Texting: Harmful to the Psyche?
If you have a teenager who can’t eat a meal without texting a friend to tell them what’s on the menu or a colleague who can’t sit through a half hour meeting without peeking at the screen to answer an “urgent” message, you may want to work the following opinion into your next conversation with them.
According to Dr. Sherry Turkle, a clinical psychologist and professor of sociology of science at MIT and author of Life on the Screen, texting for teens (and maybe the rest of us) can be harmful when it becomes excessive.
In a recent interview on Good Morning America, Dr. Turkle elaborated on these dangers studied in her research:
- Loss of intimacy: Teens no longer talk face to face with those around them. They interact with a keyboard. For example, apologizing through a screen, without seeing the other person’s hurt, anger, or fear or any reaction at all has a dehumanizing effect.
- Inability to feel: Kids don’t know what they feel or think. Whatever happens to them, they immediately text to a friend to ask for their reaction, opinion, or feelings rather than thinking or feeling for themselves.
- Loss of reflection: Teens who text excessively have no downtime to reflect, to think about who they are, where they’re going, what their goals are, what they want out of life. They fill every waking moment with text messages about mundane matters rather than the meaningful.
- Loss of identity: Texting teens lose a sense of self for all the above reasons.
For years, society considered parents unfit who plopped their toddlers in front of TV as a “babysitter” for hours on end. But what’s a parent to do with texting teens, who mesmerize themselves by the screen they’re holding in their hands?
At the least, rules may be in order for when texting is and is not appropriate—say during family meals?
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