Okay, look, we know that unchecked addiction to the Internet and social networking sites is going to have a negative impact on your mental abilities and attention span, but warnings from neuroscientist Susan Greenfield make Facebook out to be an epidemic worse than the Bubonic Plague and Rickrolling combined.
Most of the news isn't new; scientists believe that the Internet is changing how our brains develop as we get older, affecting everything from how we associate information to how we socialize. Greenfield and others, however, are beginning to argue that social networking sites, video games and other electronic media are doing more harm than good. According to an interview with the Daily Mail, Greenfield believes that such input may be "infantilising" the brain, creating a generation of "children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment."
Greenfield takes her sensationalistic and alarmist views a step further, postulating a link between rising occurrences of disorders like autism and the prevalence of social networking sites.Sure, there are trade-offs. But while, over time, our face-to-face social skills may suffer, studies show that our abilities to filter large amounts of information and perform complex reasoning are improved by using the Internet and tools such as Google.
This doesn't mean that there isn't some cause for concern, just that perhaps we shouldn't be overstating the dangers. After all, Facebook is not part of some plot by Dr. Doom to take over the world. [From: Daily Mail]
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