Latest Guides

Opinion & Columnists

Opinion: Portantino and Social Media

Published on Tuesday, April 22, 2014 | 12:08 pm
 

Anthony Portantino likes Twitter and Facebook as much as the next guy, but he worries that extreme texting and posting are eroding young people’s ability to successfully interact in the real world. The former Assemblymember recently admonished students from Muir High School’s Mentoring & Partnership for Youth Development (MPYD) program that, “We’re losing that connection. So, we have to proactively have more personal interactions.”

Of course, teens aren’t the only ones getting overly caught up in their online lives. Immersion into the world of gadgets and virtual communication is also undermining face-to-face connections among adults. “The neighborhood coffee shop used to be where you’d go to discuss the issues of the day. Now, when you walk into Starbucks everybody’s texting or using headphones,” Portantino laments.

Psychologists have been sounding the alarm for years about the socially corrosive effect of too much social media. And while parents often complain about their kids obsessing over their mobile devices, it turns out that a lot of kids feel the same frustration with their parents. In discussing her 2011 book, “Alone Together,” MIT researcher Dr. Sherry Turkle told the American Psychological Association, “Children say they try to make eye contact with their parents and are frustrated because their parents are looking down at their smart phones when they come out of school or after school activities.”

Turkle also cited the disintegration of an age-old bonding ritual between fathers and sons. “Young men talk about how only a few years ago, their dads used to watch Sunday sports with them and during the station breaks or between plays, they used to chat. Now their fathers are too often checking their email during games,” Turkle said.

Massachusetts psychologist Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair, author of 2013’s “The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age” told National Public Radio that device-focused parents are inadvertently “behaving in ways that certainly tell children they don’t matter, they’re not interesting to us, they’re not as compelling as anybody, anything, any ping that may interrupt our time with them.”

The good news is that each we don’t have to let social media rule our lives. Anthony Portantino gave the MPYD students a common sense formula to keep our human connections strong despite our plugged in: “Social media should never be a substitute for a handshake.”

Thanks for listening. I’m Cameron Turner and that’s my two cents.

 

Get our daily Pasadena newspaper in your email box. Free.

Get all the latest Pasadena news, more than 10 fresh stories daily, 7 days a week at 7 a.m.

Make a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

 

 

 

buy ivermectin online