old fashioned courtesy in a high tech world

Many people say that texting, facebook and twitter are creating a new generation of anti-social people. I tend to find most of the criticism I have heard to be rooted in oversimplification. I believe that many parents give too much weight to social media, as opposed to acknowledging the potentially much greater power and influence of parents and teachers. It's the same with TV. It is not inherently evil, as some parents claim, a toxic thing I should keep my children away from. It is actually a great resource and a wonderful learning tool, but it must be used in the right way, with parental supervision and involvement. The same argument applies to video games.

Actually, it's a bit like the gun control argument. Guns don't kill people; people kill people. If you are a gregarious person, a kind and considerate person, if your parents taught you manners and to value social graces, then using facebook should not make you regress in the way you interact with people.

I can't deny the observations of veteran teachers who describe significant differences in how their students conduct themselves since the onset of new social media. A professor told me recently that she has had doctoral students submit work with the letter "u" used as a stand in for the word "you", based on conventional text spelling, where expedience is of the essence and many words have been boiled down to the lowest possible number of characters. Voice coaches and acting coaches have shared that their current students no longer know how to look a person, whether judge or audience member, in the eye, or how to have what they used to consider a "normal" conversation.

I have only one son who is old enough to text and use facebook. We let him set up a facebook account when he was 14, and he uses it a great deal to keep in touch with hundreds of kids he knows from camp and overseas trips who live all over the country. I am happy to say that I do not discern any antisocial tendencies in him at all, although there was a time when I did need to address a certain lack of filtering in his online communications. In terms of it being a time suck, well, so is talking on the phone with friends, which I did for hours in high school. If his grades were slipping, facebook would be the first privilege taken away, but his grades are not an issue. As for socialization, well, his idea of what is appropriate behavior is my responsibility. Just as it is my responsibility how he speaks to anyone, but especially to adults, as well as the pride he takes in his any schoolwork he has ever handed in to a teacher. My son can text to beat the band, but this skill does not negatively impact him either in terms of spelling or in acquiring and using an extensive vocabulary. Just as he knows how to discriminate between real life and the pretend world of the movies, he knows the difference. He knows what is appropriate behavior, syntax, spelling and vocabulary in each context -whether that is texting, facebook, school, temple, extra curricular activities, his job or summer camp. So I'm not worried about what facebook is "doing" to his generation. I'm much more worried about what parents are doing...or rather, not doing. But that's for another blogpost, another day.

Getting back to facebook, let me say that I really only interact with adults on the site, not with my son or his friends, although they are among my list of friends so that I can stay current with them. This is reflective of my real life, which seems appropriate. I want to be accessible to and in touch with my teenager without interfering in his separate teenager world. So, observing just the behavior of adults then, I have noticed certain social phenomena during my few years interacting on facebook. I joined but then quickly abandoned twitter, realizing that I am far too inclined to long sentences and strings of paragraphs for that format to work for me.

There does seem to be a diminished sense of filtering among adults on facebook, that is to say, a failure to limit oneself to writing only that which we would say face to face. This is a well established phenomenon in all online communication, whether you compare email versus "real letter" communication or text versus phone, and we can certainly see evidence of it on facebook. I find it particularly interesting to see what happens when people who have never met encounter each other on a mutual friend's facebook wall and voice their opposing views.

My friend, Patricia, whom I only met on facebook and never in person, is a writer. She has her own page on facebook where people who have never met regularly disagree. She finds that generally they are courteous and willing to learn from each other's different persepctives. Patricia's rule for facebook is this: if people don't behave as well as she would expect them to in her living room, then they are given "a dressing down" or their comments are removed. This makes sense to me.

