Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
Volume 5, Issue 5 , Pages 257-262, September 2009

Plugged In: At What Price? The Perils and Promises of Electronic Communication

Article Outline

 

“Anything new must be received into the old.”

—Thomas Cahill, Mysteries of the Middle Ages1

On June 1, 2009, Colorado Gov Bill Ritter signed into law a bill that makes it a crime to send text messages, including e-mails and tweets, while driving. The ceremony took place in Fort Collins, where a little girl was struck and killed in 2008 by a motorist who was distracted while talking on a cell phone. The new law also prohibits anyone younger than 18 from using a cell phone at all while driving. Supporters of the bill were only partially pleased. They preferred a stronger measure that would have required all adult drivers to use hands-free devices when talking on cell phones while operating a motor vehicle.2

Across the nation, evidence continues to mount that electronic messaging can be lethal in certain situations. In May 2009, a trolley driver in Boston rear-ended another trolley while text messaging his girlfriend, sending 49 people to the hospital. Text messaging was also implicated in a commuter train crash in Chatsworth, California, in September 2008 that killed 25 people and injured 125 others. In that crash, the engineer ran a red light and collided head-on with a freight train.3 It was the nation's deadliest rail disaster in 15 years.4 The engineer, who was killed in the crash, had sent his last text message 22 seconds before impact. Investigators suggest this distraction caused him to disregard signal lights, leading to the tragedy.5

Less than one week after the Chatsworth train wreck, the California Public Utilities Commission unanimously passed an emergency order to temporarily ban the use of all cellular communication devices by train crew members. A week later, a California law was passed prohibiting automobile drivers from sending, writing, or reading messages on all electronic devices.6

These are not isolated incidents. The National Highway Traffic Safety Commission states that 85% of all cell phone customers talk on the phone while driving. The Commission calculates that 6% of auto accidents each year are caused by drivers talking on their cell phones, and that 2,600 people will be killed and 12,000 seriously injured in cell phone-related auto accidents this year.7

In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, drivers who used mobile phones while operating an automobile during the period of the call were four times more likely to crash than nonusers, a rate equal to that of drunk drivers. In an interesting twist, 39% of the drivers called emergency services after the collision—on the same cell phone whose use was believed to have caused the accident in the first place.8

In 2000, an influential study by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis (HCRA) emphasized the hazards of cell phone use while driving.9 The Center found no evidence that hands-free phones are any safer than handheld phones. The HCRA study wasn't limited to criticism, however. It acknowledged the benefits of cell phone use to drivers, families, social networks, businesses, and public health and safety. These included “expanded productive time, peace of mind, reducing the number and duration of trips, decreased emergency response times/improved life-saving outcomes, and more effective apprehension of motor vehicle law violators such as drunk drivers.” The Center also determined that the cost of banning cell phone use while driving is about $700,000 for each life year saved. This is 30 times more expensive than achieving that benefit by reducing the speed limit on interstate highways to 55 mph. It should be noted that the HCRA study was funded by AT&T Wireless but was peer-reviewed by 12 leading researchers in the field.

In 2006, psychologists at the University of Utah found in a study using driving simulators that people are as impaired when they drive and talk on a cell phone as they are when they drive intoxicated at a blood-alcohol level of 0.08%, which defines illegal drunk driving in most states in the United States. This risk applied whether the motorists were talking on handheld or hands-free devices.10

After reviewing more than 50 scientific studies concerning cell phone risk, in January 2009 the National Safety Council called for a national moratorium on driving and talking on a cell phone, whether handheld or hands-free.7 The recommendation ignited a firestorm of controversy. The conservative talk radio community exploded in opposition, charging that “the federal government is once again” attempting to take away individual freedoms and stifle freedom of speech by limiting cell phone use. This view ignores the fact that most Americans seem perfectly willing to abide by legislation—laws dealing with drunk driving, speed limits, reckless driving, auto inspections, collision insurance, seat belts, air bags, and driver's licenses—designed to keep them and their families road safe without feeling that their constitutional rights are being infringed.

