Pandora’s Blog

There is an awesome story from the Telegraph in London that focuses on one psychiatrist’s notion that the current Internet generation of teens is in danger of not being able to form real life relationships and are at an increased risk of behaving impulsively.

It goes back to a joke I’ve made several times about new college roommates. Back in the day, you meet your roommate on the first day, and as you’re setting up your room you sit and eat and chat and get to know each other. Everyone has to do it (well, most everyone). But it’s only a matter of time now before kids can have their rooms pre-made up and then when they get to school, they don’t even need to talk face to face – or don’t know how – to their new roommate. Instead, they each sit in a corner of the room, IMing each other, as each is at a loss for physical words and even more so, clueless on how to physically introduce themselves to one another and have a dialogue with a stranger, without the aid of a keyboard or LCD screen. Ridiculous? I guess time will tell.

Anyway, this really has nothing to do with online safety, it’s just a small theory that I have about the current generation, the complete overuse of the Internet and the allowance of adults to let social manner and real people skills fall to the wayside in place of what is nothing more than an electronic poster about yourself on a popular wall. I guess someone else has come up with the idea as well…

Then again, I guess you could use monitoring software like PC Pandora to double-check that your kids are behaving responsible and not abusing the Internet. But that’s just one part of this larger problem…

Enjoy the Monday afternoon read after this long holiday… what are your thoughts and opinions?

Facebook and MySpace generation ‘cannot form relationships’

A generation growing up with social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace are unable to form lasting relationships and are at increased risk of behaving impulsively, an expert has warned.

Teenagers who were born in 1990 or later have never known a world where you can’t surf online and could have a distorted view of the world and their own identity because of that, the Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists heard.

Dr Himanshu Tyagi, a psychiatrist at West London Mental Health Trust, said social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace have fostered the idea that relationships and friendships can be formed and destroyed quickly and easily.

He said: “This is the age group involved with the Bridgend suicides and what many of these young people had in common was their use of internet to communicate. It’s a world where everything moves fast and changes all the time, where relationships are quickly disposed at the click of a mouse, where you can delete your profile if you don’t like it and swap an unacceptable identity in the blink of an eye for one that is more acceptable.

“People used to the quick pace of online social networking may soon find the real world boring and unstimulating, potentially leading to more extreme behavior to get that sense.”

He said teenagers who socialize online put less value on their “real world” selves, which puts them at risk of impulsive and even suicidal behavior. They may be less able to form relationships, as they do not learn the physical clues involved with communication including body language, tone of voice and facial expressions.

“If you can’t see the person’s expression or body language or hear the subtle changes in their voice, it shapes your perceptions of the interaction differently,” Dr Tyagi said.

“The new generation raised alongside Internet is attaching an entirely different meaning to friendship and relations, something we are largely failing to notice.

“This is definitely a line of reasoning that warrants more investigation and research, ” he said. But there are also benefits including lack of discrimination where wealth, race and gender were less meaningful and a loss of geographical boundaries.

He said: “No one is a pariah on the net, it works great in flattening the hierarchies of the real world.” He warned the meeting that there was a massive generation gap amongst current psychiatrists and young patients around the Internet related issues.

A survey of International psychiatrists conducted by him at a recent psychiatric conference in US showed that the vast majority of psychiatrists worldwide were unaware of the full magnitude of impact of online world on the younger generation.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 2:29 PM and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.