“We like social media that enhances your life” says this very web site. It seems Susan Greenfield - director of the Royal Institution – begs to differ. As a backlash against social networks gains pace in the media, Lady Greenfield has been giving repeated warnings of the dangers of social media, stating that it could actually be changing the way children think.
It’s a dire vision of Facebook and its ilk creating of a generation of children who according to her: “are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity”.
By the mid 21st century we’ll all be acting like guests on the Jeremy Kyle show, in other words. Society will be dominated by an entire generation of bumbling sociopathic dimwits incapable of thinking beyond the impermanence and frivolity of a Tweet. It’s a worrying argument given Susan Greenfield is a neurologist concerned with the way in which technology impacts on the brain’s development.
Kyle: International expert on bumbling sociopathic dimwits
However, it’s also an argument riddled with flaws. It ignores the fact that online social media is just one chunk of media consumed and utilised by a generation whose cultural lives are richer – in quantity if not quality - than any generation before. You can’t just lump ‘Facebook users’ as one homogeneous group who do nothing but post status updates. The young people Lady Greenfield fears for also watch films and TV shows reliant on cohesive narratives, while the publishing phenomenon of the last decade has been a series of novels for young readers that are long, intricately plotted and involve a baffling fictional sport.
In claiming that the online social world is instant, sensationalist and without context the ‘Facebook will destroy our brains’ argument also relies on a very narrow understanding of social media. Even something as seemingly simple as an online photo album has a narrative structure and as people are tagged and comments are left that narrative evolves, making it dynamic and more interesting for it.
Every time I see this I am getting stupider
Most of all though, the ‘Facebook rots your brain’ argument relies on the simplistic belief that technology is changing us yet remains utterly beyond our control. A more nuanced view is that we’re involved in a relationship with technology; shaping it as we find new ways to use it and evolving with it. And, as an aside, Facebook doesn’t make young people ‘short attention spanned, live for the moment, sensationalists’; being young is what makes young people like that.
The media we use has always changed how we think not just as individuals but as a society – Marshall McLuhan was making this point 47 years ago in the Gutenberg Galaxy and his theories still make for interesting reading, though apparently your frontal lobe has been so damaged by online social networking you’ll never be able to read a book again. You probably haven’t even got this far down the blog.
If you have though, let us have your views on the benefits and dangers of social networking and the way it presents information. Does Susan Greenfield have a point? Are there bits of social media more worthy of derison than others (I think at FWM we’d highlight the use of instant messenger in an openplan office as technological tyranny, for example). And does the fact that I’m about to post this on Facebook and Twitter undermine my objectivity?