The result of state-by-state legislation regulating the use of electronic communication devices while driving is a crazy quilt of laws that is continually in flux.11 Currently, five states prohibit all drivers from using hand-held cell phones while driving, although no states have banned both handheld and hands-free cell phone use. Many states focus on certain segments of the population. For example, 21 states ban all cell phone use by novice drivers; 18 ban all cell phone use by school bus drivers; 13 states prohibit texting for all drivers, whereas two states have banned texting by school bus drivers. Many states have no regulations at all. This patchwork makes it nearly impossible to know which laws apply if you are driving cross country and crossing state lines. Uniform laws would help, but don't expect them any time soon; this is a hot-button issue that stirs visceral responses on both sides.

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A Recurring Pattern 

No one knows when the pushback began against the incursions of technology into human life. When humans first mastered the art of making fire, a high-tech development at the time, did some individuals oppose its use after someone was accidentally burned? When the newly invented wheel first ran over someone's foot, were there efforts to outlaw this radical contraption?

Emerging technologies always harm somebody, and they are no respecters of persons. Consider transportation, which took off with the domestication of animals. An amazing number of famous historical figures died from horse-related accidents.12 Examples include Louis IV of France, who died in 954 after falling from his horse, as did two English kings, William I (William the Conqueror) in 1087 and William III in 1702.13 Handel was seriously injured when his carriage crashed in 1752.14

Or take the automobile. Although the first cars moved so slowly they seemed harmless, it didn't take long for the death toll to mount. The first recorded automobile death was the Irish scientist Mary Ward, who in 1869 was thrown from an experimental steam car made by her cousins and crushed under its wheels.15 Bridget Driscoll was the first person to die in a petrol-powered car accident, on the grounds of London's Crystal Palace in 1896.16 The first driver-and-passenger fatalities occurred in 1899, when Edwin Sewell and Major Richer were thrown from their vehicle in London. Henry Bliss was the first person killed by a car in the United States in September 1899.

Citizens fought back in the early days against both trains and automobiles.17 The Duke of Wellington complained that railroads would “only encourage the common people to move about needlessly.” In Autophobia, author Brian Ladd describes how throwing stones at motorcars was common, particularly in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. One brave woman motorist wrote in her diary in 1905 that “a journey by automobile through Holland is dangerous, since most of the rural population hates motorists fanatically. We even encountered older men, their faces contorted with anger, who, without any provocation, threw fist-sized stones at us.” Angry farmers often threw a bucket of fresh dung instead of stones, or they scattered nails or broken glass on the roads. Between 1904 and 1906, farmers around Rochester, Minnesota, plowed up roads to prevent car traffic altogether. In 1909, farmers near Sacramento, California, dug ditches across roads and trapped 13 cars. Worse dangers for motorists were ropes and wires tied to trees on either side of the road. Near Berlin in 1913, a speeding couple struck a wire that had been strung across a highway and were decapitated. Motorists' handbooks in Germany before World War I routinely advised drivers to carry weapons for protection. Both sides regularly used whips.

Some jurisdictions in the United States banned cars in the 1890s, but most of these attempts were short lived or unenforced, and nearly all were gone by 1905. Like today's critics of cell phone use, the car haters had to face the charge that they were standing in the way of progress and were opposing the inevitable.

Injury and death always seem to haunt new technologies, no matter what their level of sophistication may be. Consider robotics. The first fatality involving a robot was Robert Williams, who was struck by the arm of a one-ton robot at a Ford Motor Company casting plant in Flat Rock, Michigan, on January 25, 1979.18 The second victim of a robot was Kenji Urada, a 37-year-old maintenance engineer who perished in a gruesome industrial accident at a Kawasaki plant in Japan. Urada failed to turn off a robot completely while repairing it. Unable to sense him, the robot went on a rampage and with its hydraulic arm pushed Urada into a grinding machine. Robot homicide continues. “Over the years people have been crushed, hit over the head, welded and even had molten aluminum poured over them by robots,” reports The Economist magazine. In 2005, there were 77 robot-related accidents in Britain alone.19

We got a forecast of rogue computers in 1968 with Stanley Kubrick's arresting movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL (heuristically programmed algorithmic computer), faced with the prospect of being disconnected, proceeds to kill an astronaut while he is repairing the ship and disables the life support systems of the crew being held in suspended animation before “he” is finally shut down.

