Sherry Turkle has written no less than four books about this over the course of the past 40 years. I've read three. The Second Self dates to 1984 and discusses how children and adults interact with technology - how it is an "other" that is not quite alive and not quite unliving, a mysterious and unexplored gray area that provides opportunities to grow our physical and mental selves through the explorations of terra incognita. Life on the Screen, which I have not read, is a 1994 study on identity performance and self-image as it relates to our ability to project our identities beyond our physical surroundings and beyond truth. It examines the changes we must make psychologically when we go from being a person to being an avatar and what it takes to successfully bridge the gap. Alone Together is a 2004 examination of the alienating effects of technology on our lives and what our ready access to technology and alternate spheres of influence has done to us psychologically. It is not a happy book, illustrating that over the past 30 years the alienation of technological devices has left us bereft of many of the experiences that have been formative for every generation of the past several thousand years. One of the most damning observations she makes is that humans don't expect a lot from "the other" in our interactions; we're more than willing to fill in the gaps with our own expectations such that everyone you think you know on the Internet is actually just an augmented image of you. 2015's Reclaiming Conversation, unlike the other three books, actually contains actionable information and data but it really comes down to "put down the phone, get off the Internet, there's nothing there that will give you the basic psychological needs of community and empathy with even a tiny fraction of the utility that simply talking to a fellow human being in person will accomplish." I'm also a parent. Unless your parents are awful (and they may well be), they aren't withholding guidance. They just suck at it. My own parents, for example, limited their advice to "don't get married", "don't have kids" and "stay out of my way or I'll fucking kill you" although I occasionally got a "I sure didn't want you but you turned out pretty neat" or "we'll make a welder out of you yet" from time to time. That said, at least their advice has context. At least it has weight. At least it's tailored. The world wasn't telling me not to get married, my drunk, bitter father was telling me not to get married which allowed me to take it under advisement. That's lacking on the internet. I fully recognize the irony of advising someone via the internet not to take advice from the internet but there it is - you only know of me what I tell you. The context I present you is statistical and sparse. You know I'm male, you know I'm older than you, you know dozens of irrelevant details. I know you're female, you're young, and you work with mushrooms. The connection we form is generalized at best and any notion you may have otherwise - despite the deliberate poignancy of my words - is assembled wholly from your own background and perception. The phantasm behind the words you read has far more of you in it than me. I've heard your argument before - "we lack the desire for an emotional connection." The data (four books of it) do not bear that out. You do not lack the desire, you lack the ability. You were never given a chance. A child that eats dinner while her parents stare at their phones is a child that learns that meals are a time for introversion. A child that communicates with her friends via Snapchat is a child that struggles to read body language, that struggles to hear tone, that struggles to understand subtext. I'll say this: it's a muscle like any other. It grows stronger through exercise. Empathy, humanity, whatever you wish to call it, it can be developed. My parents were horrific. They failed miserably. I've scanned my early slides, from birth through age six. I've watched my own innocence disappear. But my daughter smiles all the time. She laughs infectiously. She is keenly human, eager to engage and deeply interested in the emotional life of everyone around her. If an emotionally-retarded psychopath like me can raise a smile like that, than anyone can learn to connect emotionally with anyone.
No mushrooms today although I did have a perfect day of work for thinking this over so I'm glad I read this before I started. Hours of cutting down trees/shrubs, shovelling and hacking at roots proves to be a great time to mull things over. I feel for people who don’t have a healthy dose of destruction in their lives while I get paid for mine. Back to this, what I'm talking about is a little different from social media and forums. I'm talking about as a young child when I needed to know something, when I couldn't put my thoughts into words I could find an article or video to help me. All the information I need is on the internet and I can access it without asking anybody for it. Before I wrote this post I tried to find an article to describe what I was thinking for me. You're completely right though, that parental guidance does hold weight. I actually remember once my mom telling me that even if I'm not planning on having sex I should go on the birth control pill. I was 17 by then, I had already sat through about 6 sex ed classes, a parenting class, and googled everything else I needed to know. I'm pretty sure I already advised my older sister on how to get a prescription in our city. So even though I already knew everything she said that one comment stuck with me and actually made me feel something. There's an emotional component to getting guidance from a parent that you just don't get from a generic article on a public health site To put it crudely it's like replacing sex with masturbation. It serves the purpose enough to leave you satisfied for a while but then one day you lay there in the after glow asking yourself what the fuck you just watched/read while trying to remember the last time you had actual intimate physical contact with another person and wondering what that felt like. The desire for connection is completely still there, so it is the ability to form it that's lacking. Getting everything from the internet may have made me a functioning member of society but emotionally it didn't do much good. Nothing makes me happier than when I teach my niece how to do something or when she's staring at me trying to figure out how to do what I'm doing. Lately she started clapping for herself when she does something like put her own hat on and it melts my heart. So I know I want the connection and I know I'm capable of it I just have to figure out how to do it with adults. I suppose I've got plenty of time to figure that out.