Baroness Susan Greenfield is Senior Research Fellow, Professor of Pharmacology, University of Oxford.
Facebook is going to be in your face even more than before. The arrival of the ‘Facebook Phone’ and the eventual availability of the latest it has to offer on all Android platforms, means the current obsession with monitoring the lives of others and recording every moment of your own existence, will be made even easier, a default adjunct to daily life. Whilst the ethics and risk of the possible collation of the ensuing Tsunami of personal information now flooding into the central Facebook databases might raise obvious concerns, as a neuroscientist I’m most worried by what this latest ‘advance’ will mean to us as individuals.
Humans occupy more ecological niches than any other species on the planet because of the superlative ability of our brains, compared with those of any other animal, to adapt to the environment: a process known as ‘plasticity’. So if the human brain will adapt to whatever environment in which it is placed, an environment where you are constantly on the alert to the actions and views of others, will surely be changing your mindset in correspondingly new ways. How will the 21st Century human brain, with its clear evolutionary mandate, react to this latest development in what has been dubbed ‘The Digital Wildfire’?
Already privacy appears to be a less prized commodity among the younger generation of ‘Digital Natives’: apparently 55 per cent of teenagers have given out personal information to someone they don’t know, including photos and physical descriptions. Meanwhile over half send out group messages to typically over 500 ‘friends’ at a time, fully aware that each of these friends could then pass on that information to their network of further hundreds... It has become more important to have attention, to be ‘famous’. The trade-off for such disclosure and indeed fame is, and always has been, loss of privacy. So why have we previously treasured privacy so much, but now are holding it in increasing disregard?
Perhaps because until now, privacy has been the other side of the coin to our identity. We have seen ourselves as individual entities, in contact with the outside world for sure, but at the same time always distinct from it. We have interacted with that outside world, but only in the way and at the times we have chosen. You have secrets, memories and hopes to which no one else has automatic access; a private life, distinct from a professional one, as well as a multifaceted one of individual friendships where we vary what and how much we confide in someone else. Above all you have an inner narrative, an ongoing thought process that is yours alone: until now.
Another new feature of ‘Facebook Home’ will be ‘Chat Heads’, which means that when anyone contacts you on your mobile, a little ‘bubble’ featuring a picture of that person will appear with the text. These illustrated ‘bubbles’ will appear on the mobile screen, no matter what you are currently doing on your phone, allowing constant maintained ‘illustrated’ contact. But if you’re anchored increasingly in the present, consequently constantly catering for and to the demands of the outside world, that inner narrative might be now even harder to sustain. The mind might remain more child-like, reactive and dependent on the behavior and thoughts of others.
Already we are seeing a generation of 20-somethings still living at home, wearing ‘onesies’ (all in one crawler suits usually reserved for very small infants), perhaps playing mythical or sci-fi games with simplified values of all-good or all-evil, and/or craving the constant attention of others through social networking sites. The ‘you’ externally constructed by Facebook, accentuated further by the latest operating system, may not allow much time and opportunity for internal memories to mature, nor private reflections to develop into a fully-fledged, individual mind. But if you now define yourself externally by the instant thumbs-up from others, then abolition of privacy is to be welcomed in order to belong, and for a new type of identity to flourish – one that is hyper-connected and collective.
Perhaps it will mean living a life where the thrill of reporting and the receiving completely trumps the ongoing experience itself. Your identity now is paradoxically online moment-to-moment but essentially offline in how you register it. The momentary excitements you’re feeling are generated not by raw, first-hand life itself, but by the slightly delayed, indirect experience of the continuing reaction and approval of everyone else.
If we’re going to be living in a world where face-to-face interaction, unpracticed as it is, becomes uncomfortable, then such an aversion to real life, three-dimensional communication combined with a more collective identity, may be changing the very nature of personal relationships themselves. The speed required for reaction and the reduced time for reflection might mean that those reactions and evaluations themselves are becoming increasingly superficial.
It is important to bear in mind that the interaction between the brain and the environment is a two-way dialogue: just as important as how we view and use the latest technology, is the impact that an environment dominated by wizardry such as ‘Facebook Home’ will have on shaping our minds – and hence most significantly, on how we view ourselves.
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