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Socrates' Fears 

S. Georgia Nugent, president of Kenyon College, describes how we seem to be living “in a digital Age of Anxiety [characterized by] … distrust of and antagonism toward electronic communication… .”20 These concerns are nothing new, she finds. Nugent describes how the introduction of writing into Greek culture in the eighth century bce produced widespread anxiety. There was profound mistrust because it was feared that writing would be used by those in power for nefarious purposes. Plato elaborated on these fears in Phaedrus, where Socrates states that the practice of writing, in contrast to speech, will introduce forgetfulness. This is because men will no longer rely on remembrance from within themselves but will place their trust in mere external marks.21 One is reminded of the transition from slide rules to handheld calculators in the early 1970s, when some universities prohibited the use of the latter in classrooms because of essentially the same reason offered by Socrates.

Socrates also criticized writing because of its inflexibility. It signifies only the same thing, over and over, he asserts. If you ask of words anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you merely the same thing forever.

Nugent finds most of the complaints about electronic communication about as persuasive as Socrates' objections to writing. Our uncertainties about these technologies, she says, have almost nothing to do with technology itself. The real fear, she asserts, is the severing or corruption of our human ties and interference in forming meaningful, reciprocal relationships with one another. Nugent has history on her side of the argument. When the telephone, movies, and television were introduced into American life, many critics warned of the degradation of family and community life by these new technologies.

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Subtle Effects on the Brain 

Auto accidents from irresponsible cell phone use are obvious hazards, but other risks of emerging technologies are more subtle and worrisome. Susan Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at the University of Oxford and director of the Royal Institution in London, has sounded an alarm about “the pervasive and invasive quality of 21st-century technology” and its potential effects on the human brain.22 Because our brains possess plasticity or malleability, they can literally be shaped functionally and anatomically by our experiences and interactions with the outside world.

Greenfield points out that when London's black cab taxi drivers are required to memorize the bewildering configurations of their city's streets, the hippocampus region of their brains actually becomes larger, as shown by serial functional magnetic resonance imaging brain scans (fMRI). Similar changes are seen in other mammals. When rats and mice are housed in environments enriched with wheels, ladders, and playthings, dendrites proliferate in their brains and form more complex connections between individual neurons, permitting more efficient processing of incoming information.

What happens, asks Greenfield, when the influence of technology is added to our environment, and when our interactions with the world are narrowed to a two-dimensional computer screen? “According to one estimate,” she notes, “western children spend more than six hours a day at a computer screen. Given the plasticity of the human brain, shouldn't we ask how living effectively in two dimensions might leave its mark on neuronal connectivity?”22

In the history of our species, Greenfield states, we have developed our imagination not through focusing on fast-paced information coming at us on computer screens, but from first hearing stories, then reading. “Will future generations,” she wonders, “prefer the here-and-now, opting for a strongly sensory experience over a more personalized cognitive narrative? When you play a computer game to rescue the princess, it is the experience that counts: you don't care about the feelings or thoughts of the heroine. When you read a book, the princess's welfare and fate is the whole point.”22 In other words, the point of the computer game is the thrill, the sensation, the instant gratification. While reading the book, one puts oneself in the heroine's place, becomes her, empathizes with her. The differences are profound. As a seven-year-old girl expressed the point, “I like books better than TV because the pictures are better.”22

Greenfield is concerned that the way future generations see themselves and construct their personal identity may be radically modified by the immediate, fast-paced sensory experiences being provided in many technological forms. Given the plasticity of our neuronal circuits and their exquisite sensitivity to physical and imaginal activities, “might we elect to remain in a more infantile world of passive reactivity to sensations? Could we even end up living in a world where there is no personal narrative at all, no meaning, no context, just the experience of the thrill of the moment?”22

Greenfield suggests that human experience that is geared to technologically provided sensations may lead to the “Nobody” scenario, in which generic sensations, not personally unique and meaningful experiences, form the basis for one's identity. In contrast, there is the “Someone” identity that prospers with access to family, community, education, and exposure to the world at large. There is also the “Anyone” identity that is fostered in fundamentalist or communist cultures. Greenfield believes there is a fourth state, the “eureka” scenario, which is typified most fully by the experience of insight and creativity.

