Technology Kills---Rising Cell Phone/Social Media Use Creates a Loss of Empathy and a Rise in Loneliness and Anger

I found this sponsored link on Bloomberg this AM Decline in Human Empathy Creates Global Risks in the 'Age of Anger' on the damage to humanity from the use of cell phones and other new technologies. Basically they are  making us less empathetic and more  lonely and angry. It is a summary of the 'World Economic Forum: Global Risks Report 2019. It does appear to refer to some new research that I will try and access.

As I have been saying for over a decade TECHNOLOGY KILLS. Click on the Labels Section below to read some of my posts on this. Cell phones, social media and other technologies are hollowing out our souls. My upcoming book due out in September Everything Has Karma, Learning to Embrace Our Interconnectedness goes into much more detail on this.

Below are a few quotes from the article.

 Decline in Human Empathy Creates Global Risks in the 'Age of Anger'

Our interconnected world has never had more lonely, angry people. Is technology responsible for a decline in human empathy?

As today’s economy grows more interconnected, a new global phenomenon has emerged: the growing number of people who feel disconnected and isolated.

Technology is a complex factor in rising levels of anger and loneliness. The Global Risk Report notes that in a recent study, technology was cited as a major cause of loneliness and social isolation by 58 percent of survey respondents in the United States and 50 percent in the United Kingdom. But the same survey found that social media makes it easier for people to “connect with others in a meaningful way” and that lonely people were no more likely to use social media.  

ervasive digital technology has also blurred the boundary between the workplace and home. Work-related emails often start before office hours and continue long after close of business. A 2016 study by Pew Research Center found that nearly one-third of American adults never turn off their smartphones.

Even as professional pressures increasingly encroach upon private life, people often don’t have traditional support networks at home. The percentage of single-person households in the U.K. has almost doubled over the last 50 years, with similar increases in the U.S., Germany and Japan. In urban capitals, the number of “solitaries” is even higher: 50 percent in Paris, 60 percent in Stockholm. In Midtown Manhattan, 94 percent of households are single-person.

Urbanization weakens social bonds not just in cities, but also in the communities and households that migrant workers leave behind, and growing social isolation is a trend in established and emerging economies alike. The proportion of people feeling lonely in the U.K. climbed to 22 percent in 2017 from an average of 17 percent in 2014-2016, with a sharp drop in the number of people who reported never feeling lonely, according to a survey published by the Cabinet Office.

These results mirror those of a study in American Sociological Review that looked at the number of close friends that people have. In 1985, the average number of close friends was 2.9; by 2004 it was 2.1. The percentage of people who responded that they had no close friends at all tripled over the same period.

“Emotionally, people are quite lonely. We’re seeing in many societies a kind of breakdown of family, or connection with family,” Scott says. “I think it’s also a demographic thing; younger people are more tuned into using technology and social media, and to live in a world talking to machines through chatbots. That can create all sorts of emotions of fear and frustration, and in some cases that frustration can get expressed as anger.”

Individual psychological and emotional problems can become collective concerns when loneliness and frustration meet populist and identity politics—an emerging reality in what is becoming known as the “age of anger.” According to the Global Risks Report, these trends may pose a significant threat to geopolitical stability.

“Individual harms matter in themselves, but they can also feed into wider systemic risks—for example, potential political, societal, technological and environmental disruptions,” Scott says. “A world of increasingly divided and angry people would be likely to generate volatile electoral results and decrease the chance of solving complex multi-stakeholder global risks. If empathy were to continue to decline, the risks might be even starker.”

The decline in empathy is not just anecdotal. One study of American students published in Personality and Social Psychology Review revealed that levels of empathy in this demographic fell by 48 percent between 1979 and 2009. Possible causes of the growing empathy gap include increasing materialism, changing parenting methods and the digital echo chamber, in which people anchor themselves in close-knit groups of like-minded people. Such echo-chamber effects aren’t always as obvious as those seen on social media. For example, researchers have found that the matching processes used on dating platforms can also weaken social bonds.

Technology Kills--Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

UPDATE August 8, 2017 Click to hear an interview of Jean Twenge author of the Atlantic piece on NPR

A recent article in the Atlantic tells how the iPhone has altered a generation like never before and questions the damage done  to adolescents.

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

The author notes that the drive for Independence and dating and  has dropped. Childhood has stretched into High School--Because their social life revolves around cell phones.

Here are some quotes:

"There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness."

"Social-networking sites like Facebook promise to connect us to friends. But the portrait of iGen teens emerging from the data is one of a lonely, dislocated generation."

"Since 2007, the homicide rate among teens has declined, but the suicide rate has increased. As teens have started spending less time together, they have become less likely to kill one another, and more likely to kill themselves. In 2011, for the first time in 24 years, the teen suicide rate was higher than the teen homicide rate."

"The correlations between depression and smartphone use are strong enough to suggest that more parents should be telling their kids to put down their phone."

"I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology. Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually, and along a continuum. Beliefs and behaviors that were already rising simply continue to do so. Millennials, for instance, are a highly individualistic generation, but individualism had been increasing since the Baby Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Then I began studying Athena’s generation.

Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it."

"What happened in 2012 to cause such dramatic shifts in behavior? .. the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent."

"[T]he twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy."