Technology | 2009.08.18
Why I welcome the decline of the twittering classes | Jackie Ashley
The upside of cringe-making middle-aged cybermania could be to drive teenagers to try more genuine socialising
It\'s been a classic British summer: social networking and tweeting all over the place. The social networking has, however, been on the beach, in the pub and around the Scrabble table and the twittering describes bird life and chatty passersby. My space is a garden lounger with a book. There are many joys in my favourite west country spot, and one of them is a lack of O2 and Vodafone "connectivity". Bliss.
In fact, the holiday season is the perfect time to reflect on the latest internet trends, not least because it\'s a time when different generations tend to be forced into each other\'s company. And the news we\'ve all been arguing about over the weekend is the Ofcom report showing that Facebook and similar sites have become less popular with the young, partly because nosey-parker parents and assorted other saddo old folks have elbowed their way into the craze.
The proportion of 15 to 24 year-olds using a social networking site has fallen from 55 % in the first quarter of last year to 50% in the first quarter of this year. But the number of 25 to 34 year-olds has risen and among 35 to 54 year-olds there was a big jump, from 28% to 35%.
This is not a huge shift, and social networking mania remains remarkable. A third of British adults have a social networking profile and half of all Britons who use the internet have a Facebook profile. Even those teenagers who are giving up Facebook are still spending time online. They\'ve moved on, but not to Scrabble.
Nevertheless, the changing age profile of Facebook is interesting. It confirms something I\'ve noticed: the slightly desperate enthusiasm among some parents to develop their online profiles. It\'s one thing to be doing it as a way of spying on their children (not admirable, but understandable). It\'s quite another, unnatural and mildly cringe-making, when the middle-aged say they love nothing better than Twitter, or demand that you become their "friend". Thank you, but no. If I want to tell you what I\'ve been doing, I\'ll tell you. If I want to show you some pictures, we\'ll meet for coffee. And I\'ve got plenty of friends, as opposed to "friends".
Friends in my book are people I meet in real life because I enjoy their company. Middle-aged cybermania, by contrast, is just people trying to boast about how wonderful their lives are now. It\'s bald former public schoolboys telling you they\'re into hip-hop. No wonder the poor teenagers are fleeing.
There are downsides to the social networking craze that make me welcome its decline. I gape at the sheer oddness of living an endless parallel commentary-life, not simply doing something but commenting on doing it; not seeing but taking pictures and sending them. You walk to the shops; so you tell the world you\'re walking to the shops. Who cares?
It\'s like the caricature of the Japanese rist with the cine-camera who spills out of the bus and doesn\'t stop to look at a cathedral, painting or sparkling bay, because they are so busy filming it. Likewise, if you are watching yourself and reporting on yourself, how can you fully feel, when everything is mediated? Reality takes second place to a life in which you become the star of your own dull movie, and the director too.
Well, it takes all sorts. There have always been obsessive letter writers, diarists and photo-album collectors, and only the terminally exhibitionist will stick with the fun of displaying their trivia online. But it\'s what these sites can do to self-esteem and friendship that worries me more.
It isn\'t often I find myself agreeing with a Roman Catholic archbishop, but Vincent Nichols , who leads the church in England and Wales, gave a thoughtful and news-provoking interview last week when he said that he was wary about the sites. He made a point not about technophobia, but about friendship: Young people "throw themselves into a friendship or network of friendships, then it collapses and they\'re desolate. It\'s an all or nothing syndrome that you have to have in an attempt to shore up an identity; a collection of friends about whom you can talk and even boast".
Nichols argued that when they go wrong, online relationships can drive young people to suicide. That is very rare; much more common is that they make teenagers utterly miserable, providing a new form of bullying that is hard to track and – because it is completely public to the whole peer group – particularly devastating. The "honesty box" on sites, which allows for nasty anonymous comments, has ruined friends\' daughters lives for months.
Friendships which go wrong, wild nights out that end in chaos, playground spats that get out of hand – all of these are now memorialised and distributed widely. If you are very unlucky, your worst moments, which would once have been private, told in whispers to a single best friend, can end up on YouTube . In the old days, bad girls flashed their knickers, and worse. Now they sextext ; and the object of their fancy sticks the result online and a million voyeurs can get a gawp.
Defenders of all this make the point that at least parents now have a chance of finding out what really went on at that party, or if a child is having a relationship. Well, up to a point, but the savvy teenager will always find a way of blocking prying eyes from their sites. What they seem to be less good at is preventing several hundred schoolkids from turning up to a small birthday party, after one girl innocently mentions the event on Facebook.
You can\'t turn the clock back. But I wonder whether part of the 10% decline in social networking by teenagers is a reaction to excesses and bullying. Presumably older Facebookers are thicker skinned and more able to cope; their "friends" may even be real ones. Some of this craze will stick, and become an essential part of the lives of millions of people – many find social networking online essential in busy or lonely lives.
But you cannot have a full human relationship without being in the presence of the other person. Communication means gestures, tone of voice, eye contact and a constant assessment of the other person\'s reactions. Anyone who knows the blogosphere understands that people spout things they would consider unacceptable if they were standing in the room and couldn\'t hide behind the cloak of anonymity.
Online networking is not fully real. It\'s virtual. All around me, on the hot days and the wet ones, are families and friends walking, talking, sitting, arguing, probing, noticing one another afresh. That\'s real. And my guess is, they will go home feeling the better for it.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]cial-networking-family-friends
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