Even as social media companies like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube continue to amass users, there continues to be no dearth of critics who doubt the value and sustainability of a service that to-date appears to have little revenue-generating capacity. Since simply railing against the service as being a meaningless social-contact medium for vapid youths hasn’t stopped the phenomenon, it appears that the scientific community is now weighing in.
Much like Hulu claims to want to rot your brain into a cottage-cheese like mush, to be scooped out with a melon-baller and gobbled up (Hulu, an evil plot to destroy the world), social networking sites, according to Oxford University neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, may be contributing to the infantilization of the brain. She worries that “these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment.”
Her argument is that if the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of fast action and reaction, such rapid interchange might accustom the brain to operate over such timescales. When in the real world such responses are not immediately forthcoming, perhaps we will see such behaviors and call them attention deficit disorder.
Of course, without a scientific report to back up her claims, the video game and social networking communities are content to ignore the claims.
No comments:
Post a Comment