[lit-ideas] Re: Social networking -- what do YOU do?
- From: Eric <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2010 02:18:16 -0400
On 9/18/2010 12:34 PM, Walter C. Okshevsky wrote:
Could it be that thinking and speaking in our contemporary technologese rewires
our brains somehow? Are our
texting, emailing, messaging, i-phoning, facebooking children unknowingly
engaged in altering their brains?
I abandoned cable-TV three years ago. A while back, I used Google
Scholar to check on studies that show the effects of abandoning
cable-TV. Hardly anything.
One sociological study indicated that people (and families) who
abandoned cable-TV watching were largely on the political extremes --
hippies in cabins; fundamentalists in cabins. Not me. Why the lack of
studies on the effects of giving up TV? Hmmm.
On the larger issue of TV watching, I found a study indicating that
children who grew up with their family's TV on all the time, crib next
to Tube I guess, performed significantly lower on tests and had all
kinds of developmental problems.
Expanding the search to effects of an immoderate digital lifestyle, I
found all kinds of research, research offering contradictory conclusions.
Parsing through a couple dozen papers yielded a sinister conclusion. It
seems there is a powerful digital lobby (Video Gaming Industry for
example) funding lame studies to persuade people that being online all
the time doesn't affect one's scholastic performance.
The more rigorous studies seem to suggest immoderate digital life is
detrimental in many ways. The lame studies defend it.
One example of a lame study had a title like VIDEO GAMING DOESN'T EFFECT
SCHOOL PERFORMANCE (indexed by Science News in fact) was a study of 50
high school students who played less than five hours of video games per
week, only on weekends, in households where their online activity was
closely monitored.
It's the tobacco lobby all over again.
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