Notes for a speech on "Happiness in a Digital Age"

By Jonathan Kay

January 28, 2008

Hart House, University of Toronto

My speech tonight is about “Happiness in A Digital Age,” and my plan for the next 30 minutes or so is to divide my time roughly between the real world we inhabit in this room and the digital world you inhabit on your computers and cell phones — because one of my themes is going to be that your happiness relies on getting the balance between these two worlds right.

By way of introduction, let me start with a little example from the digital world — a web site called Club Penguin

I'm guessing that no one in this room knows much about Club Penguin. That wouldn't be surprising, since this is a social networking Web site for eight-year-olds. In fact, it’s probably a good sign that most of the people in this room don’t hang out there

Club Penguin is run by the Disney Corporation. And it markets itself as “a safe virtual world for kids to play, interact with friends and have fun letting their imaginations soar.” If you sign up for Club Penguin, you are assigned a little colorful penguin character whom you can dress up the way you like with hats and clothing and jewelry. This little cartoon penguin is called an avatar. And the way Club Penguin works is that you wander around this cartoon world full of buildings and snow mountains, and you interact with penguin avatars controlled by other kids around the world. It’s kind of like the video game Second Life, except its for children

I spent some time there because I was doing some research on social networking, and it’s a very interesting place. It’s interesting because while many social networking sites are designed for adults and teenagers, Disney corporation specifically made this a place where kids would be safe. The language interaction between penguins is heavily moderated. There are thousands of things you can’t say, including numbers (to ensure that kids don’t give out their addresses online). So most of the conversation on club penguin revolves around innocent subjects — mostly penguins complimenting each other about the different kind of penguin clothes they’re wearing

But that’s not entirely it. One of the things I was interested to see on Club Penguin is that one of the most popular expressions people exchange with each other is "Who wants to be a couple with me?"

Now keep in mind that these are young children. So the definition of “couple” is pretty innocent. You cant kiss or fool around on Club Penguin. Instead, you just walk around together “being a couple”

As silly as this sounds, I think there is something profound going on here. We can learn from these little penguins. The lesson I draw from this is that from an early age, what we all want is human connection And even kids instinctively use the Internet to try to get that connection — even if it is only a connection of the most symbolic type imaginable.

And this will be my premise tonight. Humans are social creatures. All sorts of studies have shown us that whatever our age, our happiness generally relies on our ability to maintain a thick web of social connections. Without those social connection, we get lonely and depressed. So I think the best criterion for judging how the Internet and other forms of digital technology can maximize our happiness is: How well do they serve in encouraging this basic need to be connected?

Let me step back a moment and describe my observations about the nature of that basic need. On this score, I should say that there is some irony in my coming to a college campus and presuming to lecture people about happiness. In many ways, college life, what you're experiencing right now, represents the happiest time of a person's life — much happier (on average) than the middle-aged life full of responsibilities that I inhabit.

An interesting question is *why* is college so happy. Some of it, obviously, has to do with the exciting time of life you're going through — being away from home for the first time, learning new things, entering into adult relationships, playing varsity sports, etc. But I think a lot of it has to do with the campus milieu itself — which taps into some of the basic social needs we've been vested with thanks to evolutionary psychology.

We are all conditioned, in our brains, to operate in small kin-based societies of a few dozen, or a few hundred people. This was what human social milieus were like during the many tens of thousands of years during which our ancestors roamed the African savanna, and so the circuitry of our brains got used to it. Remember that until very recently, just a few hundred years ago in fact, it was seen as perfectly normal for most people to spend their whole life in the same farming village, intermingling with the same small group of people, working the same small patch of agricultural land. This is what we are used to — in evolutionary terms — and it is why many of us find urban life (with all its attendant interactions with strangers, dehumanizing suburbs and long car trips), so stressful: It grates against the natural social circuitry of our brains. That’s why urban planners are such strong advocates of the village model – high-density urban neighborhoods in which people walk everywhere and have lots of random encounters with their neighbors, which is an excellent way of building up social capital and making people feel socially connected with their environment.

(As an aside, I should say that this is why I pay an exorbitant amount of money to live in a small 3-bedroom house in the downtown neighborhood of Riverdale rather than buy a house twice as big, for half the price, in an outlying suburb like Ajax or Burlington. The extra space would be nice. But I don't think it's worth the crushing social alienation that comes from low-density suburban life, drive-thru/big-box commercial culture, and hours on end spent in traffic jams.)

