Consider the following two situations:
In the first scenario, a man and a woman sit across from each other at a romantically lit table in a fancy restaurant texting – looking down and talking to others, maybe each other – but rarely glancing up except to place drink and food orders.
In the second, a mother walks into a diner joining friends for lunch, carrying her 2-year-old. She sets him down on the table, hands him a tablet device, takes out her smartphone, searches messages and half-listens for only occasional moments of adult conversation squeezed in between swooshes across their collective screens.
What ties them together? The distance between them. Both scenarios reflect a new phenomenon of the digital age growing ever more rapidly.
It’s called “virtual distance.”
Changing rules of interaction
Virtual distance is a psychological and emotional sense of detachment that accumulates little by little, at the subconscious or unconscious level, as people trade off time interacting with each other for time spent “screen skating” (swiping, swishing, pinching, tapping and so on).
It is also a measurable phenomenon and can cause some surprising effects. For example, when virtual distance is relatively high, people become distrustful of one another. One result: They keep their ideas to themselves instead of sharing them with others in the workplace – a critical exchange that’s necessary for taking risks needed for innovation, collaboration and learning.
Another unintended consequence: People disengage from helping behaviors – leaving others to fend for themselves causing them to feel isolated, often leading to low job satisfaction and organizational commitment.
Virtual distance research underscores that the rules of interaction have changed. It changes the way people feel – about each other, about themselves and about how they fit into the world around them.
But the demonstrated impacts measured among adults seem comparatively benign when considered against what it might be doing to children.
Virtual distance, growing child
Kids learn by looking at loved ones closely, watching what they do and listening to how they say things. The actions and behaviors parents model have a profound and lasting impact upon a child’s development. For example, the “serve and return” of interactions between children and adults is a key factor in child-cognitive development.
If much of what the child notices about the world comes from a small screen where only a shallow representation is available, what do children have to mimic? How much practice do they get developing human capacities crucial to establishing emotional ease and social sensibilities?
Virtual distance is a game-changer when it comes to human relations. When technology is used as an agent for relationships, in some cases it can be beneficial. However, when technology is used purposelessly as a default, it doesn’t just squeeze out sophisticated interpersonal interactions, it changes the nature of what’s left.
Purposeful use of technology can support children’s learning; but, when technology becomes either a substitute or a proxy for relationships, language development in children can be held back. Communication becomes the transfer of impersonal information instead of the sharing of a passion. This can have an impact on language development for kids, but it can have affects on other aspects of our lives.
These kinds of skills – self-discipline, ethical understanding and interpersonal communication, social ability and critical thinking (among others) – are what UNESCO calls “transversal competencies.” And they can be impaired through virtual distance.
When the ripple effects of actions and inactions seem to go no farther than the screen, empathy and collaborative skills can be difficult to develop. For example, children seem to have trouble looking into other people’s eyes and are less able to hold conversations.
As connectivity increases, connectedness can lose out.
Karen Sobel Lojeski is an assistant professor of technology and society at Stony Brook University.
Martin Westwell is a professor of the science of learning at Flinders University.
