The Sixth Sense

It’s become a cliché these days to bemoan how addicted humans are to various forms of media, particularly the Internet. At parties and gatherings, I hear over and over again that youth are “forsaking social connections” to sit in front of the screen all day. Articles like this one from Ars Technica frequently appear in the popular press, debating whether or not “Internet addiction” is a real phenomenon.

This article discusses a recent study from the University of Maryland where participants from around the world were asked to abstain from Internet use for 24 hours and report on their reactions.

Not surprisingly, due to the commonly held belief in “Internet addiction,” the participants’ responses tended to be couched in the language of drug withdrawal: one student from the US reported she was “itching like a crackhead,” another said he “felt dead.”

Yet, others reported that they missed important requests from their bosses, or felt out of touch with the news from the world around them.

The article was full of this year’s current buzzwords like “media overload,” “life balance,” and “the benefits of unplugging,” and ended, ironically enough, with a reference to an Internet addiction treatment center—and its URL.

The comments about addiction made me start thinking about all the things I do every day, things I would miss if I went without them. Yes, Internet use is one of them. But so is eating, sleeping, and using my senses to perceive the world around me.

How would I feel if I had to, say, block off my ears for a day so that I could hear nothing for 24 hours? I wouldn’t be able to hear my husband telling me jokes in the morning, or hear my kids say they loved me. I wouldn’t be able to talk with my friends at lunch or converse with my colleagues in the halls.

Would I feel deprived and lonely? Umm, yeah. Definitely.

So, does that mean I’m addicted to hearing others? To the social interaction of conversation? It’s not that I need the sense of hearing to live. But I would still miss it if I didn’t have it. It doesn’t mean that I should “unplug” from my ears, or give up those terribly addictive habits of sleeping and eating.

Is the Internet depriving people of true, healthy social interaction that can only take place face-to-face? A sixteen-year-old girl I interviewed recently claims that social interaction on the Internet is just the same as in person… it’s just easier to find. She has plenty of friends at school—but when there’s something preying on her mind, she can always find someone online who’s willing to talk about it, something that’s not always possible in real life.

She also says, “In real life, you can’t listen to everybody’s conversations first to see who you might want to develop a friendship with. Online, you can.” In other words, in real life, you have to depend on appearances, clothing, or stereotypes to form your initial opinions of others. Is that truly the best way to initiate social interactions? How many friendships have been missed, how much potential to experience diversity has been lost, because we have such limited information about the people we pass by in the physical world?

So, is it a bad thing that this teenager spends hours a day on the Internet? Her social network has widened and diversified. Her view of the world no longer originates only from other sixteen-year-olds in her local high school. She converses with online friends from Russia, from the UK, from Dubai. She has learned about the geography and culture of the world, has been encouraged to read Russian literature and philosophy, has even been advised by online friends to stay in school and do her homework.

Sure, she says, her parents grouse when she’s online for hours every day… but didn’t parents of a different generation complain when their teenage daughters were on the phone every day?

Another charge frequently leveled against the Internet is that text-based communication is impoverished. Instead of the high-bandwidth channel of in-person contact, where spoken language is fully accessorized with gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, and other body language—you have plain text, devoid of emotional content.

My response is: have you looked at how children, especially “digital natives,” communicate online? Their text conversations are peppered with a large and growing vocabulary of emoticons. They have learned this language young, and thus “speak” it “without an accent” —like anyone who learned a language as a child, they are completely comfortable with their vernacular of emoticon-enhanced text.

I hear youth these days speak of online friends in terms such as these: “And she made a face when I said that.” Then they scrunch up their face to demonstrate the expression. When I ask, “How did you know that she made that face?” their reply is to show me the appropriate emoticon.

The translation is natural for them. They are using this new language the way native speakers do. They are augmenting and enhancing text to build a language with all the richness of face-to-face communication.

It’s exciting to watch these new developments as I study computer-mediated communication. But I do also see the potential for harm.