Anthropologist, author, remote viewing pioneer, and Explore columnist Stephan A. Schwartz suggests that the “eureka experience,” which has long been associated with radical, sudden breakthroughs and discoveries in science, is the direct experience of nonlocal awareness, in which one suddenly becomes aware of the infinitude of human consciousness in space and time.23 This experience is often described as an epiphany and, says Schwartz, is virtually identical to deeply moving spiritual experiences. Schwartz has also found that when people acquire information nonlocally in space and time in remote viewing experiments, the same “eureka” moment is often experienced. Will a life lived in relationship with a two-dimensional computer screen eliminate these extraordinary moments?

Critics often assume that Greenfield and others who warn of these potential hazards are antitechnological, backward-looking Luddites. Nothing could be further from the truth. Greenfield's concerns are based in the latest knowledge of how human brains respond, both functionally and anatomically, to lived experience. She is not out to ban TV, cell phones, laptops, or video games.

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Tweeting Away Our Moral Compass? 

Neither is the well-known neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, and his colleagues, who have recently sounded an alarm similar to Greenfield's. They are concerned that the rapid-fire information that comes through TV news bulletins or updates via social networking tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering.24, 25, 26

In the first fMRI brain study of inspirational emotions, the authors exposed 13 subjects to compelling real-life stories designed to evoke admiration for virtue, skill, or compassion. Brain imaging showed that the subjects required six to eight seconds for their brain to fully respond to the stories. This is different from stories that evoke fear, which is registered in the brain almost immediately. The implications, say the researchers, are profound. “For some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people's social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection,” says coresearcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang. “And so we need to understand how social experience shapes interactions between the body and mind, to produce citizens with a strong moral compass.”27

Damasio agrees. “If things are happening too fast,” he says, “you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states and that would have implications for your morality…. We actually separate the good from the bad in great part thanks to the feeling of admiration. It's a deep physiological reaction that's very important to define our humanity.”28

Normally, life events are, or used to be, reasonably slow paced, providing time for humans to reflect and feel admiration and compassion. But fast-paced digital media tools may direct some heavy users away from traditional avenues for learning about humanity, such as engagement with literature or face-to-face social interactions. “In a media culture in which violence and suffering becomes an endless show, be it in fiction or in infotainment, indifference to the vision of human suffering gradually sets in,” says media scholar Manuel Castells, who holds the Wallis Annenberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society at University of Southern California.29

When the Damasio fMRI study was released in April 2009, accusing fingers pointed instantly toward Twitter, the social-networking tool that limits messages and links to 140 characters.28 With unabashed hypocrisy, CNN.com trumpeted, “Scientists Warn of Twitter Dangers.”25 Another online site warned, “Tweet This: Rapid-fire Media May Confuse Your Moral Compass.”26 Twitter denies that it is part of the problem. In fact, it proclaims just the opposite. On its Web site, Twitter says that it actually “solves information overload” by placing limits on what's sent.30 Is Twitter getting an unfair rap? This question can't be resolved by addressing Twitter alone, of course, but the entire barrage of rapid-fire information sources of which it is but a single example.

