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Meghan, being connected to lost friends via Facebook can be vertiginous—but I bet it doesn't make a person feel quite as lost in time as being connected to a former BFF via reality TV. I'm thinking specifically of The Hills, which starts its fifth and likely final season tonight and has always been, at its core, a long drama about the disintegration of female friendship.
When the show began, protagonists Lauren and Heidi were besties. But it really took off in the ratings during its second season, when the duo basically broke up because Heidi got herself a truly terrible boyfriend. In the two and a half seasons since, other story lines—plus bathing suits, over-determined stares, a tension between "reality" and reality, and the meta-joy of watching celebrity be created in real time—have held the audience's interest, but Lauren and Heidi have always been the A-plot, conveniently running into each other, and shedding many mascara-laden tears, just in time for season premieres and finales.
Losing a best friend, whether due to drifting, fighting, or a cad named Spencer, is something most adolescent girls know about; that's why The Hills has always been "relatable" even though it stars a bunch of space aliens dressed as Barbie dolls. But when most regular folks irrevocably spar with a friend, they don't have to run into her, on camera, for the next three years. Talk about being stuck in time. No wonder Lauren decided she was done filming the series. Of course, even after the cameras leave, she'll still be receiving status updates from Heidi—the two of them are almost certainly Facebook friends.
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I always feel queasy about such studies, Ann, because of the potential problem you mentioned, namely fatalism. These researchers are writing about the circumstances of poverty, which puts them on the traditional left of the poverty and social policy spectrum. But I'm not sure the effect is all that different from Charles Murray, who made many of us furious when he argued that differences in I.Q. were enduring and a predictor of success. Unlike Murray, the latest crop of brain researchers are careful to steer clear of race issues, or use words such as innate. Instead, they have recast the evils of poverty in the latest neutral neuroscience language. The NAS studies you mention focus on "cognitive development," and "working memory." Still, in reading the study one feels like by age 3 or 4, some permanent architecture has been erected that can't be undone.
In his great book, Whatever It Takes, Paul Tough does a wonderful summary of all the studies that come to a similar conclusion as the one you mentioned. The gist is that early intervention is crucial, because the circumstances of poverty leave children farther and farther behind. I suppose one can't elide or ignore this fact. And Tough's book is about a program—the Harlem Enterprise Zone—that grapples with the evidence. But that program is so comprehensive and well, expensive, that I can't help but think that in this economy, it won't be replicated so easily.
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I’m really glad Kai Wright wrote about a boarding school experiment for kids in poor public schools. He frets about disconnecting teens from their families—which could have particularly pernicious effects on black households. I dissent: Having attended boarding school hundreds of miles from home from age 14 on, I think the experience is well worth it. All other things (East Coast WASP culture, cough, cough) being equal, boarding school provides first-class, real-time instruction on how to fend for yourself—setting your own bedtime, developing study skills on your own, managing money—at an age when these skills are most prone to underdevelopment, perhaps losing out to after-school deliberations over whether to get plain or pepperoni from the local slice joint.
I don't know tons about the sleepaway plan (read the Time piece), but Barack Obama has already come out and said that he favors a longer school day and school year (American kids spend less time in school than kids in just about any industrialized nation). Why not take it a step further and institute the faintly Colonial, but more rigorous six-day school week I had in high school?
The big knock on boarding school, actually, seems to come from clingy parents:
"It sounds very exciting, but the devil is in the details," says Ellen Bassuk, president of the National Center on Family Homelessness in Newton, Mass. "What's it like to separate a third- or fifth-grader from their parents?"
My parents left for boarding school in Nigeria at age 11, and so at 14 I was definitely not allowed to whine about my “disconnected” educational experience. I know every child is different—but I think the option of greater discipline (and deeper relationships with teachers) should be available to more children, particularly from underserved and underperforming school districts. Maybe I'll feel different when I have my own chickadees, but for now, parents and policymakers shouldn’t brandish family ties as a weapon against what could be, as Kai writes, a “holistic education solution.” What do you think?
(cross-posted at the Browntable)
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A decade and a half ago, a report by the Carnegie Corp., "Starting Points: Meeting the Needs of Our Youngest Children," announced new scientific research that purported to demonstrate the "negative early impact of stress on brain function." The specter of disadvantaged babies and toddlers, their synapses irreversibly damaged by being bathed in stress hormones, was supposed to be galvanizing-to lend hard-headed, not just soft-hearted, urgency to the otherwise familiar calls for social action on behalf of poor kids. In fact, the research had proved no such thing-and if it had, arguably the more plausible response might have been fatalism: Miss the early window for intervention, and we might as well give up on helping boost the achievement of poor children.
