social media and the lost rite of passage: against Haidt

"You never saw so many phonies in all your life, everybody smoking their ears off and talking about the play so that everybody could hear and know how sharp they were."

"I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff."

"The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was."

-- Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger (1951)

Jon Haidt has been on a long crusade against social media arguing that it distracts from social contact. His data are largely correlations between psychological stats and increases in phone use. He argues, very likely correctly, that the phone use is causal. But causal relations don't identify the explanation. It could be that in-person contact is essential, as he maintains. But it could be that phone use encourages young people to measure themselves by unrealistic standards of social presentation. Or maybe we're missing something else. I want to observe what I think is a radical change in development, the rite of passage, a feature of cultures across the world and across time. 

What I most remember of high school culture was that we all knew at all times what in the culture at large, and especially pop culture, was hip, cool, genuine and authentic, and what was fake marketing, wannabe, lame trying to be hip, in Holden Caulfield's expression, phony. We seemed to have an instinct for perceiving the transparency of effort compared with the real thing-of-the-moment, instant recognition of what was mimicry-a-moment-too-late versus innovative grasp of the cultural now and the talent to create the new. 

This keen, clear and absolute perception was, of course, a collective one. A cultural moment is a shared perception, and it's the sharing that makes it momentary. Like the hipster effect, the appearance of authenticity lasts only as long as it's new and different and different from previous kinds of difference (see "where the future is behind you"), so it's got to have a grasp of the cultural moment while bringing it into a new one. The standard of genuineness in high school is not merely high, it's as high as possible at all times. 

Maybe because it's so brutally high a standard, adolescents, at least back in my day, rejected sentimentality as a weakening of standards. We could detect the smell of saccharine instantly. There's just no room for dwelling on emotions in this cut-throat competitive market of fashion. 

In all of this, adolescence rejected the adult world of lame mimicry, bad taste and inability to recognize the genuinely new. For my generation it led us all to protest the Viet Nam War and adult conformity. The generation immediately following mine plunged into Punk, which made of this a political attack on all of the adult system, its economics, its class oppression, its blind acceptance of every evil of modernity and stability. 

All of these perceptions and rejections -- what Salinger so uniquely portrayed in his character's objection to "phonies" -- all depend on childhood's freedom from having to adjust to the responsibilities and obligations of making one's way in the working world, that world of selling out one's principles to work with other sell-outs from other cultural moments and from other social backgrounds, working with fellow adults who don't share your music, your politics, your adolescent cultural moment. 

The transition from a culture where your cohort supports your most minute sensibilities and perceptions to a culture where that support is entirely lost, where your principles and tastes must be compromised -- and compromise was exactly what the purity and absoluteness of adolescent culture most rejected -- that transition in the age of social media, seems to have been lost. 

When friends my age complain that the young are not just all looking down at their phones but have their ears plugged with buds, I wonder whether those young adults have merely found a way to preserve the purity of their adolescent standards, tastes, values and meaning. 

TV in the 1960's was a kind of babysitter and social and cultural engagement. but it wasn't interactive beyond changing the channel among few options -- 2,4,5,7,9,11 and later 13. Social media is vastly more interactive. There's something strange about everyone assuming that social media isn't social. It's obviously social, it's just that it looks like it's excluding the in-person. It's visible presentation is anti-social. But once you look into what's on the phone, oh, that's not just social, it's also interactively informational. Hasn't anyone noticed that gamers are incredibly sharp and fast and brilliant at dealing with the world? 

Most recently, social media is blamed on fertility decline. It's not that couples are having fewer children, it's that there are fewer couples and that's because people prefer to stay at home with the internet and games and movies than connect in person. But couldn't it be that they are too connected -- too connected with their clique, that adolescent support group with its finger on the cultural pulse? 

If I had such a support group, I too would put on ear buds and shut out the rest of the world too. Who wants to socialize with people you don't identify with and who aren't hip enough to get your identity?