The Social Media and the Brain: A Good Thing

In a remarkable display of point missing, some neuroscientists are Viewing With Alarm the entire phenomenon of the social media (and by extension all the new media of the 21st century.

The most recent viewer with alarm is Professor Susan Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University and an authority on the brain and its development.

As Prof. Greenfield told the House of Lords (she is also Baroness Greenfield):
“If the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of fast action and reaction, of instant new screen images flashing up with the press of a key, such rapid interchange might accustom the brain to operate over such timescales.“

She may even be right. And she completely misses what's going on. Dyslexia wasn't a handicap until writing was invented. And what's happening with the new media, especially the social media, is a sea change as profound as the invention of writing.

Thanks to being immersed in a sea of information of all sorts, children are being conditioned to handle multiple data streams at high speeds.

What will our children and their children use this new capacity for? Mostly the same sorts of things we use the ability to read for. Which is to say they will fritter it away on the equivalent of trashy novels and supermarket tabloids.

But some of our descendants will use it for other things too. These capabilities will give them the ability to handle vast amounts of information and (with the help of the appropriate software) to correlate and draw conclusions from it in ways we can hardly imagine. They won't be smarter than we are, but thanks to the enhancements of the media they will have a far greater effective intelligence.

Indeed, the biggest problem with social media and their results is not that the brains of children are being affected, it is that not all children are having their brains so affected.

In another 50 years people who can't handle this datalanche are going to be at a tremendous disadvantage.