Marxist Moments

THE MENACE


(corrected)

 

          As an American boy in a Midwestern US junior high school I could not have been less than a million cultural miles from Rugby public school in 1830s England, yet when I came across quite by chance an old copy of Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1856) by Thomas Hughes, I was transfixed. Apart from the fact that the boys wore waistcoats and top hats and drank porter (no Kool-Aid back then) which was exotic in itself, there was one aspect of the story that gripped and terrified me. Bullying. I saw myself as young Tom facing the evil and seemingly invincible Flashman. Because I knew bullying. My life seemed to be made up of escape-routes from the pimply bullies two years’ my senior who went round in gangs scaring the pants off us. I was never actually roughed up by them, if coming close, but the threat was there. Later when I reached 14 I was knocked down in the street by two boys as one pulled a switchblade on me while they said obscene things about my mother. My mother was a teacher at their school, a different one from mine. They left me on the pavement vowing to cut out my liver if they ever saw me again. Yes, I took Tom Brown’s Schooldays to heart. Life was pretty good on the whole but for this undercurrent of menace.

          Social media bullying must be equally terrifying and demoralising, for both boys and girls. And perhaps the mobile makes it seem virtually omnipotent. At least I had escape routes: there is no escape from social media. But though the technology is there now, the impulse or threat is the same as when we didn’t have smartphones. Are social media the ‘cause’ of bullying? Bullying was always there and may always be there: it just has newer, different methods of malice.

          Some months after that last incident I went to live in western Canada and to an entirely different sort of high school, a country school. Gone was the seething tension I had experienced in American school life. We had naughty boys of course but no one seemed very interested in promoting a reign of terror. It was wonderfully laid-back and peaceable. Perhaps because we were mainly country youngsters – and perhaps it had something to do with school sports. In American  high school sports are (or were) viciously competitive: I remember even the school’s best athlete being reduced to tears by a barbaric ex-Marine of a coach – a brute with black hair sprouting all around his T-shirt collar. None of that up north. Boys in the Canadian school were more focussed on skating, skiing, swimming and fishing than on competitive games, which were played indifferently under tolerant coaches. In my part of Canada only hockey was taken seriously but my school never went in for it. So in the world of sport, where my ex-Marine-assault-course coach in America was a macho figure in that school, bullying may well have been in part a kind of emulation.

          Because of experiencing such complete contrasts I came to believe when quite young that bullying belonged to something wider, something to do with the stresses and strains of a relentlessly competitive culture. I would thus not be surprised if it were mooted that bullying has got worse in Britain  than ever before (leaving 1830s Rugby to one side) because times in this run-up to Brexit are more nervy and in a class-war that if anything is tending towards greater harshness. Children and teenagers are as much a part of society as any other group, feeling the tensions their own parents may not even suspect they harbour. To me social media may not always be all that edifying, let alone ‘social’, but I don’t think they are at the root of the problems of their alleged victims.

          A propos, I once likened the moral panic that the almost universal use of social media has engendered to moral panics of the past: the evil influence of comic books (Dr Frederick Werth in 1950s America), of TV’s immoral effects (Mrs Mary Whitehouse, UK 1960s+), of rock ‘n roll and Elvis the Pelvis, of video amusement arcades, and now of widespread accessibility of pornography to the young. (The grainy black-and-white porn in my day was flashed about in the boys’ loo.) Children it seems are so in the grip of games and social media that they sit up all night with their smartphones, unable to communicate with others in the flesh in the daytime, with cognising difficulties and inability to concentrate on anything more than for a few seconds.

          But there has not till now been anything like conclusive scientific evidence to do with any of these moral panic allegations, only anecdotal stuff, blown up out of all proportion in the popular press, which even has child psychologists and educationists believing it. But now there is a glimmer of hope in the form of real substantiated evidence: this is provided through publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Amy Orben (lecturer in psychology at Queen’s College, Oxford) and Andrew Przybylski (director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute). The aim of the study was not to focus on the technology so much as on ‘how social media and life satisfaction influence each other and to do so over time’. They focussed on ‘a sample of more than 10,000 preteens and teens, analysing nearly a decade of longitudinal data from British adolescents’. Perhaps the most thorough and comprehensive study of its kind made to date.

          It would not be true to say that they came up with precisely zilch. In more than half of those they tested they found nothing but ‘random statistical noise’, and in the remainder ‘some small trends over time – these were mostly clustered in data provided by teenage girls’. ‘But it’s not an exaggeration to say that these effects were miniscule by the standards of science and trivial if you want to inform personal parenting decisions. Our results indicated that 99.6% of the variability in adolescent girls’ satisfaction with life had nothing to do with how much they used social media.’ (Observer, London, 7 July 2019.)

          I would go further and say that while children may act instinctively (much like the rest of us, if truth be known) they are not stupid. They are, let’s face it, entering the cyberworld of our time, and are equipping themselves for it, whether they know this or not. Employment is centring on the use of computer and smartphone; so is much of everyday life. For them not to be engaged at ever-earlier ages would bind them to losing out one way or another by the time they reached adult life and responsibility. The problem is one of balance: of engaging with real things like books and art galleries and outdoor physical activities, and of joining in sociality with real friends as well as ‘cyber’ friends. The evidence so far provided by Orben and Prszybylski does not suggest that through social media we are turning out recluses and hermits.

          In any case I have great faith in the human capacity to be bored or jaded, especially – that is – among the present-day and more privileged part of the human race. There is a craze for something everybody’s doing, but crazes either die out in time or become relegated to just another aspect of life’s routine. There’s always something else, something new. Recently by chance when channel-hopping I came across an item on Blue Peter (CBBC) in which a little boy was proudly showing off his new discovery: a typewriter! He demonstrated to an apparently astonished young presenter that you can actually type real letters on to a piece of paper with this gadget!

          Meanwhile we have the deeper problem of a society that appears to be losing both cohesion and the promise of security for the many. In response, the social medium has its political uses too. Has it not been instrumental in informing children about, for example, Greta Thunberg, and thus encouraging them to join her in the worldwide crusade to save the planet? Frankly, the fewer mainstream newspapers young people might read on this topic the better.

          But perhaps a sinisterly relevant kind of bullying is what Britain’s schoolchildren are actually going through: I mean bullying by the State. In a poll taken of NEU (teachers’ union) primary schoolteachers, no less than 97% proclaim themselves opposed to the SATS exam system and to their children being driven nuts by wave after wave of exams (instead of learning anything). (E.g. Guardian 9 July 2019.) In the bad old days of childhood oppression when I was a lad I don’t recall a single exam from my elementary/primary schooldays. We only started taking exams at Big School. If young kids look haunted and anxious to you these days it may not be down to social media!