Ah, those African Digital Natives: Not as shallow and self-absorbed as you think [OPINION]

E-mail, cellphones, instant messages and social media are not only a part of Africa's Digital Natives' lives but are integral parts of their lives.

My two-year old was unlocking my phone, playing videos and taking selfies before he could speak, and now taps icons on the television screen at home, looking at me quizzically when nothing happens.

There’s much handwringing about the effect that this is having on the ability of children to grow up “normal”, and understandably so. Evolutionary anthropologists tell us that human beings evolved in small hunter-gatherer communities, rarely more than 100-150 people per group.

That limit is important; because that’s about the maximum number of people that one individual can know personally. In a hunter-gatherer society, the “social glue” that holds the group together is mandatory sharing. The clever fellows who study these things have a nifty phrase for it – fierce egalitarianism.

Fierce egalitarianism

Essentially, the only way to survive in that kind of society is if everyone shares, because each of you depends on the group for survival - you can’t hunt alone. The biggest sin, therefore, is selfishness, or worse, hoarding food. It’s considered deeply shameful, almost unforgivable behaviour.

Shame is what keeps the system functional, and to be able to shame someone, you need to know their business. As a result, there’s little or no privacy in these societies, and the individual only finds his or her identity and purpose in the group.

But this only works if the group small. The human brain can only process a certain number of concurrent relationships. Once the group grows beyond 150 individuals, you can’t know everyone one-on-one; you start losing track of who’s doing what and certain people in the group start becoming strangers to each other.

It makes it easier to hide secrets, and hoard food, threatening the group cohesion.

Having evolved in small, intimate bands where everybody knows our name, “human beings aren’t very good at dealing with the dubious freedoms conferred by anonymity,” say anthropologists Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha in their stunning book Sex at Dawn.

Cities and sins

It explains why crime, delinquency and all sorts of nasty anti-social behaviour emerge in towns and cities – the bigger the society is, the less effective shame becomes as a social policing tool, “our behaviour changes, our choices shift, and…our sense of the acceptable grows ever more abstract.”

It makes the ultra-anonymity of the Internet particularly pernicious, and explains why even a reasonable, decent, level-headed person can make the most vitriolic comments online.

This break between “reality” and “online reality” is really what characterises the life of a digital native. Social media, for example, is really just a careful curating of the best moments, and a ruthless competition to see who has the best wedding, the cutest baby, the coolest vacation, etc.

Data from Google Trends reveals the number of times the word “narcissist” has appeared online has risen four-fold over the past decade. And the country with the highest search volume? South Africa.

At the end of last year, Facebook had to apologise for its “Year in Review” feature, an automatically-generated slideshow of a user’s most popular photos of 2014. The default tagline was “It’s been a great year! Thanks for being a part of it.”

But for some, the algorithms selected photos of traumatic events. One user lost his daughter to cancer and the slideshow had his daughter’s face surrounded by some holiday clip-art, and he complained to Facebook for its “inadvertent algorithmic cruelty”.

What’s illuminating is not that the algorithm got it wrong; it’s the implicit assumption that photos shared on Facebook would obviously be happy ones.

But are digital natives really shallow, attention-seeking narcissists conditioned to jump at the ping of a WhatsApp message? Yes, but maybe, no.

Someone I know, a through-and-through digital native, works part-time in a remote part of Kenya, a place where there’s only a smattering of mobile coverage and people have never heard of Twitter.

It was torture, obviously, being away from his social networks, and you would think it would break the addiction – it didn’t. Every time he gets back, he’s launches a flurry of tweets, photos and status updates, carefully curating before uploading – he deletes photos that show him in an unflattering light, before uploading the best one.

But these days, when you talk to him one-on-one, before he hits “Post”, he sometimes makes an offhand comment – “Now, to lie to the people.”

I can’t quite tell if he’s being sarcastic, or if he’s genuinely psychologically aware of the deception, and choosing to play the game from a completely detached vantage point. It’s like smoking marijuana without inhaling.

For him, it helps that he also has an occasional physical detachment to reinforce his psychological aloofness.

But I bet if you look carefully, you will find that some digital natives are not as self-absorbed as you think. They are just cynically playing the game.

[Source]