Step back for a moment from this description of ancestral village-based social life, and you will realize that what I am talking about is ... a college campus. Think about all the random social encounters you have with people — in class, eating, in dorms, etc. You are all on this campus to earn a degree, not hunt bison or plow fields — but the structure of the community you've created does succeed in tapping into ancient social patterns and expectations. You may think you enjoy university life for the academics and the sports. But I think a lot of it has to do with the nature of the social connections you are enjoying.

If you are lucky, after you graduate, you’ll have a professional experience that provides you with this sort of social experience. But most workplaces don't — for a variety of reasons:

1) Most corporate work environments are highly risk-averse places that discourage social interaction and encourage workaholism.
2) Many jobs these days are solitary — you work at home in front of a computer. I would urge everyone listening to this speech to avoid solitary telecommuting. It sounds great in theory. But in practice, it is very lonely. You don't realize how much you need to interact with others until you're plopped in a basement, dressed in a bathrobe, and parked in front of a computer terminal for 8 hours.
3) Sometimes, you just don’t like who you work with. On campus, you can pick your friends. But at most jobs, you can't pick your immediate work colleagues. A lot of them can be real jerks.

This is not to say that people who work for a living don’t have social lives. But it’s a different kind of social life. People like me, who have a wife and kids, tend to have a more narrowly focused social life that revolves strongly around our immediate families and the various couples (with kids of a similar age) whom we regularly see for playdates and dinner parties. There isn't as much of the wide-ranging social free-for-all you get among extroverted students on a university campus.

And so a lot of us are looking for a broader social experience – something that replicates the sort of campus social life you’re experience now, a social milieu where you can regularly meet with dozens of people you know on a regular, unplanned basis.

In the old days, the place for this was church, or bowling leagues, or the PTA. But as two-income families have taken over, those traditional social milieus have broken down. The phenomenon is best described by Robert Putnam in his famous 2000 book "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community." The title refers to the statistics, deployed to great affect by Putnam, showing that bowling is still a popular activity in modern America, but that more and more people are bowling by themselves, instead of bowling in leagues. These are shift workers and other folk who simply don’t have the ability to schedule regular activities with friends. So they spend their time by themselves. They are lacking the social capital and connections that are required for happiness.

This explains why so many people are out there looking for that "third place" — between work and home — where they can network socially. This explains the social cult of Starbucks and the neighbourhood café. You don’t necessarily go just for the coffee. You go to see your friends, flirt with the barrista and otherwise feel connected.

Where does the online world come into this? It helps make up for some of the alienating drawbacks of modern real-world life. In the old days, you lived close to your family and friends. In the new world, you have to use your cell phone and your computer to stay in touch with them, because everyone is moving from city to city in pursuit of jobs. Your brother might be in Japan teaching English. Your parents might be retired in Florida. Your high-school friends might be back home 1,000 miles away, or away at college, like you.

A perfect example of this phenomenon is Facebook. One of the reasons I like using Facebook is that it duplicates the sort of random-encounter social experience you get on campus, or in a small town. You can keep "bumping into" people you know through your Facebook news feed — or their photos, or status updates or what-not. It’s all very superficial, of course. Still, you do feel a simulacrum of social connection. That, I think, is the secret to why Facebook has become so popular — and will eclipse MySpace, which is more oriented to creating transient connections between strangers.

Facebook has its limitations. You can't really exchange heartfelt feelings on it, because you don't want your 500 friends to know, say, that you fear you might be miscarrying your baby, or how much you're bidding on your new house. There are certain things you share only with family and very close friends. That is why I think Facebook is best for what I call "second-order" friends, people you want to keep in your social orbit — but not necessarily as bosom buddies. For my "first-order" and family members, I use email, phone or "facemail" — i.e. seeing them IRL.

Like everyone else in the media, I also maintain something I call "third-order" friends — people I wouldn't even consider as Facebook pals, but whom I've met once or twice and who seem interested in my writing. In their cases, I refer them to my website — where they can surf my journalism and photos. That is to say, I relegate them to a one-way, non-interactive relationship. I know that sounds jerky — the whole concept of having different classes of friends likely seems bizarre — but we all have a limited amount of time for social interaction, so you have to prioritize whom you interact with. One of the fallacies that emerged when the Internet was in its infancy was that everyone would use the new technology to instantly become best cosmic friends with everyone else. That didn’t happen: After the first thrill of emailing with people you meet on alt.rec.startrek wears off, people find they don't have time to keep corresponding with strangers on the other side of the world. And so we create social hierarchies — just as we do in the real world — using tools such as MySpace, Facebook, instant messaging, email, special ringtones and the like. Just as in the real world, you don’t want to overstep the boundaries of your friendship with someone. In the virtual world, boundaries must be respected as well.

