Abuse is perpetrated by people whether or not they have a psychological disorder, but some disorders have abusive behaviours at their core. Narcissistic abuse involves a range of tactics designed to inflate and protect the ego of the narcissist at the expense of others. It can involve threats, coercively controlling behaviours, gaslighting, invading privacy, and engineering social isolation.1 Several of these behaviours are commonly seen in online interactions, and that form of communication is a medium for narcissists.2 However, a consideration beyond the use of digital communication by narcissistic abusers is whether the very form of that digital communication itself has characteristics that mimic narcissistic abuse. Indeed, when the effects of narcissistic abuse are listed: anxiety, depression, loss of self and self-esteem, and somatic problems,1 they read like a description of the health characteristics and ailments of the digital generations.3
Socially isolating people to make them dependent and controllable is a tactic of the narcissistic abuser. Digital communication systems also may lead to social isolation, not only through their well-documented impacts on increasing loneliness,4 but also due to their protean form and impact on one group’s ability to communicate with another. Altering the nature of communication systems between generations of users impedes their ability to interact; and using, in essence, different systems produces different experiences, generating further blockages to mutual understanding. In this way, rapidly changing digital communication systems both disrupt the ability to communicate, and negatively impact shared meanings of expressions5.
Communicational alienation ticks some boxes for narcissistic abuse,1 and can result in generational alienation. Presciently, one horror projected in 1984, by George Orwell, was such a language-based intergenerational alienation. There are several ways in which one set of people can be alienated from another through digital communication. This can be through changing practices in the style of communication; or, at a deeper level, changes to the shared meanings of terms, making mutual understanding difficult.
Younger people frequently share descriptions (although not necessarily analyses) of their feelings, opinions, and experiences through selfies on social media. In contrast, middle-aged people are less likely to use digital communication in this way,5 tending to use it for transmitting information (or for keeping an eye on their younger people). As a result of these differing uses, younger people often feel it easier to communicate with other younger people, and the subsequent lack of contact with other age groups limits the scope for intergenerational influence and understanding.5
The ways in which digital communication encourages short communications affect the types of things that are expressed and transmitted. What is thought appropriate to comment on and ask about, as well as the expected speed of replies, can be shaped by experiences with such systems. The anecdotal impression held by middle-aged people of younger people being overly dependent and demanding may well reflect communication styles developed through social media use. One practical impact is to reduce the perceived usefulness of younger people in the workplace, as their focus on digital communication media fails to prepare them to appreciate the diversity in relationships and communication styles across other age groups.6
However, alienating effects of digital communication may be traced to sources beyond generational differences in experiences and expectations; these have existed from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, long before the digital age.7 New communication systems shape linguistic use and meaning—language. The ways in which new forms of expression and understanding are developed and accepted within new communication modes are complex matters. Literature exists on the interactions within social groups leading to the development of new forms of expression, which draws heavily on Giddens’ notions of structualisation.8 A key point is when language becomes so new and alien as not to be understandable by people outside that group. This point has previously been investigated by evolutionary analyses of the development of dialects and languages9—but the timescales are radically different in a digital world, which makes change more rapid, adaptation more challenging, and alienation more likely.
Subtle and/or difficult concepts, be they informational or emotional, are not well-suited for transmission by digital media or, at least, cannot be understood in any traditional sense without fully comprehending the mode of communication used.10 Consequently, these aspects of life may not be jointly experienced by people with varying familiarities with digital communication, meaning their core experiences and expectations may not be shared. Perceiving and understanding the world differently from others have been noted by those who have undergone narcissistic abuse involving social isolation.11 Experiencing everything as an isolated person, who interacts with the world in only the ways allowed by another, has profound effects on any subsequent ability to interact with others,11 as shared experiences and understandings have been eroded. This may be one way to understand intergenerational alienation in the digital age, as successive groups of people become communicationally estranged. Although it cannot be claimed that language determines all perception and experience, as suggested by a Whorfian hypothesis, it certainly plays a role.
It could be argued that the form of communication has always affected the development of languages. For example, linguistic changes can be charted through an analysis of personal letters, as has been done for the change in the use of ‘th’ and ‘s’ in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Britain, with the concomitant changes in meaning, understanding, and orientation to others.12 However, these changes occurred over a period of a century, during which time a single primary form of interpersonal communication, the letter, remained largely unaltered. This is not the case in the rapid digital age.
While all age groups become disconnected from one another in these ways, the results of alienation appear more strongly for younger generations, who report more psychological signs of digital alienation, consistent with the impacts of social alienation, than middle-aged people.3 This may reflect the young’s relative vulnerability and their need for guidance from older heads, which, of course, is not felt so strongly in reverse. The situation for older people is quite different in comparison to the middle-aged, and more like that of the younger people, but for entirely different reasons.13
All of this suggests that rapidly changing modes of communication are adding to the psychological burden for those who are most engaged with this form of communication—younger people. The constant revolution in different forms of digital communication provides an unstable base for interpersonal understanding, and is rich fertiliser for alienation. The question begged is: Who benefits most from this form of generational abuse—a form that looks very similar to strategies employed by narcissists?
