Baroness Susan Greenfield has been taking a lot of flak these past few days for her comments about Facebook and computers in general: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. Perhaps when in the real world such responses are not immediately forthcoming, we will see such behaviours and call them attention-deficit disorder...
I often wonder whether real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitised and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf
Greenfield's statements also display the vacuous obsession with "The Brain" so common today - if she'd simply said that spending hours on the internet might plausibly make kids grow up anti-social, that would be fair enough, but she had to bring the brain into it (several times in her various comments). Hence the headlines to the effect that Facebook could change or damage the brain. Well, Facebook does change the brain - as does everything else - because every experience we have has an influence somewhere in the brain. I'm reminded of Vicky Tuck on boy's and girl's brains; Tuck, however, is not a neuroscientist. Greenfield should know better.
But despite all this, Baroness Greenfield does make an important point.
At the moment I think we're sleepwalking into these technologies and assuming that everything will shake down just fineThese are very wise words. As a society, we are in danger of "sleepwalking" into social and cultural changes which we may end up regretting. Profound changes in the way people live rarely happen overnight, and they are rarely presented to us as a choice that we can either accept or reject. Societies just change, over a span of decades, often without anyone noticing what is happening until the change has happened.
One of my favorite books is Bowling Alone by the sociologist Robert D. Putnam. Putnam assembled data from a wide range of sources to support his theory that a profound change took place in America over the years from about 1960 to 1990; namely, that Americans stopped participating in community life. Union membership, Church attendance, charitable giving, league bowling, voter turnout, cards-playing, and many other such statistics fell markedly over this period, after a high peak in the 1950s. Meanwhile, solitary or small-group activities such as TV watching, spectator sports, and so on, exploded. Over the span of 20 years or so, Americans lost interest in "the community" as a whole and turned to themselves and their immediate circle of friends and family. He also makes a convincing case that this is, in many ways, a bad thing.
I doubt that Putnam's thesis is water-tight; for all I know he may have cherry-picked those statistics that support his theory and ignored those that don't. It wouldn't be the first time that someone has done that. Yet what's interesting about Bowling Alone is that even if Putnam's theory is only part of the truth, it's hard to deny that there's something in it - but it still took a book published in 2000 to bring it to people's attention. Putnam was writing about profound changes that every American will have felt to some degree. Yet these changes went un-noticed, or at least, few noticed that the various individual changes were part of a larger trend.
Putnam proposes various causes for the fragmentation of American community life, ranging from suburbanization to the increasing time pressures of work to that old favorite "the breakdown of the family". None of these were deliberate choices. Over 20 years or so America sleepwalked into a different way of life. This is hard to deny even, if you don't accept everything Putnam says. Baroness Greenfield, clearly, is no Robert Putnam. But her point about the dangers of sleepwalking is a sound one. Sleepwalking happens. It would be a pity if that message were to be lost in all the nonsense about Facebook and the brain.
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8 comments:
Putnam's thesis is an interesting one, although I do feel that I should defend those of us on this side of the Atlantic by saying that we've gone quite a lot further, and that some of this research puts an interesting perspective onto what Greenfield is saying.
I have no doubt that you are correct that Putnam's book in 2000 was the first on the issue stateside, but it is certainly not the case here. In particular, Frank Furedi - our most cited sociologist - has been talking about this for quite some time. Interestingly, Furedi and several others since have taken the idea that there is a reduction in collective action and used it to explain (although causation is to my mind unclear) a) the huge rise in the number of people seeking counselling as previously social problems are internalised and b) the rise in functional pains such as fibromyalgia, as social problems are reconstituted as biological problems. The whole angle is nicely summarised by Stuart Derbyshire here;
http://dev.ampainsoc.org/pub/bulletin/sep04/path1.htm
I should also note that the work of Furedi et al. is clearly related (although not deliberately I assume, as they are never referenced) to the work of some of the great European thinkers of our time who talk extensively about a 'therapeutic discourse'. I know this best through the work of Foucault, but others have written about it extensively as well.
Now, given this 'therapeutic turn' and the proposed health problems that are seen as a consequence by Furedi et. al of the social disintegration mentioned by Putnam, Greenfield's comments seem slightly less left-field. Furedi in particular is big on the reclassification of personality traits as medical problems. One of the examples that he uses is reclassifying "being a bit worried, but unsure about what" (I paraphrase) as 'generalised anxiety disorder'. Maybe a little ott, but you get the point. What Greenfield is saying is actually not that dissimilar (short attention span reclassified as ADHD), she is routing it in neuroscience for sure and missing out the social bit, but I don't think it is necessarily completely at odds with other work.
For me, the question really is (I include both Furedi's and Greenfield's hypotheses here) 'is this a problem, and if so how big a problem?' Clearly the answer is that, if this hypothesis is correct, it is a problem and one we should set about trying to sort out. However I'm not sure it is a massive problem compared to those we've faced in the past. Certainly I think talk of sleepwalking into disasters is a bit mad. A large (and presumably increasing) percentage of the Western worlds work force sit in front of a computer every day, and if children have the ability to interact with this medium comfortably (which is essentially Greenfield's point) then I can't see why this is a problem. (Clearly those coming down with fibromyalgia, IBS etc are more so.) And yet we forget that today's working class sitting at computers both domestically and at work would, 50 years ago, have been working in mines or shipyards. I suspect the health problems encountered there were somewhat less easy to negotiate.
G.
I'm tempted to shrug my shoulders and say 'so what?' when it comes to moralising and hand-wringing over perceived changes in 'ways of life'.
These have happened constantly throughout human history for incalculable numbers of reasons and with incalculable numbers of consequences ever since we decided to stop hunting animals and grow crops instead, if not before. That they continue to happen is unremarkable.
gimpy: I agree that's a strong temptation. And I agree that we shouldn't be worried about change per se.
But I think that if some social change was fairly certain to increase murder rates, for example, that would be A Bad Thing.
Of course whether we can do anything about such changes is another question. It may be that we can't. I still think it can only be a good thing to know as much about them as possible.
G: Fascinating - I haven't read Furedi, but that sounds like great stuff, I'll have to get around to reading it now.
Re: the reclassification (re-labelling) of personality traits as pathological conditions, I think that's certainly happening. Unlike many people I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing - but yes it's happened.
However I think that Greenfield was saying something more than that, I think she was saying that screen use could actually give people ADHD by actually reducing their attention spans. Likewise I think she was implying that it could actually cause autism.
Although being very charitable maybe she was saying something more subtle than that.
perhaps a bit off topic but reading discussion reminded me this
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Medicine/PsychiatryPsychology/?view=usa&ci=9780195313048
i haven`t red yet but it looks to be related
m.
Yeah - given that I write about that kind of thing all the time I really ought to read that...
It's sounding remarkably like apprehension about railway spine or the fear that if women learned to read it would destroy their femininity.
People rather than ologists had been expressing their concern about changing social and community structures for some time. Joyce Grenfell even had several sketches about a woman who had moved from a back-to-back with no facilities to a council flat with modern facilities but where she 'never saw anyone and no-one ever popped in' - and that must have been some time in the 60s.
I didn't read to much but I can tell that facebook it;s something that make our brains stupid in many ways... facebook it's just a business like everything else.
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