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According to scientific researchers, use of Facebook or Twitter might be changing the way we think about moral situations and could, ultimately make us indifferent to human suffering.
Scientists at the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California suggest that the fast-paced nature of modern media, including Facebook updates and Twitter, don’t give us enough time to reflect. Time that they say is crucial in forming emotions such as admiration and compassion, which take longer to form than a response to signs of physical pain.
The scientists offer a wealth of medical evidence to back up this theory, which certainly sounds on the face of it like yet more evidence of the way in which our ‘soundbite culture’ is eroding the values and ethics of society.
Or is it? Perhaps instead it’s yet more evidence of the fact that we are standing at a fascinating time in history, participating in an Information Revolution that will have profound implications for the future that we cannot yet understand.
At times we seem caught between two urges. On the one hand we want everything now; we want it in bite-size chunks and it has to come in a disposable format so we don’t feel too guilty when we cast it aside.
Yet at the same time we live in a culture ever more dominated not only by rules and regulations but by committee decisions, where nothing is agreed without consultations and focus groups. We seem to be becoming increasingly wary of making snap decisions ourselves without deferring to the collective majority.
Our language is full of words that have taken on multiple meanings and pairs of words that have developed positive/negative attributes. So ‘Up’, ‘Light’, ‘Forward’ are generally seen as ‘good’ concepts, things to aspire to, while ‘Down’, ‘Dark’, and ‘Backward’ often have negative connotations.
Arguably to the negative list we could add ‘quick decisions’. These days it seems only when something has been carefully deliberated and cogitated, reviewed by a board of experts and properly tested can it be declared ‘right’. I’m reminded of the hilarious scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the Judean People’s Front discuss ‘what have the Romans ever done for us?
And this erosion of our self-belief and decision making capability it seems to me is a crying shame and very possibly one of the real downsides of the information revolution. With so much information available to process is it any wonder some times that we seem confused? That we feel the need to check what everyone else thinks first?
In his excellent and very timely book Blink, Malcom Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, makes a fascinating case for the value and importance of the immediate judgement. He refers to a wide range of different examples in arts, politics, science, medicine, where people’s ability to make the correct judgement instantly comes from an ability to ‘thin slice’. That is to process a large volume of relevant data that an individual has collected through experience and use it to evaluate a present situation extremely accurately.
Largely a sub-conscious process, it is this ability to thin slice, to react quickly and correctly to situations through learned experience that has arguably enabled our survival and prosperity as a species.
I’m not for one second suggesting the children should be directed to social networking sites as an ideal means of developing their concepts of morality.
But I am suggesting that if we’re not careful we could end up losing our individual decision making capability. We become ever more afraid of trusting our own instinct to know when something is right or wrong and being able to make that decision confidently in a split second. Sometimes we need to do just that.
Survival now may not be about deciding whether the tiger with big teeth that has just jumped out of the tree is a signal to run as fast as you can in the opposite direction or a signal to try and tickle its tummy.
But we should not be afraid of making decisions quickly; sometimes they might be wrong, but very often they’re the best ones we make.
Remember, an awful lot of very bad decisions are also made by committees, over long periods of time with intense consultation – it’s just that when a lot of people have been involved there’s normally more of a vested interest in forgetting about it and moving on.