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.
These remarks echo concerns that Lady Greenfield expressed earlier this month in a debate in the House of Lords, in which she said that social networking, as well as computer games, might be particularly harmful to children, and could be behind the observed rise in cases of attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder: If the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of fast action and reaction, of instant new screen images flashing up with the press of a key, such rapid interchange might accustom the brain to operate over such timescales.
Update | Feb. 25: A day later, in a very interesting interview on The Guardian’s Newsdesk podcast, Lady Greenfield was given several minutes more to expand on her thoughts. It is worth listening to the whole interview, but of particular interest is her suggestion that conducting personal relationships through a screen could be having an effect on the brains of users and might even be related to the rise in cases of both A.D.H.D. and autism. In the House of Lords debate, Lady Greenfield also stressed that social interactions conducted through computer screens are fundamentally different from spoken conversations — which, she said, are “far more perilous” than electronic interactions because they “occur in real time, with no opportunity to think up clever or witty responses.”
Lady Greenfield told the Lords:
Real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitized and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf. Perhaps future generations will recoil with similar horror at the messiness, unpredictability and immediate personal involvement of a three-dimensional, real-time interaction.
Those reports were sparked by a paper published in a respected biology journal by Dr. Aric Sigman, a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. In the paper, Dr. Sigman looked at what he called “the biological implications of social networking,” and, well, he was not impressed. Dr. Sigman’s starting point was evidence that social interaction that takes place face to face, rather than face to screen, may be good for your body. In several measurable ways, people who are more social tend to be healthier, physically, than loners. Looking around him, Dr. Sigman has observed that, lately, more people “are physically and socially disengaged from the people around them because they are wearing earphones, talking or texting on a mobile telephone, or using a laptop or Blackberry.” Then he notes:
Time that was previously spent interacting socially has increasingly been displaced by the virtual variety. A recent editorial in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine made the timely point that social networking “encourages us to ignore the social networks that form in our non-virtual communities. … The time we spend socializing electronically separates us from our physical networks.”
From there, Dr. Sigman makes something of a leap, suggesting on the basis of no experimental evidence that virtual social networking, by way of Web sites like Facebook or Twitter, probably does not confer the same health benefits as actual, unmediated social interaction.
One problem with this analysis, as Charles Arthur pointed out on The Guardian’s technology blog, is that Dr. Sigman does not seem to distinguish between interactive activities people engage in online, particularly on social networking sites, and the more passive consumption of media, like watching television or listening to music. He refers to time spent “in front of TV/computer screens” and presents a chart of hours spent in “Social Interaction vs. Electronic Media Use,” which of course assumes that there is no overlap between those two activities. Most telling, as Mr. Arthur noted, is that Dr. Sigman seemed not to take account of how the Web is increasingly used in what Lawrence Lessig calls read-write ways that are very different from passive media consumption. As Mr. Arthur wrote:
Sigman points to a 1998 study that suggested that greater use of the Internet “was associated with declines in communication between family members in the house, declines in the size of their social circle, and increases in their levels of depression and loneliness.”
O.K., that was 1998, though. In fact, Sigman doesn’t really have anything to say about social networking systems such as Facebook and Twitter.
So, until some future studies are done comparing the health of compulsive users of Facebook or Twitter to that of their peers, the jury is still out on whether we will all be killed or driven mad by social networking.
My enthusiasm for reviving old friendships and retaining newer ones via social networking waned when managing information about other people’s socializing became harder work than my day job.
A common criticism of video games made by non-gamers is that they are pointless and escapist, but a more valid observation might be that the bulk of games are nowhere near escapist enough. A persuasive recent essay by the games theorist Steven Poole made the strong argument that the majority of games offer a model of play which is oppressively close to work. The Grand Theft Auto games, for example, are notorious (especially among people who’ve never played them) for their apparent celebration of random violence. The most recent iteration of the game, however, Grand Theft Auto IV, involves the main character having to spend a large amount of time building up his relationships, so that he can have people to help him do his criminal thing; and building up these relationships involves driving to see these people, taking them out to nightclubs, and sitting there with them. It’s not significantly less boring in the game than it would be in real life.
The very interesting post Mr. Lanchester points to, “Working for the Man: Against the Employment Paradigm in Videogames,” on Steven Poole’s blog, makes you wonder if there is any way in which computers can be used now that is not some form of work. After noting that many games “hire us for imaginary, meaningless jobs that replicate the structures of real-world employment,” Mr. Poole makes a persuasive case that all of us really should get away from our screens for a good long while: Today, the most common paradigm for progress in games, for example, is the idea of “earning.” Follow the rules, achieve results, and you are rewarded with bits of symbolic currency — credits, stars, skill points, powerful glowing orbs — which you can then exchange later in the game for new gadgets, ways of moving, or access to previously denied areas. The only major difference between this paradigm and that of a real-world job is that, whereas the money earned from a job enables you to buy beer and go on holiday — that is, to do things that are extraneous to the mechanized work process — the closed video-game system rewards you with things that only makes it supposedly more fun or involving to continue doing your job, rather than letting you get outside it.