An article in the Washington Post today lays out similar story: "Research Links Poor Kids' Stress, Brain Impairment" reports on a paper, just published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that set out to test the hypothesis that childhood exposure to stress, as a result of poverty, leads to compromised "working memory"—short-term memory ability—at age 17, which would help explain the achievement gap. The researchers ran assorted data gathered from a longitudinal study and came up with correlations, but subtler proof of causation still awaits. Chronic stress isn't good for anybody, and it is higher among kids growing up under the poverty line: That seems to be very clear. But to rush to pinpoint specific, and crucial, brain effects seems less likely to be a recipe for well-targeted social policies than for, well, yet more stress.
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Jess, I was struck by the story of Demi Moore and the allegedly suicidal tweeter, too. As you so rightly point out, tweeting to a near stranger about your plans to kill yourself shows signs of disconnect, rather than connection. In this sense, I think Peggy Orenstein was onto something—even if she didn't spell it out—when she talked about a "growth through loneliness" she got to enjoy as a teenager in a pre-connected era who could discard old selves (and friends) with each new step. The irony she starts to unpack is that—according to psychologists in her piece, at least—many kids seem to find connectivity more lonely than being alone. All those "friends" reporting on their activity can make you feel even more like an isolated weirdo when you're down.
I'm sure tons of psychologists are studying Facebook as social phenomenon. One question I have is about how Facebook plays with your sense of time. I suspect it messes with eveyone's sense of time, but perhaps it has been especially odd for those of us in our 30s and 40s who had already gone through the process of letting go of old friends when ... voilà! There they were, friending us again, flooding our news feed with their status updates about kids, husbands, wives, work, American Idol. Sometimes I find it reassuring; at other times, extremely destabilizing, a vortex forcing me to contemplate years gone by, loves lost, friends I let go of without fully intending to. I may have had a higher-than-usual dose of this of late because my mother died at Christmas, and she was the head of my middle school. So I was flooded with messages from old friends (now new "friends") about her. It was extremely reassuring at the time, I have to say: It made me feel that life has some continuity and, well, enduring connection, especially since many of these notes were about my mother's influence on their lives. But at less stressful moments, I'm sometimes shaken to glimpse a photo of an old lost kindred spirit on my feed. ... What would Anne of Green Gables have thought? The other day at brunch, a slightly older friend talked about being pulled into this same vortex, becoming almost depressed by this reminder of times past, selves left behind, there on his screen, updating away, hour after hour. It's a strange kind of connection, that's so far. Sometimes I have an almost physical need to touch the screen and get past the pixels.
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It was big Web news on Friday when Demi Moore responded to an allegedly suicidal tweeter, who had written the actress an online message via Twitter, threatening to kill herself. Moore, along with other Twitter users, tracked the woman who wrote the message to San Jose, California, and many called the police there.* That woman is currently under psychiatric care. Today, there is another story of a suicide intervention via social networking, this time using Facebook. According to the Daily Mail, a 16-year-old boy from Oxford was chatting via Facebook with a Maryland girl when he started talking about suicide and wrote, "I’m going away to do something I’ve been thinking about for a while then everyone will find out." The Maryland girl smartly told her parents, who contacted the British Embassy in D.C., who then called Scotland Yard. The police eventually found the boy, who was alive but had overdosed on pills.
All of this brings me back to an earlier point I made about Peggy Orenstein's essay on Facebook. She argued that teens today will miss out on "growth through loneliness" because they're constantly in contact with other people. For these people to make threats of suicide to virtual strangers shows a profound disconnect, rather than a feeling of satisfying interpersonal interaction. If you need Demi Moore to save you from yourself, you're a very sad person indeed.
Correction, April 6, 2009: in the original post, it was incorrectly stated that the Twitter was traced to San Diego, CA.
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Could it really be that the Sarah Palin haters are getting exactly what they predicted in the aftermath of Bristol Palin's teenage pregnancy? First Bristol and Levi Johnston called off the wedding. Now they are using the knives of his Tyra Banks appearance and her press release to slash each other. It's like I-told-you-so catnip. When Bristol did her interview with Greta after the baby's birth, I was on the side of seeing something real there. But this latest round is all tabloid parody, down to the high-road claim that Bristol is busy "advocating abstinence." Actually her crackup with Levi is a public service announcement about teen pregnancy.
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