, because mobile technology is pretty much ubiquitous. I think there is a temptation to compare modern adolescence to an idealised version of the past that is impossible to compare against. In addition, technology is rapidly changing.

      Altogether, my answer is that we do not have good enough evidence at the moment to make any predictions. I personally find it unlikely that human social behaviour will be fundamentally changed by technology. I find it far more likely that we will adapt technology to suit our social needs in the long run.

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