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Estrangement from Nature 

Other experts are concerned that peering into a computer screen for several hours a day necessarily separates one from nature. “Technology is a good and it can help our lives, but let's not be fooled into thinking we can live without nature,” says Peter H. Kahn, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, adjunct professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, and director of the university's Human Interaction with Nature and Technological Systems Lab. “We are losing our direct experiences with nature,” he says. “Instead, more and more we're experiencing nature represented technologically through television and other media. Children grow up watching Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, playing with robotic pets, and taking virtual tours of the Grand Canyon on their computers. That's probably better than nothing. But as a species we need interaction with actual nature for our physical and psychological well-being.”31

Nathan H. Freier, assistant professor of human-computer interaction in the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, shares these concerns. Freier believes we underestimate the way emerging technologies influence children's intellectual, social, and moral development, and that we need to design our technological environments more wisely. Freier and Kahn say, “We are not [a] technological species, but one that came of age through deep and intimate daily contact with humans and with an embodied, physical natural and often wild world—and we still need that world to flourish as a species.”32

“In the years ahead,” Kahn says, “technological nature will get more sophisticated and compelling. But if it continues to replace our interaction with actual nature, it will come at a cost. To thrive as a species, we still need to interact with nature by encountering an animal in the wild, walking along the ocean's edge or sleeping under the enormity of the night sky.”31

How capable will today's children—tomorrow's adults—be as caretakers of the environment if they have been shielded in their formative years from the natural world? Will they know it well enough to treasure it? As if to compound this concern, many parents now send their kids to computer camp instead of to summer camp, which has traditionally given urban children a firsthand experience of nature.

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“The Ape That Used E-mail” 

Another casualty of pervasive technology may be human communication itself. This is ironic, because e-mail, texting, and tweeting are widely touted as enhancers of communication.

Ned Lock, professor of information systems at Texas A&M International University, in an article provocatively titled “The Ape That Used E-Mail,” maintains that humans have evolved so that face-to-face simultaneous interaction is the most natural and therefore optimal mode of communication.33 His “media naturalness theory” is based on the physiological evolution of the human capacity to communicate using vocal cords, and using hearing and sight to interpret facial expressions and body movement. His theory also suggests that communication through an unnatural medium increases the likelihood that messages will be misunderstood. For instance, it is often difficult to assess the tones of e-mails and text messages, which are frequently brief and out of context. Messages meant to be humorous are often perceived as cynical or hostile.34

One of most vexing results of instant, mobile communication technologies is the virtual elimination of solitude for many individuals. Many employees and executives feel that to remain competitive, they must be continually available and respond immediately, even when they are away from the job. “The social norm,” says David E. Meyers, a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Michigan, “is that you should respond immediately. If you don't it is assumed you are out to lunch mentally, out of it socially, or don't like the person who sent the e-mail.”35

This has resulted in what has been called the “empowerment-enslavement” paradox, which converts the advantages of anytime/anyplace connectivity to the disadvantages of all-the-time/everywhere connectivity.36 “Electronic leashes” harness many individuals to organizations at all moments of their lives.34 As a consequence, many individuals are working harder than ever, with virtually no time off. No one is immune. One survey found that executives were four times more likely to work on vacation compared to purely office workers.37

The diminishing solitude and quiet in a plugged-in world involves millions of individuals in an ongoing human experiment of unknown outcome. What will be the consequences of the constant blurring of work with personal life? Researchers are already pointing to absenteeism, elevated stress levels, lower productivity, and an inability for some individuals to maintain relationships, friendships, and hobbies.38

Physician-researchers Jamie Spiegelman, of the University of Toronto, and Allan S. Detsky, of Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital, suggest that the compulsion to stay in touch at all times and to reply immediately is a “definable disorder.” They advocate the development of coping strategies to help those who experience the negative effects of multitasking and constant communication, such as feeling uneasy or guilty when they turn their devices off.34

“[T]he key,” says Meyers, “is to make sure this technology helps you carry out the tasks of daily life instead of interfering with them. It's about balance and managing things.” But with the advent of smartphones such as BlackBerrys, iPhones, and other models, it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell who is slave and who is master. The smartphone, says Meyers, “can be seen as a digital ‘Skinner box,'” referring to the experiments of behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner in which rats were conditioned to press a lever repeatedly to get food pellets.35 With the smartphone, the stimulus is not real food, but “information feeds.” “It can be powerfully reinforcing behavior,” says Meyers.35

“The smartphone story is as much about consumer sociology and psychology as it is about chips, bytes and bandwidth,” says New York Times journalist Steve Lohr. “For a growing swath of the population, the social expectation is that one is nearly always connected and reachable almost instantly via e-mail. The smartphone…is the instrument of that connectedness…and…a status symbol.”39

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Etiquette 

When cell phones were still on the drawing boards, critics said people would never accept them because no one wanted to be overheard in public having intimate conversations. That's what all those phone booths were intended to do—erect a wall of privacy between phone talkers and the outside world. Today the phone booth resembles a relic from the Stone Age, and privacy sounds like something your grandmother might have cherished.

