I had this article from the Globe and Mail passed onto me today and I felt compelled to include it in the many discussions held here about Facebook and its merits. The discussion starts with Joshua Prowse, a 35 year old high school teacher in Calgary Alberta and his decision to fore go his twice daily habit of checking in on Facebook. Interesting in itself as a discussion, it is the ensuing conversation about children’s use of the internet that caught my attention. Some scientists are predicting that our children are being harmed by too much technology. Here is some of this discussion.
The debate about the vices and virtues of the Web continues unabated: Is our Facebook fixation an impending social ill, or the secret to saving community? The answer may depend on how we use it.
A pair of senior British scientists sparked a Facebook backlash this winter by arguing – in one case, before the House of Lords – that online socializing may make us not only sick, but stupid, evolutionarily speaking.
Their research, dismissed as “twaddle” by less delicate Internet watchers, has nonetheless inspired a great many blog lines on the merits of virtual hangouts, and postings of pro-Web papers to suggest that cutting off Facebook will neither protect you from cancer nor save brain cells, but may douse the liveliness of your social circle.
To sum up the research divide: Late last month, Susan Greenfield, a pre-eminent neuroscientist at Oxford, warned the British Parliament that if our tech obsession continues “the mid-21st-century mind might be almost infantilized” by the psychological effects of onscreen friendships. Young brains, she suggested, are being trained to process fast-action, instant images, potentially harming their ability to manage social behaviours off-screen. Drawing a comparison to the way people today rarely witness an animal being butchered but eat meat from a package, she suggested that “perhaps future generations will recoil with similar horror” to the messiness and unpredictability of real-time human interactions.
Psychologist Aric Sigman sounded a more immediate alarm a few weeks earlier by suggesting in Biologist magazine that spending too much time online – along with watching television and listening to iPods during family dinner – was leading to loneliness, and that loneliness has been convincingly linked to diseases such as diabetes and cancer, even dementia. Though his paper never specifically names Facebook, it inspired the doomsday headline: Facebook Causes Cancer.
What is your take on the subject?
