I see George Will is being his usual superior self:
In 2008, Americans were being inundated by journalism performing anticipatory sociology. “Techno-cheerleaders” — Mark Bauerlein’s term — predicted that millennials (born 1981-1996), the first generation suckled by their digital devices, would dazzle the world with the sublime personal and social consequences of their mind-melds with those devices. And their emancipation from the dead hand of everything prior. Bauerlein, Emory University professor of English, dissented.
Fourteen years ago, in “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30)” he anticipated that millennials were going to become “unsatisfied and confused” adults, bereft of the consolations of a cultural inheritance, which is unavailable to nonreaders. They would be gripped by the furies of brittle people bewildered by encounters with disagreement, which they find inexplicable. And by the apocalyptic terrors that afflict frustrated utopians, the only kind there is.
Immersed in social media that have “contracted their horizon to themselves, to the social scene around them,” unable to “think beyond the clique and the schoolyard,” they pay the severe “opportunity costs of digital diversions” — “mind-maturing activities” forgone, such as learning a language, mastering a musical instrument, following the real politics of governance. Books are the best “reprieve from the bombardment” of the digital age, but the bombardment makes young people “bibliophobes,” drawing them into “the maelstrom of youth amusements.” [WaPo]
I’m not a big fan of Will. He often strikes me as that extraordinary teenage prodigy who, fifty years later, still hasn’t rid himself of the ‘tude.
But what he talks about here has some correlation with other observations. For example, when he says,
The stage was set for the “overproduction of elites,” churning out college graduates who, flattered since middle school, felt themselves of historic importance because they lacked knowledge of history. Which is a chastening record of the wreckage of egalitarian utopias imagined by people boundlessly pleased with themselves for being the first to understand “social justice.”
It reminds me of Andrew Sullivan’s occasional observation that the advocates of the transgenders seem completely oblivious to the observed and lived history of the gay community, which I unfortunately have not bookmarked – The Weekly Dish has a link on the right, a ways down, in case you’re interested. It may be behind a paywall.
But in a very odd way this connects to an article I ran across on ghosting, the practice of dropping out of a relationship without warning or explanation:
IT WAS 2015 when Jennice Vilhauer’s clients started telling her ghost stories. The Los Angeles-based psychotherapist had more than 10 years of experience helping people with their depression, anxiety and relationship issues – but suddenly, clients began telling her about a new problem, one that left them extremely distressed.
They were victims of ghosting, where one person ends all communication with another, disappearing like a phantom. Messages are ignored and just like that, the person you had a connection with – typically a romantic partner, but sometimes a friend or colleague – chooses to disengage with no explanation. But when Vilhauer searched for more information, she found little research on this phenomenon. So she started publishing her own observations online and was soon inundated with emails from people who had been ghosted. “There’s been an enormous explosion of interest in this because it’s happening so frequently,” she says.
Which begs the question, what is uniquely painful about ghosting? [“What psychology is revealing about ‘ghosting’ and the pain it causes,” Amelia Tait, NewScientist (23 April 2022, paywall)]
I copied that last line only to clarify that the article focuses on the pyschology of the pain, while, for my sensibilities, I’m more interested in the Why now? question.
And it connects to the Internet and social media. The modern social media, unlike the antiquated social media of the very late 1970s – mid 1990s, has a vast geographical reach, a monstrous network effect.
And the production of a huge number of social groups within which to form relationships.
Prior to generally available social media, people typically formed relationships within geographically restricted areas. Sure, you can find plenty of exceptions, but that’s all they are – relationships formed during wartime, or during long trips by certain privileged classes. But for the vast majority of people, their relationships were close to where they lived. And what did that mean?
Yeah, the chances of encountering someone you had ghosted, or their family and friends, was inescapably high.
That sort of blowback can be a bitch for a would-be ghoster.
And, in a weird sort of way, that same long, long reach of the Internet, combined with humanity’s near-universal urge to scale the social ladder and occupy its top rungs, regardless of the content of the ladder[1], results in, well, what Will complains of. And why does that happen?
In 2010, with 15-year-olds averaging eight hours of media a day (42 percent more minutes in lower-income than in higher-income households), children were constantly absorbed in youth culture and peer pressure, all of it flooding “the pleasure centers of the developing brain.”
Humanity, by and large, competes with what it can reach, competes relentlessly, and in countless niches, whether it’s to be the best professional video game player – or the best fan of same. And we’ll dedicate years of our lives to it, to the negligence of other subjects that have no impact on our standing in the social ladder.
In this regard, the adult classes, at least of Western Civ, may be regarded as having failed to direct the restless energy of the non-adults properly. From those who setup global social media, generally in the relentless search for profits, to the parents who didn’t realize that social media is a monumental time suck until their kids had sunk their competition-fangs into it, they failed.
Don’t confuse this with blame. New things bring unpredictable new challenges for adults, and the mythology of the profit is thick and deeply believed by us. But what will it cost us?
George Will and his sources may be on to something.
1 I think I just stretched my metaphor permanently out of shape.
