Sometimes you blog stuff because it’s of interest, sometimes you blog it because you just can’t make head nor tail of something and you hope other people can. This is one of those latter times.
Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford, has warned that social network sites risk ‘infantilising’ the human mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity.
The first issue in the article is that she explicitly states that this isn’t a problem that requires more regulation, whilst members of the government have responded that it might be, but that’s by the by.
The main thing seems to be the lack of any form of empirical evidence that these statements are based on. Perhaps there are and the article’s just missed them, but really, at the moment it comes across like a whole load of hypothesis and supposition. As a commenter points out on the article, the whole thing is riddled with ‘perhaps’ and ‘might’, acting as qualifiers to huge amounts of it.More to the point, a lot of what is actually talked about refers to computer games rather than social networking.
This raises doubts in her pronouncements further, as not only is the game mechanic of ‘rescuing the princess’ that she cites nearly 20 years out of date now, but also if these were to cause a problem, then wouldn’t we have 25 or so years of empirical data against which to evaluate these concerns? Yet again, as the old raver joke goes ‘People aren’t affected by computer games like Pacman. If they were, they’d all be running around in darkened rooms listening to techno music and munching pills’.
So, there could be something in this area, it’d be silly to ignore the impact of the internet, gaming and social networking on either individuals or society itself. But if anyone has any thoughts on what the good professor is trying to say, and what she might be basing her pronouncements on, i’d be most obliged to hear them.
