By Tom Terranova

By the beginning of the new millennium, email had forever changed the way we communicate. But less than 5 yeas later, it was already being overshadowed by instant messaging, social networks, blogging, and cell phone messaging. Simultaneously, Google’s Internet search engine was well on their way to cataloging and democratizing a significant chunk of human knowledge. Barring some global disaster, new technologies will continue to arrive faster and faster over the next few decades. These new forms of communication are intended to make us more connected, but many feel they have actually done the opposite and that we are already becoming more isolated, less educated, more narcissistic, and increasingly incapable of critical thought.

Some see these new methods of online communication as merely helping to facilitate, rather than causing, the perceived breakdown in our interpersonal relationships. Recent books and articles have begun to cite studies that trace much of this problem back to the self-esteem movement. Generation Y has been indoctrinated with the notion that  “I am special,” producing a generation of young adults who have a strong sense of entitlement (disconnected from work ethic) coupled with artificially inflated self-image. The MySpace Generation has replaced the foundation of academic achievement and the quest for self-improvement that were the foundation for past generations with a new culture dominated by savvy fashion, self-obsession, and a belief that there’s no need to possess personal knowledge anymore “since they can just Google it.” It almost sounds like a reasonable (if short-sighted) argument, except that the information on the Internet is notoriously unreliable, incomplete, and biased.

Many of us view these new technologies as an opportunity to reach outside of our own social strata and to connect with people of like mind. Others see social networking sites as the narcissistic crack houses where Generation Y goes to reinforce its collective delusion — the one where everything hinges on a $600 pair of jeans and Paris Hilton is the new Albert Einstein.

In an article on Drama 2.0 Show called Web 2.0 Fuels Narcissism, Is Destroying America, the author relates that, “In a classic 1992 study, psychologists Harold Stevenson and James Stigler compared academic skills of elementary school students in Taiwan, China, Japan and the United States. It showed a yawning gap in self-perception between East and West. Asian students outperformed their American counterparts, but when they were asked to evaluate their performances, American students evaluated themselves significantly higher than those from Asia.”

“In other words,” noted Nina H. Shokraii in an essay called The Self Esteem Fraud, ”they combined a lousy performance with a high sense of self-esteem.”

In 2006, a study found that two-thirds of U.S. college students given a Narcissistic Personality Inventory had above average scores — a whopping 30% increase since 1982. Jean Twenge, a professor at San Diego State University and author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before, sees a clear link between the self-esteem movement and the MySpace generation.

The most common negative characteristics attributed to Generation Y / the MySpace Generation include an overestimation of their skills (and of their importance to their employers), an unwillingness to put in long hours, a sense of entitlement, a lack of loyalty to anyone but themselves, a belief that it’s an employer’s job to keep them entertained, a tendency to simply quit jobs as soon as they become challenging, and an unfounded belief in their special ability to achieve anything — but with no understanding of how things are accomplished in the real world. These are harsh generalizations, but it’s hard to deny that many parents in the United States have indeed been lulling their kids into consumerist comas and enabling fantasy lives by allowing adult kids to live at home so that they can afford leased BMWs, plastic surgery, and the non-stop party lifestyle of a socialite. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has been struggling with absolute resolve to improve their lots in life. The looming realization for Gen Y may be that despite their honors classes and film school degrees, many of the 6 billion or so folks on the planet are competing against them for the same jobs — folks who are smarter, more talented, more disciplined, and more in touch with reality.

If ever there was a strong visual demonstration of the power of cooperation and the idea of valuing the collective rather than the individual, the recent opening ceremonies for the Olympics in Beijing was it. Can you imagine trying to get an equal number of college students from the United States to work together with such dedication and discipline for little or no pay and no personal glory in a less than ideal environment? We can only hope that our recent financial crises in the United States (which have put us on the brink of total economic collapse) will help some of us to stop obsessing on our own images in the mirror.

Internet-era communication has made the world smaller and made it much easier for us to stay in constant communication with our friends and family, but at the same time many people feel that the quality of that communication has deteriorated. We may interact more often via email, IM, and cell phone messaging, but it’s much more rare that we use that opportunity to talk about anything meaningful. Recent studies have found that although we may now each have 500 MySpace friends, we have fewer people to truly rely on when things get tough — and even fewer people to share our real troubles with.

Shankar Vedantam, writing for the Washington Post, noted that, “Americans are far more socially isolated today than they were two decades ago, and a sharply growing number of people say they have no one in whom they can confide, according to a comprehensive new evaluation of the decline of social ties in the United States. A quarter of Americans say they have no one with whom they can discuss personal troubles, more than double the number who were similarly isolated in 1985. Overall, the number of people Americans have in their closest circle of confidants has dropped from around three to about two. ‘That image of people on roofs after Katrina resonates with me, because those people did not know someone with a car,’ said Lynn Smith-Lovin, a Duke University sociologist who helped conduct the study. ‘There really is less of a safety net of close friends and confidants.’”

For better or worse, one of the most profound effects of Internet era communication has been disinhibition. Much that was formerly considered personal is now being shared publicly and many people maintain online personas that differ sharply from their real-world identities. John Suler’s online book Psycho-logy of Cyberspace takes a comprehensive look at the psychological dynamics, causes, and ramifications of this disinhibition. Suler presents a much more complex picture than most of us have heard before, explaining that, “The concept of disinhibition may mistakenly lead us into thinking that what is disinhibited is more real or true than the part of us that inhibits. If we can just peel away repression, suppression, and other defense mechanisms, we will discover the ‘real’ self that lies below. Based loosely on the kind of archeological approach to intra-psychic structure proposed by Freud, this notion suggests that the personality is constructed in layers, with more true or real features of personality existing at a deeper level. This is a simplistic interpretation of the much more dynamic psychoanalytic model which states that the inhibitory processes of repression and defense mechanisms are components of personality no less real or important than others.“

At a recent public lecture by Frank Warren, creator of Post Secret and author of four books based on the website, Cybersocket’s associate editor Danny Valle made some interesting observations. Post Secret encourages people to write secrets about themselves on anonymous postcards and to mail them in to be posted on the web. Danny says that, “It was fascinating to see how Internet-era communication — which has crippled human interaction in so many ways — is now evolving to correct its own mistakes.” As we have unconsciously begun to realize that we are more isolated as a result of these new modes of communication, we have begun to adapt them to fill the void. The system seems, in essence, to be self-healing. Danny noted that, “The popularity of blogs has really illustrated our need to connect with like-minded individuals. It’s clear that this connection not only helps us to feel like we’re socializing, but that it also fulfills a deeper need we have to become a part of a much larger dialogue.”

Danny noted that a large percentage of the attendees were under thirty, hinting at the fact that the much-maligned Gen Y may in fact be simply the first to embrace the best of this new technology. In every recent generation, there has been a certain technological divide and the young have consistently been the most willing to adapt. While Gen X’ers were embracing videogames and email, they often left their parents and grandparents behind. Now that that Gen X’ers have become the parents, the same pattern seems to be repeating with Gen Y. Danny said that the attendees of the Frank Warren lecture “seemed hungry for a deeper connection — as if they believed that hearing the secrets of strangers might somehow help them to build that connection. Not with just that one person, but with everyone in the room and with humanity as a whole. Perhaps this is the true reason behind Post Secret’s success. It’s not that we feel better hearing about someone else’s failures and despair, but that we identify with them. And in a world so big, which can be terrifyingly lonely, that can be a real comfort.”

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