When individuals permit electronic messaging to intrude into their lives, it often intrudes into our lives as well. A Google search for “rude cell phone use” turns up nearly three million sites. “Rude cell phone users are everywhere—driving in cars, walking on the street, in cafes and restaurants, in the adjacent cubicle at work,” notes blogger Bob Strauss, who offers several tips in dealing with “rude people who revel in imposing their private conversations on the rest of the world.”40

It has become impossible to avoid overhearing the intimate details of cell phone users' lives when they shamelessly shout into their electronic appendages. These individuals appear oblivious to the fact that the rest of us have ears. In situations like this, I often feel like a reluctant snoop. I'm reminded of the Woody Allen line in Annie Hall: “Do you have no unuttered thoughts?” For millions, the answer is apparently no.

Frayed nerves from rude cell phone behavior is now an international phenomenon, and some countries are fed up with it. Although a formal law was not passed, in March 2009 India's parliament recommended that the most annoying offenders should be sent to prison.41

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Voyeurs and Exhibitionists 

Leonard Pitts, Jr, the syndicated pop culture critic for the Miami Herald, thinks a gradual transition has occurred in American society over the past few decades, in which we have become increasingly willing to shed our privacy and reveal our innermost thoughts, warts and all.42 This began, he suggests, with Allen Funt's wildly popular television series Candid Camera, which was syndicated in 1951. The show exposed people in embarrassing and often intimate situations. Gradually, says Pitts, “you and I have learned to live on camera… . Your toddler goes missing and your second call is to a publicist… . There is something deeply … debasing in the all-access invasion of it all, a debasement that touches both the watchers and the watched. It ‘changes' us.”42

Are we to become a nation of shameless exhibitionists amid a nation of voyeurs? Exhibit number one is probably The Jerry Springer Show, where troubled or dysfunctional families come to discuss on television their problems before a studio audience, airing dilemmas concerning adultery, bestiality, divorce, homophobia, homosexuality, incest, infidelity, pedophilia, pornography, prostitution, racism, strange fetishes, dwarfism, or transvestism, with occasional fights among guests. In 1997 and 1998, the program became the first talk show in years to outrank The Oprah Winfrey Show in ratings.43 The craze influenced other talk show hosts such as Jenny Jones, Maury Povich, and Ricki Lake to revamp their programs to resemble Springer's to improve ratings. The latest iteration in this trend is reality television, in which the viewing audience is permitted to peek into the lives of ordinary people in purportedly unscripted situations.

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The Able Human 

Robert A. Heinlein, whose science fiction classic Stranger in a Strange Land galvanized the counterculture of the 1960s, said, “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”44, 45 I doubt Heinlein ever met anyone who was actually capable of all these things, but we can wonder what sort of person might master such broad achievements. Surely it would be someone willing to immerse himself/herself in a diverse, enriched environment in which opportunities for learning abound, including intense exposure to nature. This is not the kind of world we are creating for our children, who are increasingly and willingly leashed electronically to a bewildering array of gadgets, almost always indoors.

Using cell phones and texting while driving, and poor cell phone etiquette may be the least of our electronic worries. It's the subtle, invisible effects of the new technologies on human brains, and the wall they create between the natural world and us that should concern us the most.

It isn't today's technology, but how we employ it that is the main issue, just as it was with fire, the wheel, writing, and cars. How we decide to use electronic communication is up to us. We should choose thoughtfully, for our children's brains—and their future—are at stake.

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References 

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PII: S1550-8307(09)00232-8

doi:10.1016/j.explore.2009.06.006

Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
Volume 5, Issue 5 , Pages 257-262, September 2009

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