Susan Greenfield, the mind and social networks
The Guardian is carrrying an interesting piece, which it is calling “Facebook and Bebo risk ‘infantilising’ the human mind“. The article carries the views of Susan Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln college, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution.
I find the commentary interesting for several reasons.
- It is written by the Grud’s Political Editor, with a view to linking up to a debate on regulation, or a lack thereof. It is interesting to review this in light of the Byron review, Safer Children in a Digital World.
- It raises issues about attention and behaviours that are raised anecdotally by academic staff, and which, if real, threatens a disconnect between staff and students. As Greenfield states, “”It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result in brains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations.”
- It connects into the work of projects like InCurriculum and BrainHE, which are evaluating neurodiversity and learning differences.
- It highlights underresearched issues around compulsion, empathy and identity. These have emerged again as important areas, with researchers returning to Bloom et al’s tentative work on the affective domain of learning.
- It intriguingly quotes Greenfield saying that the risks involved in the “messiness, unpredictability and immediate personal involvement of a three-dimensional, real-time interaction” may be lost, and we need to look at the social implications of this behaviour. At present this can appear to alignwith the *stranger danger* fears that appear to pervade views of parent/chilhood – clearly more work is needed.
- It quotes an interviewee of Greenfield: “You become less conscious of the individuals involved [including yourself], less inhibited, less embarrassed and less concerned about how you will be evaluated.” As the piece notes work on education, culture and society may be pivotal.
More work required for sure, but Greenfield doesn’t appear to be a reactionist or counter-revolutionary. This is no time for fingers in dykes or regulation. It is critical that those engaging with these tools have a baseline of their impact on learning styles, preferences and expectations that can help shape effective [affective] curricula.
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How the media (and academics) love a good media effects argument. The Greenfield debate recalls previous disagreements around the deleterious use of technologies such as Books, Radio, TV, Gas Lamps and Telephones. Despite Mcluhan’s lengthy exile from British Media Studies it is hoped that we are now able to freely discuss the fact that technologies do indeed have effects. That is that they are physical and enter into the causal world of which we are also a part. However to make the leap from this rather mundane observation to the claim that a singular media technology is responsible for only negative or positive outcomes which are endangering a whole society demonstrates an inability to construct an argument.
For those interested in these discussions then 2 texts that I try to get students to read are Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid and Katherine Hayles’ Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes. Both texts admit that media effect us and that new media usage is probably having some sort of effect on our ability to concentrate.
For example Carr argues: “Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. ‘We are not only what we read,’ says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. ‘We are how we read.’”
This isn’t so far from what Greenfield argues although she draws some rather spurious conclusions such as that there is “a risk of loss of empathy as children read novels less”.
Hayles’ article begins, “Networked and programmable media are part of a rapidly developing mediascape transforming how citizens of developed countries do business, conduct their social lives, communicate with each other, and perhaps most significantly, how they think. This essay explores the hypothesis we are in the midst of a generational shift in cognitive styles that poses significant challenges to education at all levels, including colleges and universities”. She then goes on to point to studies which support these claims. The interesting thing to note is that unlike Greenfield she does not make a claim for the superiority of one style of attention over another. Although she does point to the fact that if this shift is occurring then it has implications for teaching. Certainly some of my recent experience (and what I’ve heard from other academics) would not be in contradiction to this hypothesis but also not prove it.
This is not to say, as Greenfield does, that these technologies are dangerous, Just that they have effects which may change the way we do things and that we have to develop new etiquette’s and protocols for how we use them. But this is hardly news, is it? Surely over a decade of cybercultural studies has told us this already.
One of the effects that hasn’t been mentioned so much is how this technology seems to be able to create fervent evangelists out of middle-aged academics who should know better! There must be a research proposal in there somewhere.
Simon
Thank heavens I had enough attention span to read this entire post.
Quick comments here, in passing:
I have to question who is the ‘we’ Carr speaks of?
I remember reading novels as a young boy, and comic books. Most other kids didn’t bother with the novels. This was in the late 50’s, early 60’s. I worked in libraries for over 20 years and witnessed no drop of circulation stats for books for young readers – on the contrary.
Mostly, electronic coversations are full of the same babble and bravado as conversations of old.
Have to clickaway now, off to Facebook to see who is eating tripe, who has risen in the Mafia Wars, who’s going to bed and who’s just getting up.
>:r