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"Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?" Scientific American asked in September. The answer provided was pretty much "yes." Over at the New York Times,
my friend Tim Lee explains why this question—and the division it
implies, of a privacy-rich pre-social networking past, and a
voyeuristic dystopic present—is hopelessly muddled.
"People are used to dividing the world into broadcast media
(television, newspapers) and point-to-point communication (the
telephone, face-to-face communication)," he explains. Concerned
onlookers tend to put social networking sites in the first category, as
if everyone were sharing their status updates via a major television
network rather than with a vetted group of confidants. Newspapers and
television do not allow you the luxury of selecting your audience,
individual by individual; Facebook does.
In Tim's telling, social networking sites represent the advancement
of Internet-related privacy rather than its demise... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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An Oxford neuroscientist is suggesting that social networking and the hours kids spend doing it is rewiring their brains so that we are at risk of raising a generation of solipsists. Dr. Susan Greenfield fears this exposure is permanently "infantalizing" young brains, leaving them with truncated attention spans and the inability to interact face-to-face with other human beings. Her conclusions feel instinctively right (as I've found even adult brains can be rewired for such stunting), but then again, isn't this always the cry of the older generation when a new technology comes along? Television, radio, and telephones were all supposed to ruin the generation that grew up glued to these devices. Even the printing press—which allowed people to absorb cultural knowledge privately—was supposed to destroy the group cohesion that was enforced through the oral tradition. Do others feel Greenfield is right? Or is she just the latest adult warning that rock 'n' roll, et. al., is producing degenerate kids?
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