Larry D. Lauer

The amazing influences of social and mobile media are becoming more clear every day.  They establish and maintain social and professional relationships, and those relationships  number in the thousands for many. They  facilitate the instant exchange of brief messages and have the potential to move masses of people to action. Thus, these are extremely effective relationship building and marketing tools.

For example, universities establish contact, foster interactive relationships, and drive responders to a website for more information. These tools also motivate desires to visit campuses and attend events. Likewise, special interest groups are able to stimulate followers to assemble, and oppressed people can connect across closed borders. Examples of success in relationship building and motivating to action are endless.

But MIT professor of “the social science of science,” Sherry Turkle, raises a different kind of concern. Her concern is the longterm psychic and social effects on individuals who live day-to-day in this virtual world.  In her book Alone Together, Turkle  explains  how her research is indicating that young people are using on-line relationships to avoid the difficulties of real human interaction.

Turkle reports that many of her interviewees are choosing texting over actually making a phone call and talking to someone. Instead of writing a letter or having a real conversation, an instant short message posted or tweeted is preferred. In the final analysis, Turkle’s fundamental concern is that those who spend much of their lives in this digital world are losing their capacity for sophisticated problem-solving conversation, and for genuine human intimacy.

It’s only fair to also mention here that many of my students and colleagues disagree with Turkle and feel that the opposite just might be the case. Their argument is that relationships are only begun on-line, or by using social media tools, and that they can be the beginning of a meaningful social, and even intimate, relationship.

These questions therefore are important to ponder: What do these new tools do well, and what do they not do? It continues to look like they build relationships and stimulate action extremely well. But they do not deal with sophisticated problem solving, and they do not achieve a deeper understanding of complex issues. For these outcomes, other media and face-to-face human interaction are required.