***

Till now, I've been talking about how digital technology can help make your social connections thicker, stronger and more numerous. Now, I want to talk about the opposite phenomenon – how digital technology can actually undermine your existence as a social creature. This is what happens when your online social life doesn’t compliment your real-world, but actually replaces it

The first thing to understand here, is that, whatever the miracles of the Internet, it is never going to replace face-to-face meeting as a means for people to interact and truly get to know one another. Consider the example of speed dating. If you were willing to do your speed dating online, you could meet hundreds of people per night. So why is it that, in cities all across the world, as we speak people are getting dressed up to do their speed-dating in person, at cafés and book shops and community centres? Why do they subject themselves to that mass cattle-call humiliation? Because meeting someone in the flesh is the only way to know if you might be a good match.

That's why I usually see it as reason for concern when people start sacrificing their real-world relationships to spend more time in digital worlds such as Second Life or World of Warcraft. It usually signals that something is wrong with their real flesh-and-blood life.

Who are the people who are in danger of replacing their real life with a digital life? I'd say they usually fall into a few discrete categories:

(1) People whose identity is so reliant on one aspect of their life that they feel they can only relate to people who share that trait. This is often the case with people who become extremely wrapped up in their identity as, say, someone who was adopted as a child; or who has an obscure ailment; or Islamist fanatics; or who has an all-consuming interest in some esoteric brand of spirituality; or who is entirely absorbed in a conspiracy theory related to the 9/11 tragedy or the autism/vaccination (non)link. Often, these people will become more and more engrossed in the online community that caters to their particular niche because they have no desire to interact with anyone who doesn't share their obsession.

(2) Incredibly lonely, or socially dysfunctional people who feel like they can’t interact properly with the people around them, and so gravitate to electronic relationships, which socially embolden them by permitting them to present themselves in highly selective or artificial, ways

(3) People who are in dysfunctional personal relationships and use the Internet as a retreat. Often, these people are unwilling — for moral or logistical reasons — to cheat on their partner or otherwise abandon their status quo real-life relationship, but feel less inhibited about gaining the intimacy they need online.

There is a 4th category of people whose lives get sidetracked by the Internet, and those are people who become addicted to pornography. Now I know this is a liberal university audience, and you don’t need a middle-aged guy lecturing you about the evils of smut. But porn is a huge component of digital culture, and so it would be odd if I didn’t say something about it.

By my observation, porn has a corrosive effect on men’s lives — and yes, men account for the overwhelming share of porn addicts. It causes them to internalize a certain artificial ideal about female sexuality and of female behavior that is at variance with what they can expect to find in healthy relationships. It implicitly teaches the idea that women should always make themselves available to men when men want sex — and so causes them to become disappointed or insecure when that doesn’t always happen in real life. Porn also makes it harder for men to relate to women as equals because it relies on the conceit that women are a mere means to a man's pleasure, rather than thinking, autonomous creatures.

I don’t object to pornography because its obscene, or even because it demeans women. I’m a free speech advocate. I object to it because it makes it psychologically more difficult for people to sustain the most important social connection there is – the monogamous relationship between a person and their partner.

Now of course, porn has been around for centuries But it’s a special threat now because it's so available on the Net. People think, "It’s free. Why *shouldn’t* I look at it?" And I think that’s part of a larger problem with the digital culture: There’s so much content being delivered to us, part of our challenge is to know when to turn it off.

I remember when I started using the Internet in 1993, it took 30 minutes for me to "do my email" — because there were only 10 other people I knew with email accounts. Now, you can spend 24 hours a day just keeping up with your various blogs, RSS feeds, newsgroups, social networking sites, Youtube recommendations, Onion articles and such.
You have to know when to log out. The overriding principle should be to manage your experience in the digital world so as to optimize your experience in the real world.

This is something I'm reminded of every day of my life. My own digital vice is my Blackberry, to which I am absolutely addicted. When I'm out with my wife, she keeps a close eye on how much I use it. Sometimes, I just give up and tell her to take it away from me — to keep it in her purse so I *can't* look at it. Part of managing your addiction is admitting you have one. For me, it also means acknowledging that keeping my wife happy is a lot more important than having an empty inbox.

It's a lesson I urge you all to heed. Make sure the technology is a slave to you, and not the other way around.

jkay@nationalpost.com