Children of the Screen are Losing Their Identity

How the Internet is Negatively Affecting Youth Identity Development

Apr 13, 2009

A look at scientist Susan Greenfield's analysis of screen culture and how it will affect the new generations' identity formation, as reviewed from her new book.

Various explanations have been offered for the mounting disinterest of youth in the world of politics.

This article will explore one theory that looks at those factors that explain why recent youth generations are less involved and interested in politics than were the generations before them.

Diminishing Youth Identity

Many blame technology for desensitizing young generations from a very early age, thus making their attention more difficult to attract and hold. Technology has seen advances over the past century like at no other time in human history. There is little doubt that this has had an effect on recent generations’ development.

The fact that colossal advances resulting in fundamental changes to the way people live has coincided with the decline in youth political involvement and interest is not likely coincidental.

In her recent book, ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century (2008), Susan Greenfield endeavours to explain the impact of 21st century technology on the mind.

She argues that young people are increasingly turning to sources of authority they have never met, specifically through internet sources. Worryingly, she says they are spending an average of six hours a day in "two dimensions." (Check out this Business Week article for more on how this development is affecting youth).

This lack of reality in a child's life has a major effect on the formation of identity. There is a concern that intellectual activities are becoming obsolete in favour of "a quick laugh, a rush of adrenaline, and the immediacy of the next sensory kick." Greenfield speculates that the simplistic sensory sensations of the screen experience may be diminishing society's sense of reasoning.

Screen Culture and Generation Y

Greenfield makes the astounding suggestion that this generation's great grandchildren will not see themselves as individuals at all. This, she blames on ‘screen culture,’ which she explains as the phenomenon of living life through a screen.

She says that identity is increasingly being eroded as Generation Y-ers and their younger counterparts turn to technology to define who they are. She points to experts who have said that dependence on electronic gadgets may be one factor behind the marked decline in young people’s verbal communication skills.

Meanwhile, at school, young people are becoming increasingly self-obsessed and easily bored, which makes them harder to teach. This leads children to seek refuge in the hyper-stimulation of the cyber-world "where brands are the currency of love and identity, where what they look like and own is more important that what they are."

Attention Problems and Other Possible Consequences

Greenfield predicts that spending so much time in cyberspace will inevitably lead to minds very different from any others in human history. She references psychologist Dimitri Christakis who made another astounding estimation, that for each additional hour of TV per day that a child watches before the age of four, the risk of attention problems by the age of seven increases by nine percent, explaining that this may be due to the child’s increased expectations for a higher level of stimulation than is available in real life.

Due to the rise of screen culture, Greenfield fears that imagination is becoming a thing of the past. Indeed, she wonders whether "children of the screen" will have the ability to understand concepts such as democracy, or whether they would even care to know about these concepts.

These claims are not entirely new, but Greenfield, an established scientist, lays out the implications of screen culture’s impact on neurological development in blatant and shocking clarity.

Before computers, young people were forced to employ many different tactics to discover information; they were forced to occupy themselves with physical activities and use their imagination in their leisure time. Now, homework can be researched by typing a phrase into Google, and leisure time is spent staring into a screen.

The copyright of the article Children of the Screen are Losing Their Identity in Child Psychology is owned by Kaila Krayewski. Permission to republish Children of the Screen are Losing Their Identity in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.