8. Netiquette, the amplifier of human nature

Netiquette

For a moment, let’s swap your mobile for a book and imagine you are at a table with your children, friends or clients; would you open your book, read a passage then shut it?
Of course not, it’s very rude. So why is it acceptable for mobiles?
 
What is lost?
Empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. A loss of friendship and community.
 
The difference between social media and face to face conversations are similar to the disconnect between drones and fighter planes in war.
 
Internet manners, Behaving Ourselves — David Mitchell & Sherry Turkle, BBC Radio 4
The Flight from Conversation by Sherry Turkle, MIT.
 
Our education system positively discriminates against face to face conversation by the restrictions of the syllabus and physical layout of classrooms. Class sizes are now so large that it is impossible for the teacher to walk round and have one to one contact.
 

How Social Media is rewiring our Brain

Our brain evolved to communicate using non verbal gestures, then spoken language and very recently by writing. Our brain pathways are set up to handle this type of neural messaging.
 
Social media is reshaping the actual structure of the brain so that the brain is responsive to the new culture. The neural pathways used for face to face communication could be seriously diminished or even die.
 
We will have a serious problem if social media replaces time for face to face communication.
 
Face to face contact has seven felt textures of life.
Eye contact
Facial expressions
Tone of voice
Posture
Gestures
Timing
Intensity
 
How Social Media is rewiring our Brain by Dr Dan Siegel, Mindsight Institute. Extracts from YouTube

Human Nature

A fundamental set of qualities and range of behaviours shared by all humans.
It’s a way of thinking, feeling and acting that are common to most people.
 
The internet amplifies or exaggerates the difference between people from the good to the bad. It has made right and wrongs so difficult to define because it depends on the personal perspective to perceive it, but for the first time, we can publish our own thoughts and become part of wider online social groups.
 
The internet has not changed how we think but altered the context in which we think. It has reduced our exposure to the real world, replacing experiences with second-hand images.
The brevity of its messages is now diminishing the role of facts. The age of the sound bite creates voids of knowledge.
 
Based upon “Keyboard Hero” in ”Human Nature — Cyberculture.
 

 
We mostly agreed that the new technology should be seen as an amplifier of human nature rather than something which fundamentally changed us and our need for personal interaction.
On the whole we saw the new technology as a force for good and individual empowerment, especially in the longer term, while recognising that there was a worrying dark side, and that authoritarian governments were also getting better at using it to suppress dissent. We were also aware that the digital divide was real and deep
 
From the Ditchley Foundation
Managing the digital revolution: can governments keep up.
 

 
I've become convinced that the ‘digital revolution’ might be as epoch making as the invention of writing or, certainly, the invention of printing or of broadcast.
 
The lives and minds of young people are far more fragmented than at earlier times. This multiplicity of connections, networks, avatars, messages, may not bother them, but certainly makes for identities that are more fluid and less stable, resulting in less time for reflection, introspection and solitude.
Longstanding views of privacy and ownership/authorship are being rapidly undermined.
Probably most dramatically, what it has meant for the last thousand years to belong to a community is being totally renegotiated as a result of instant 24-7 access to anyone who is connected to the Internet. How this will affect intimacy, imagination, democracy, social action, citizenship, and other staples of human kind is up for grabs.
 
Howard Gardner
Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education;

How is the internet changing the way you think?