Is Social Networking Killing You?
Posted on February 5th, 2010 by MichaelNew York Times:
Well, no, probably not. Or at least, not literally. But two British scientists have recently suggested that spending all day, and — admit it — much of the night networking on a computer might in fact be bad for your body and your brain.
No less an authority on the brain’s workings than Susan Greenfield, a professor of pharmacology at Oxford University and the director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, told a British newspaper on Tuesday that social networking sites remind her of the way that “small babies need constant reassurance that they exist” and make her worry about the effects that this sort of stimulation is having on the brains of users. Lady Greenfield (she’s a neuroscientist and a baroness) told the Daily Mail:
My fear is that these technologies are infantilizing 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.
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November 9th, 2010 at 8:59 pm
None of this surprses me. My gradfather who was born in the late 1800′s liked to say that you should always leave the dinner table feeling a little hungry.
He was a great man and I miss him terribly
February 6th, 2010 at 2:44 am
The hidden purpose of so-called “social media sites” is to generate personal information for corporations to use in closely targeted marketing efforts. If long hours on these sites infantilizes the brain, this perfectly matches the purposes of these corporations. It’s clearly easier to sell gaudy, expensive, unnecessary junk to people who are conditioned to live for the moment and to believe that transitory material pleasures are essential for a sense of self-worth.