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Dancing With The Devil
Written for the Bradford Media Museum Archive, March 2010, in response to the short film ‘Immersion’ at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfOUhwhdUV0
There’s a delightful term used by developmental psychologists to describe the two-way traffic between babies and their mothers: ‘the dance of communication’.
Human beings reached the top of the evolutionary tree because we’re such a successful social species – we work together to overcome difficulties. So from birth we’re genetically programmed to seek out – and respond to – eyes and faces, gradually working out how our fellow humans tick. Since mothers are also naturally concerned to understand and respond to their babies, the process is mutually rewarding. The more mother and baby interact, the fitter the child will be to engage in communicatory dances with others as the years go by.
This was my first thought when I watched Robbie Cooper’s film of computer gamers: It’s a dance of communication. You can see it in their eyes. Watching and responding, watching and responding. But it’s not another human being they’re dancing with, it’s a machine. Wow!
And here’s another Wow. The second reason for our species’ success is our amazing talent for controlling our physical environment. Babies are primed for that too. They have an innate drive to make sense of – and try to dominate – the world around them. To look and listen for patterns and discrepancies, to reach and grasp for objects (the opposable thumb comes in useful here), to seek understanding through trial and error.
The players do that too. See the concentration in their eyes, the fierce determination to solve the problem, grasp the tool, achieve dominion. The joy when the machine rewards their efforts.
This game hits every psychological button in the Cro-Magnon brain.
The Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen labels these two fundamental human drives E and S: E for empathy, S for systemizing. Unless something goes dreadfully wrong as the brain develops, both come naturally to human beings, and we make use of them all our lives.
Interestingly, over the last hundred years we’ve got better and better at systemizing. As a species, we do about a third as well again on IQ tests (pure systemizing) than our forebears in the early 20th century. And Steve Johnson, in his book Everything Bad is Good For You reckons computer games are making us better at it every year.
I’m sure he’s right. Indeed, we’ve become supreme S-type thinkers, and our world now teems with clever systems. Economic systems, political systems, education systems… and on and on and on.
Trouble is, we don’t seem to be getting better at empathizing. And unless people can collaborate to make a system work, it isn’t worth the program it’s written in. So our economic system collapses. Our political system becomes corrupt. Our education system churns out graduates without a grain of common sense… and on and on and on.
As the author of Toxic Childhood: how modern life is damaging our children…and what we can do about it I’ve been labelled a Luddite, a technophobe, a kill-joy and accused of lusting after some ‘non-existent golden age of childhood’. This bothers me, because I’m quite the little technophile really, perfectly aware that there’s never been a golden age, and very happy indeed for all those adults who enjoy interacting with computer games.
What concerns me is technology and children. If, from an early age, they tune too often into screens rather than human faces, their chances of developing empathy are likely to be seriously undermined.
Screens draw the eyes, fulfil the psychological need for S-type patterning, distract us from the real world and real people. Computer games and social networking sites can easily become substitutes for real-life play and real-life interaction with real people. This is fine for full-grown adults, but when children are drawn into virtual worlds before they’ve learned – through natural human interaction – to function in the real one, there are bound to be problems. In the last decade, this has happened to more and more children, at an ever younger age.
I’ve also been called a ‘social Cassandra’, and to this – I fear – I must own up. Our species has to recognise, very soon, that the development of human empathy is just as important as the development of ever greater systemizing powers. That we have to engage our children in a human dance of communication, rather than leaving them to dance, hour after hour, with screens.
If we don’t, we’ll soon be far too clever for our evolutionary boots.