Another peculiarity of facebook conversations is that there is no "tone", which of course is a liability in texting and email communication as well. Just last night, my orchestra conductor and I had a misunderstanding when I texted him to say I was taking a mental health absence and staying home to drink wine, rather than attending that evening's rehearsal. He thought I was joking, but from his response I thought he understood me, until he texted me today to ask what I had thought of the rehearsal. (He had been unable to attend due to extreme weather conditions where he lives) Very often people who do not know me well tend to mistake my tone for sincerity when I am being sarcastic or facetious. At the same time, I really am a very earnest and dedicated person, so the idea of my joking about skipping rehearsal seemed unthinkable to me. And yet, due in part to the nature of the medium, and in part to my casual "ironic" use of it, I was misunderstood without realizing it.

Earlier in the day, I had posted a Jewish joke, which I borrowed from the facebook wall of an orthodox rabbi. The joke went viral during the course of the day, but at that point I had only seen it on the rabbi's wall and I wanted to share it. This was a few hours before anyone was killed in the protests in Egypt, which of course have subsequently turned quite bloody and chaotic. The joke went as follows:

Dear Egyptian rioters,

Please don't damage the pyramids. We will not rebuild. Thank you.

The Jewish People

I think it is fair to say that at that point, just about every Jew in America was somewhat to deeply concerned about the impact the impending regime change would have on Israel and all of the middle east and our relationships there. Roughly half of my facebook froends are Jewish. Many welcomed the chance to laugh during a tense situation, which is what I believe accounts for the universal popularity enjoyed by the joke throughout the day. Some of my close friends and relatives posted responses indicating that they found the joke hilarious. One person, though, a Jewish man whom I have never met, scolded me for making fun of the Egyptians. He then went on to challenge me to consider how I would react if someone made fun of women's rights, or gays and lesbians.

I do have to wonder if would have said such a misguided thing had he been sitting in my living room, instead of snowed in and about to shovel his driveway for the umpteenth day in a row. First of all, if he were in my living room, he would probably have gotten to know me better than he evidently had managed to do on facebook. But I have to say that I was surprised that he had such a distorted view of who I am, that is, who I perceive myself to be and who my "real" friends reflect back to me. As Patricia observed, after witnessing his behavior, and knowing I was upset by it, "it usually has very little to do with you and much more to do with them."

On the other hand, I responded to him just as I would have on the phone or in my living room. I stood up for myself, clarified and defended my position, but tried to maintain a civil tone in doing so. I was frankly overwhelmed and touched by the amount of support I received, both privately and on my wall. People vouched for my positive intentions, for my sensitivity, humanism, humor, and political awareness. That was all great. One of my "friends" sniped at me, rather irrrationally, in defense of my critic, to whom she clearly feels a stronger allegiance. The two people who took shots at me both hurt my feelings. But I have to admit I was a bit taken aback at some of the hostile remarks that were written on my wall in defense of the joke, in support of my position, and criticizing my critic.

Two people offered him a one way ticket to Cairo, where they predicted he would be stomped on, or have his heart cut out, by the Egyptians he was protecting from my joke, as soon as they discovered his Jewish identity. Several people called him nasty names and said disparaging things, said "good riddance" after he withdrew himself from my facebook circle. Perhaps they would have said exactly the same things to him were they all sitting together in my living room. Some of what was fired at him, like "intellectually lazy", seems living room appropriate. But if actual face to face name calling were to start up in my home, or if violent death wishes were expressed, I have to beleive that I would either change the subject, and if that failed, that I would ask everyone to go home. I have to ask myself why I did so little to intervene when remarks went beyond a point I felt appropriate. The main reason I think is that it seemed harmless venting since the target was no longer present. But if my facebook wall is my virtual living room, then I have to admit that I took some satisfaction in letting my friends assault my attacker while I stood licking my wounds in the virtual corner of that room.

Communication on line is fast and furious. Yesterday, I wrote about how grateful I am that technology makes it possible for us to be connected to each other in ways that our ancestors could only dream of. But it is also important to be courteous, and to be sensitive to each others' feelings, even while communicating nearly at the speed of light. This is something our ancestors valued a bit more highly than we seem to do. This does not seem to me to be something we should blame on technology. We need to teach our children, and adjust our own behavior, to use new communication technologies in the best possible way.