July Editor's blog

"Losing our identities:
the Nobody Scenario"

There is a computer game which, so the blurb goes, has been specially designed to tax the older brain and keep it perky. I don’t need this software - I get more than enough mental stimulation trying to make head and tail of my daughter’s text messages. Take this one, from last month’s school trip to Italy: Ostia zin.

She had already explained to me that’s it all phonetic. So - Ostia is...thin? Is the ancient Roman port spectacularly narrow? Maybe she meant Ostia, seen - as in: done that, got the t-shirt ? But still my mind kept straying back to that picture of a very narrow set of ancient ruins.

“Amazin” she sighed when she got back.

God save these poor teenagers - their parents are so dim.

But far from, as BBC Radio 4 presenter John Humphrys would have it, “doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours 800 years ago” texting, according to a new report, is good for children. It improves literacy.

Frequent texting develops their reading and writing because of the imaginative abbreviations needed, according to the latest academic research. These help vocabulary and phonological awareness.

Hmmm. I can hear it now: but mum, you know texting is good for me…

As we gear up for that annual screen fest which is the summer holidays (especially, God forbid, if the weather is anything like last year) parents throughout the developed world are plotting strategies to lure their offspring away from the virtual world and into the real one.

Bang on cue, the maverick British scientist Susan Greenfield has come to some really scary conclusions. A specialist in brain degeneration and the loss of identity associated with Alzheimer’s, Greenfield says that today’s teens are heading not just for an identity crisis but are in danger of losing their identity altogether. She calls it the Nobody Scenario.

And she goes further: the actual make-up of the brain changing in response to the hours spent in the unreal world.

When you, say, rescue the princess from the tower during a computer game you don’t know - as you would if you were reading the story - anything about the princess, her personality, why she is in the tower, why it is your job to rescue her? There is no narrative and we human beings need narrative both to make sense of who we are and to understand the world around us.
Add spoon-fed menu options which avoid the need for free ranging enquiry, tick box multiple choice options, the death of imagination and creativity, a text language which avoids the need for the verbs and the conditional structures essential to complex thought process and you create a generation of screen addicts unable to link facts together and understand how they are related to each other.

To create our unique identities we need unique adventures, conversations and interactions with the real world around us. But individuality is being obliterated in favour of a passive state, reacting to a flood of incoming sensations - a “yuck” and “wow” mentality where the ability to make connections is entirely lost.

A generation which won’t be able to build the mental framework necessary to link actions to consequences - a moral compass in other words.

The Nobody Scenario is particularly scary because nobodies want to become somebodies and those without a sense of personal identity are more likely to opt for a collective identity: within a gang, for example, or political or religious extremist group. Fundamentalism is, after all, the suppression of uniqueness.

Greenfield’s hypothesis gets worse. The constant “hits” of wham bam computer games promote the addictive over-release of the brain’s natural feel good chemical, dopamine. The brain is a supremely malleable organ and excessive dopamine hits could, she believes, be leading to an underfunctioning of the prefrontal cortex - i.e. an inability to make connections typified by a total absorption in the here and now and an inability to consider past and future actions. It could lead, in other words, to a generation literally unable to understand the meaning of their actions.

She is talking about children who spend between six to nine hours a day in front of one screen or other - apparently not uncommon. Of course none of our children fall into this category. Do they?

Go on: count the hours.

One of my concerns about particularly, hand held computer games, has always been the effect on the eyesight of scowling at tiny screens for hours. But I’ve just unpacked a box of my childhood books, saved for my own children’s long summer holidays, and had to go in search of a magnifying glass. The writing is miniscule - far smaller than your average text message . Ditto all those old Penguins, price 1/- , inherited from my mother. No wonder we didn’t have any holes in the ozone layer in those days - one tree must have been enough for an entire print run. It’s a wonder that those of us who spent eight summer weeks with our nose in a book, not to mention all those hours with a torch under the bedclothes, have any eyesight left.