Why 'effects of technology on the brain' debates are useless

London: Computer games and social media sites like Facebook are making us all narcissists with short attention spans, says Baroness Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford. She suggestedthat online friendships could ‘rewire’ the brain, creating a need for instant gratification and reducing our skill at non-verbal communication, such as making eye contact. She was particularly critical of Twitter, saying that it is turning us all into attention-seeking “mini celebrities”: “What concerns me is the banality of so much that goes out on Twitter. Why should someone be interested in what someone else has had for breakfast? It reminds me of a small child (saying): ‘Look at me Mummy, I’m doing this’, ‘Look at me Mummy I’m doing that’.“The idea that the Internet is eroding the very fabric of our humanity has been Greenfield’s clarion call for  a couple of years now. In 2009, Dr Ben Goldacre, author of Bad Science, tackled Greenfield’s assertions head-on:

These stories arise from a string of lectures, public meetings, pronouncements, and articles in the popular press, generated by the Baroness over the past few years. They are never set out as a clear hypothesis, in a formal academic publication, with the accompanying evidence and a clear suggestion of what research programmes might be planned to clarify on any uncertainties. She has explained, when criticised for a lack of clarity, a lack of evidence and an excess of panic, that these are merely ideas, speculations, hypotheses.

The same can be said now, too. Greenfield has recently been lecturing up and down the UK, so it appears that this latest batch of scaremongering is based not on any new research but on a simple repetition of her previous ideas, speculations and hypotheses. Science writer Martin Robbins is so frustrated at this merry-go-round that he’s resorted to parody. [caption id=“attachment_52825” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Descending into wild and baseless speculation about the effects of technology on the brain does society no good. quapan/Flickr”]  [/caption] But the Nominet Trust recently released a report, The Impact of the Internet on the Brain, which found that many of these sorts of concerns are unfounded. The report says that we have very little to go on when trying to understand the full impact of the Internet on the brain. In fact, we don’t even know how people are using modern communications technologies. Their conclusions included a refreshing amount of common sense:

Discussing the general benefit, or otherwise, of different types of application (social network sites, games, chat rooms etc) can be unhelpful, since it is how these specific applications are created and used that determines their impact on an individual. So we cannot say ‘social network sites are good’ or ‘online games are bad’.

But there’s a reason why Greenfield’s story is such a reliable perennial: It fits perfectly into a preconceived media narrative wherein children are put at risk by soulless technology and all those nasty strangers on the Internet. Greenfield is not above playing up this angle. In an interview with science writer Frank Swain, she mentions “increasing numbers of children on the autistic spectrum [and] perceived declines in the social behaviours,” but, Swain says, “when you press her these tend to evaporate.” This is typical of the kind of moral panic that surrounds advances in technology. According to Genevieve Bell, the director of Intel Corporation’s Interaction and Experience Research, we have had moral panic over new technology for pretty well as long as we have had technology. It is one of the constants in our culture. Railways, electricity, television and telephones have all incited moral panic. Telephones, and the conversations we can have using them, would cause us to never leave our homes. Electric lights would make women and children vulnerable because criminals outside would be able to see in. And railways were thought dangerous, Bell says, because “women’s bodies were not designed to go at 50 miles an hour. Our uteruses would fly out of our bodies as they were accelerated to that speed.” Even the printing press scared people. Fifteenth-century abbot Johannes Trithemius, for example, had serious concerns that his monks’ souls would rot if they weren’t spending all day copying out the scriptures. But descending into wild and baseless speculation about the effects of technology on the brain does society no good. Digital literacy is far too important a skill, for children and adults alike, to just throw it away because of vague suspicions. We have no evidence that, with normal and sensible usage, the Internet, social media or computer games are causing any significant problems. Contrary to what Baroness Greenfield says, what we need is not more ‘debate’, but more research.