Facebook and Twitter make you a bad person… allegedly
By Dave Parrack
Using social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter can make you a bad person… or so say a bunch of neuroscientists from USC (University of Southern California). The fast streaming of news events and updates can play havoc with our ability to process the information and build it into our moral compasses.
Most of us use social networking of some kind these days. In fact most of us use too many forms of it, far too often for our own good. I’ve seen many days ruined by a lack of productivity due to an addiction to social networking. And that’s just me.
A lack of productivity is one thing, and as a recent study showed Facebook and the like can potentially harm students’ chances of gaining good grades. However, a new study goes one step further and claims that social networking and rapid-fire media can actually lead to immorality. Pure scaremongering or legitimate concern?
According to The Daily Mail, the study was headed up by Antonio Damasio, director of the USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute. Thirteen volunteers were told real-life stories in an effort to induce an emotional response. Brain scans indicated that the volunteers needed 6-8 seconds to respond to stories intended to elicit admiration or compassion.
USC researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang said:
For some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people’s social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection. If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality.
Manuel Castells, holder of the Wallis Annenberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society at USC, added:
Lasting compassion in relationship to psychological suffering requires a level of persistent, emotional attention. In a media culture in which violence and suffering becomes an endless show, be it in fiction or in infotainment, indifference to the vision of human suffering gradually sets in.
The assertion is, of course, that the types of media that are standard in this day-and-age – rolling news coverage, online feed readers, Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed etc – don’t give us that sort of time to truly consume and process the information that is being thrown at us.
Maybe there’s some truth in this but maybe it’s not such a bad thing. Rather than affecting our moral compasses and altering our ability to make conscious decisions which will aid others, this fast-paced world stops us getting upset and moved at every damn thing that happens in the world.
I don’t know about you but if I see something that actually strikes a chord or affects me personally I will investigate it further. So the fast-moving media has brought it to my attention and it’s then up to me to choose whether to be affected or to become emotionally involved by it.
I’m not arguing with the scientists findings – after all, they should know more than I do – but I am questioning whether the interpretation of these findings is correct or not. I guess we’ll find out in 20 years time when the youngsters brought up in today’s society are running the world and making the big decisions.
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April 14th, 2009
Ya know, this article could be taken as sensationalism, but i do tend to agree with it. I’ve had to shed my social media addictions away simply because they were eating into my attention span and making me irritable. It seems just recently less and less people i know are using Facebook. My cousin and her mother even admitted to deleting their accounts.