Another re:post worth sharing. Cultural Offering covers yet another article claiming computers and the Internet are ruining our brains – You’ll melt your brain.
The post includes a couple of great quotes:
“Will Twitter make us communicate in 140 characters or less? Not a bad idea, now that I ponder it”
I’ve written about these concerns before. Baroness Susan Greenfield is particularly vocal about how terrible the Internet is for our brains. See Do Books Matter? and Misleading Analogies. What frustrates me the most is that she is supposed to be a professional academic. Instead of predicting doom and gloom for our brains and spouting off opinions about people who use technology (in a recent interview, she dismissed people who use Twitter as the sort of person who likes to tell their mommy they’ve changed their socks, in an old interview she assumed teenagers flirting over the Internet are averse to human contact “eewww fluids”), come up with some unbiased evidence and fact-based research. In Do Books Matter? I questioned how someone like Baroness Susan Greenfield would have reacted to the invention of writing. Cultural Offering goes one better and comes up with a quote to show this is not the first time in history experts have reacted negatively to new technology:
“…he [Plato] says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember”
Click Here to read the full post.
References:
- You’ll melt your brain by Cultural Offering
- Friday Thought: Do Books Matter by Joining Dots
- Misleading Analogies by Joining Dots
- Susan Greenfield – is the web changing our brains, BBC interview
- The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century by Susan Greenfield, The Times book review
Joining Dots 