Oh, neat. Time for another round of pearl-clutchy terror about the deadly effects of the internet. This incarnation comes courtesy of Newsweek, which asks, “Is the Web Driving Us Mad?” I don’t know, Newsweek—is it!? I know I feel pretty close to a psychotic break every time a commenter tells me to eat less/exercise more, and based on that anecdotal survey of 1, the internet is 100% driving us mad! Panic! Panic! Panic!
Now that we all live inside the internet all day all night, it’s becoming clear that this shit is great and this shit is terrible. But, in my opinion—and the internet makes me borderline homicidal on a daily basis—the great outweighs the terrible to such a degree that this entire conversation feel like a debate on the devilish influence of sarsaparilla. To its credit, Tony Dokoupil’s Newsweek piece acknowledges that this type of anti-internet handwringing is commonplace and often misdirected. (Also, Tony Dokoupil’s glamour shot—haaaaaaaaaay.) And some of the statistics and anecdotal data that Dokoupil cites are troubling—specifically this:
[Results] link Internet addiction to “structural abnormalities in gray matter,” namely shrinkage of 10 to 20 percent in the area of the brain responsible for processing of speech, memory, motor control, emotion, sensory, and other information. And worse, the shrinkage never stopped: the more time online, the more the brain showed signs of “atrophy.”
And this:
“What I learned in high school,” a kid named Stan told Turkle, “was profiles, profiles, profiles; how to make a me.”
Now, obviously I hate the idea that my brain is shrinking and wilting and becoming meme-shaped; and my heart breaks at the realization that modern teens have to be on display in front of the mean girls 24/7. Those are problems that seem graspable, and hopefully fixable. But the rest of the article goes right off the deep end:
“This is an issue as important and unprecedented as climate change.”
NO. IT’S NOT.
…says Susan Greenfield, a pharmacology professor at Oxford University who is working on a book about how digital culture is rewiring us-and not for the better. “We could create the most wonderful world for our kids but that’s not going to happen if we’re in denial and people sleepwalk into these technologies and end up glassy-eyed zombies.”
And:
“Mothers are now breastfeeding and bottle-feeding their babies as they text,” she told the American Psychological Association last summer. “A mother made tense by text messages is going to be experienced as tense by the child. And that child is vulnerable to interpreting that tension as coming from within the relationship with the mother. This is something that needs to be watched very closely.”
And most strikingly:
“The computer is like electronic cocaine.”
U guyz.
Chill.