"Tweet Tweet!" - Teenagers like birds?
Thursday, September 17, 2009 by Hazel Gibson
Talking about SNS and cyborgs in lectures reminded me of an article I read recently in the New Zealand Herald, entitled “Teenagers' big fear: lacking a cellphone”. The article describes a new phobia being experienced by adolescents, the so-called “NoMo Phobia”, which is the “fear of not having with you a functioning mobile phone”.
In the article Sydney-based psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg states that adolescence is “all about socialising” and that mobile phones have replaced the milk-bar as teens’ social venue of choice. “They've becoming increasingly important tools of socialisation, far more important than I think the vast majority of adults, certainly Gen-Xers would ever realise," Dr Carr-Gregg says.
For me this makes a lot of sense: teenagers are going through a process of development in which they are forging a personal identity and figuring out who they are. This process requires a high level of socialisation and interaction with others that act, dress and feel like they do. This hardly a new phenomena - just think of the classic movie images of kids from the 50s rolling around in car convoys together, or kids from the 80s spending hours talking to each other on the telephone. The fact that SNS, mobile phones and instant messaging have become a new way for teens to engage in this behaviour is hardly surprising (nor, in my opinion, particularly worrying).
However it might be interesting to look at this phenomenon in the context of cyborgs: I think texting teens in this article are an excellent example of the possibility of a post-human society. While not as extreme as some of the science fiction-esque human/machine interactions found with the likes of Stelarc, being so attached to your cellphone that it causes a high level of anxiety to be apart from it surely reveals a certain level of cyborgian behaviour? Especially if we note that this behaviour is apparently most prevalent amongst today’s teens – precisely the generation that have almost certainly grown up with a computer, TV, cellphones and other such technologies in their households from a very young age, if not their entire lives.
It seems easy to read articles like Opening Pandora’s Box and dismiss it as paranoia, or pure science fiction, but its not necessarily the more extreme versions of cyborg culture that have permeated our society. We only reassess technologies that become so ingrained in our lives (or bodies) that they have effectively become invisible to know that we are truly living in a technologically dependent world.
(…And briefly returning to the article, there was one comment that I think pushed the article into ‘moral panic’ territory and that was that teenagers are now obsessively texting one another throughout the night (thereby causing severe sleep deprivation), and Dr Carr-Gregg likens this behaviour “to the ‘morning chorus’ of birds - tweeting to one another when the sun rises.”
"The reason why they tweet to one another is to find out who survived the night," he says. "This, in my view, may be the equivalent of a sort of morning chorus ... the kids are reaching out to each other all night making sure that they're okay."
Surely this is a bit far fetched?!)
- Hazel -
In the article Sydney-based psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg states that adolescence is “all about socialising” and that mobile phones have replaced the milk-bar as teens’ social venue of choice. “They've becoming increasingly important tools of socialisation, far more important than I think the vast majority of adults, certainly Gen-Xers would ever realise," Dr Carr-Gregg says.
For me this makes a lot of sense: teenagers are going through a process of development in which they are forging a personal identity and figuring out who they are. This process requires a high level of socialisation and interaction with others that act, dress and feel like they do. This hardly a new phenomena - just think of the classic movie images of kids from the 50s rolling around in car convoys together, or kids from the 80s spending hours talking to each other on the telephone. The fact that SNS, mobile phones and instant messaging have become a new way for teens to engage in this behaviour is hardly surprising (nor, in my opinion, particularly worrying).
However it might be interesting to look at this phenomenon in the context of cyborgs: I think texting teens in this article are an excellent example of the possibility of a post-human society. While not as extreme as some of the science fiction-esque human/machine interactions found with the likes of Stelarc, being so attached to your cellphone that it causes a high level of anxiety to be apart from it surely reveals a certain level of cyborgian behaviour? Especially if we note that this behaviour is apparently most prevalent amongst today’s teens – precisely the generation that have almost certainly grown up with a computer, TV, cellphones and other such technologies in their households from a very young age, if not their entire lives.
It seems easy to read articles like Opening Pandora’s Box and dismiss it as paranoia, or pure science fiction, but its not necessarily the more extreme versions of cyborg culture that have permeated our society. We only reassess technologies that become so ingrained in our lives (or bodies) that they have effectively become invisible to know that we are truly living in a technologically dependent world.
(…And briefly returning to the article, there was one comment that I think pushed the article into ‘moral panic’ territory and that was that teenagers are now obsessively texting one another throughout the night (thereby causing severe sleep deprivation), and Dr Carr-Gregg likens this behaviour “to the ‘morning chorus’ of birds - tweeting to one another when the sun rises.”
"The reason why they tweet to one another is to find out who survived the night," he says. "This, in my view, may be the equivalent of a sort of morning chorus ... the kids are reaching out to each other all night making sure that they're okay."
Surely this is a bit far fetched?!)
- Hazel -