A recent article on texting and teen development reports Sherry Turkle’s expert opinion on how “constant texting is causing anxiety, sleep and relationship problems in teenagers,” but this opinion is abysmally ethnocentric and highlights the trouble with culture-blind assessments of recent developments in communications technologies.
For example, Turkle says, “Adolescence is a time when teens are supposed to define their boundaries and to have a certain autonomy,” without contextualizing the culturally contingent importance of autonomy. Nor does she point to this as a simple shift that has taken place in adolescent development, rather than perceiving it as an assault on something that is static and steadfast.
One reason such an assessment raises my ire is that it has already been seen in other cultures. Digital Korea dubs South Korean youth “Generation-C,” for connected, and highlights how they are “the first generation to live with the friends ‘in their pocket’ — instantly available at all times.” What this cultural example allows us to do is to read American developments as a new and deeper form of intimacy, rather than seeing them as a threat to previously existing cultural formations.
Thus, instead of arguing that, “Intimacy requires that you really become a kind of expert in the face-to-face, and teens use texting as a way to avoid the risks of face-to-face,” we could instead see these developments as a shift taking place in intimacy, and praise the new opportunities texting opens up for managing interactions and relationships. While it is indeed the case that some information is lost when individuals text each other rather than interact face-to-face, it is also the case that this “loss” of information makes it possible for individuals to engage in difficult conversations that they might simply have avoided in the past.
As a minor point, Turkle argues that texting has placed adolescents’ thumbs in harm’s way, but this could easily be an argument for better cell phone design rather than an argument against texting.
Also, Turkle says she “talked to a lot of teens who feel that there is no choice because if they don’t have it, people will think there’s something wrong with them” — but isn’t that just an inescapable part of growing up?
Hopefully these points are just distorted artifacts that will disappear when I become more familiar with Turkle’s work.
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