It’s true that the phenomenon of online social interaction shows some of the effects of variable reinforcement, something that has been demonstrated in multiple animal and human studies to lead to addiction and obsession. Variable reinforcement works like this: if a rat in a cage gets a food pellet every time it presses a bar, it will press the bar when it’s hungry. If it never gets a food pellet, it won’t press the bar at all. But if the rat sometimes gets a food pellet, and sometimes doesn’t, studies have shown that the rat will press the bar repeatedly, almost obsessively, even when it’s not hungry. This is also known as the “slot-machine effect.”

In other words, you post online, and sometimes you get a response and sometimes you don’t. It can lead to obsessive checking of your blog posts to see if anyone has responded… So Internet use should clearly not remain unsupervised and unexamined. But neither is it the source of all ills, or merely an impoverished substitute for “true” social interaction. Instead of castigating youth and children for Internet use, instead of feeling guilty when we check our email first thing in the morning, maybe we should just admit that the Internet has given us a new way of perceiving the world around us and connecting with other humans.

It’s like a new sense. A sixth sense, if you will. Just as vision permits us to detect information at a distance and hearing lets us communicate with other humans, the Internet has evolved into a way of learning about things at a distance, a means of making connections to faraway people.

Our family’s dinner conversations are richer now, because when my children ask when the Prisoner’s Dilemma originated or in which climates one can grow avocado trees, rather than shutting the conversation down by saying, “I don’t know, but we can look it up tomorrow,” I simply pick up the smart phone. When I want to see how my best friend from fourth grade is feeling after her surgery, I connect with her via email or Facebook, since she lives across the country. I communicate with her much more than I used to. My friends email their college-aged children every day or two, rather than scheduling a long-distance phone call every week or two.

My life has been immeasurably enriched by my new social and sensory connections via the Internet, and I find myself increasingly annoyed and even outraged by these repeated suggestions that I need to “find life balance” and “unplug more.”

I do not want to give up my sixth sense. Does that mean I’m addicted? No, I think that’s altogether the wrong word to use in this context.

Yes, it’s true that we are being bombarded with information. I think many of the warnings about media overload or information overload are true. Indeed, when animals first evolved a new sense, it’s likely that information overload was a problem. Most of the sensory circuitry in the human brain is devoted to inhibition, to filtering out extraneous input. To gain the most benefit from our new sense we will need to develop filters to cut down the barrage of new information. These filters will have to combine computational, social and individual techniques and strategies to be effective. Indeed, new products to filter information are already being developed by the boatload, and we are all devising new personal strategies to handle the onslaught of information.

So will we and our technology evolve to process our new sixth sense.

Personally, I find it exciting.

So, am I going to unplug for 24 hours? No way. I’m as excited as if I had discovered I was clairvoyant. What I want to do is learn how to use my new sense most effectively.

And I suspect that, just as the animals that first developed sight or hearing had an advantage over their predecessors because they could now process information at a distance, so will those of us who learn how to use our new sense have a competitive advantage over those who insist on “unplugging.” We’ll learn of new developments faster, have more useful information at our fingertips, perhaps even be more socially connected and happier than those who turn away from their sixth sense.

Plus, the sixth sense is making the world a more interesting place.

Digital natives are developing new ways of social interaction that take advantage of the multitude of channels for online communication. It’s leading to new kinds of social interaction: for example, a group of four people playing an online game, communicating via voice chat, but also running six pairwise private text channels at the same time. The combinatorial possibilities for social interaction are staggering— and terrifying.

This development reminds me of a science fiction story from 1971, “Sharing Time,” by Zenna Henderson. In the story, narrated by a teacher in an elementary school, a mysterious device passed around in class made all children below the age of puberty telepathic. The story discussed various teachers’ initial reactions to this overwhelming societal change. Many were disbelieving, angry, or terrified, and simply wanted to reject the new development. But others focused on guiding the children to make the most of this new type of communication: they taught the children to build filters and they explained how societal mores were still valid even in a period of change.

As my colleague Sarah Pérez-Kriz has stated, science fiction can offer a useful lens to examine the potential effects of technological developments on society.

So I’m very curious how we are going to manage this sixth sense. Are we going to try to ban our children from the Internet, force ourselves to “unplug”? Or are we going to think hard about how to develop the socio-technical filters and inhibitory mechanisms we’re going to need to handle the barrage of information that has only just begun to overwhelm us?