ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, March 10 2011

A broader but shallower social network
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

The great Charlie Sheen meltdown of 2011, complete with incessant Twitter updates and expletive-laced online video rants, marks a new Internet-era low. Sheen is not the first actor to go on a crash-and-burn bender in public view. But he is the first to do so while making full use of social media to publicize his disintegration. As a result, his five children will grow up knowing that their family's most humiliating moments are not only a matter of public record but of shared public experience.

Sheen and his enablers deserve more blame for this calamity than the technology he uses, of course. No less an opinion leader than Pope Benedict XVI recently praised online social networks as vehicles for "dialogue, exchange, [and] solidarity." Yet the pope also warned of their propensity to seduce users into "constructing an artificial public profile," "enclosing oneself in a sort of parallel existence" and succumbing to "excessive exposure to the virtual world."

"It is important always to remember that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact," Benedict said.

Dissolute celebrities are not the only ones who fall prey to the excesses Benedict described. A spate of recent studies has raised questions about the impact of today's technologies on the quality — and endurance — of our most important relationships, including marriage. According to a 2009 London Telegraph report, the British divorce firm Divorce-Online found Facebook mentioned in nearly one of every five cases it has handled, with jilted spouses frequently citing sexually explicit online exchanges as a factor in breakups. A 2010 survey from the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers found that 81 percent of divorce attorneys have seen an increase in cases in which evidence from social networks — usually provocative Facebook posts — played a role.

Facebook allows users to reconnect with old flames as well as old friends, so it's not surprising that spouses who spend too much time online sometimes stray. Nor is technology's threat to marriage limited to Facebook. The much larger problem of Internet pornography — which accounts for an estimated $3 billion of America's total $14-billion-a-year pornography revenue — has hit many marriages like a tsunami, wiping out decades of trust and intimacy with clicks of a mouse.

Many family therapists now are sounding the alarm over more subtle threats posed by technology, including the way its use can divert our attention from those who need us most. Anyone with a cell phone or Internet access knows the temptations: Smile and nod when a loved one talks to you, while stealing furtive glances at your text messages; set aside quality time with the kids only to spend it gabbing on the cell phone instead; make a quick detour to check your e-mail on your computer, then look up hours later and realize the walk in the park or long talk you planned with your spouse has become yet another casualty of your need to stay in the loop online.

I recently attended a wedding where a man ahead of me spent the entire ceremony sneaking 30-second peaks at his iPhone, looking torn between his desire to pay attention and his compulsion to fiddle with a gadget. Earlier that day, I had sat beside a father and his teenage son at a café and winced as I heard the soft-spoken son repeatedly try to engage his father in conversation, only to be interrupted each time by another call on his father's cell phone. Last Mother's Day I watched a similar scene unfold when my family and I were seated especially close to another table where a 20-something woman was dining with her mother and grandmother. The young woman spent the lunch surreptitiously texting on the cell phone tucked on her lap, while smiling blankly as her aging relatives swapped stories — the sort of casual reminiscences she may regret missing someday, when her mother and grandmother are gone and her riveting text messages long since forgotten.

None of these scenes are shocking or beyond the bounds of what most of us do or have done with technology. Maybe that's what's so troubling: Routinely fragmented visits and constantly interrupted conversations are simply a given in family and social life today. It seems as if the Internet and attendant technologies are doing to our network of relationships what they already have done to our knowledge base: make it broader but shallower.

We cannot put the genie back in the bottle. Technological advances of recent decades have revolutionized and improved our lives in many ways. Yet for every moment we waste gawking at an Internet cautionary tale like Charlie Sheen, it only makes sense to spend several more considering how our own virtual lives are enhancing — or hurting — the real thing.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is a St. Louis-based author, former presidential speechwriter and television and radio host of "Faith & Culture" on EWTN. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.