Social networking under fresh attack as tide of cyber-scepticism sweeps US

Twitter and Facebook don't connect people – they isolate them from reality, say a rising number of academics 

Paul Harris in New York, guardian.co.uk, Saturday 22 January 2011 21.00 GMT

The way in which people frantically communicate online via Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging can be seen as a form of modern madness, according to a leading American sociologist.

"A behaviour that has become typical may still express the problems that once caused us to see it as pathological," MIT professor Sherry Turkle writes in her new book, Alone Together, which is leading an attack on the information age.

Turkle's book, published in the UK next month, has caused a sensation in America, which is usually more obsessed with the merits of social networking. She appeared last week on Stephen Colbert's late-night comedy show, The Colbert Report. When Turkle said she had been at funerals where people checked their iPhones, Colbert quipped: "We all say goodbye in our own way."

Turkle's thesis is simple: technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human. Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world.

But Turkle's book is far from the only work of its kind. An intellectual backlash in America is calling for a rejection of some of the values and methods of modern communications. "It is a huge backlash. The different kinds of communication that people are using have become something that scares people," said Professor William Kist, an education expert at Kent State University, Ohio.

The list of attacks on social media is a long one and comes from all corners of academia and popular culture. A recent bestseller in the US, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, suggested that use of the internet was altering the way we think to make us less capable of digesting large and complex amounts of information, such as books and magazine articles. The book was based on an essay that Carr wrote in the Atlantic magazine. It was just as emphatic and was headlined: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Another strand of thought in the field of cyber-scepticism is found in The Net Delusion, by Evgeny Morozov. He argues that social media has bred a generation of "slacktivists". It has made people lazy and enshrined the illusion that clicking a mouse is a form of activism equal to real world donations of money and time.

Other books include The Dumbest Generation by Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein – in which he claims "the intellectual future of the US looks dim"– and We Have Met the Enemy by Daniel Akst, which describes the problems of self-control in the modern world, of which the proliferation of communication tools is a key component.

The backlash has crossed the Atlantic. In Cyburbia, published in Britain last year, James Harkin surveyed the modern technological world and found some dangerous possibilities. While Harkin was no pure cyber-sceptic, he found many reasons to be worried as well as pleased about the new technological era. Elsewhere, hit film The Social Network has been seen as a thinly veiled attack on the social media generation, suggesting that Facebook was created by people who failed to fit in with the real world.

Turkle's book, however, has sparked the most debate so far. It is a cri de coeur for putting down the BlackBerry, ignoring Facebook and shunning Twitter. "We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, yet we have allowed them to diminish us," she writes.

Fellow critics point to numerous incidents to back up their argument. Recently, media coverage of the death in Brighton of Simone Back focused on a suicide note she had posted on Facebook that was seen by many of her 1,048 "friends" on the site. Yet none called for help – instead they traded insults with each other on her Facebook wall.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/22/social-networking-cyber-scepticism-twitter

Email has turned us into 'lab rats'

 

Email has turned office workers into no more than lab rats desperately craving “pellets of social interaction”, a leading expert has claimed.

A recent study found that British office workers look at their email inboxes at least 30 times an hour 

By Nick Collins 6:30AM GMT 07 Dec 2010, The Telegraph

Increasing levels of information overload from computer and smart phone screens cause a “bottleneck” in the brain and prevent any deep thought, according to Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review.

His comments add to the weight of evidence that our addiction to technology and the snippets of information it provides is damaging our ability to apply our power of thought in a meaningful way. Mr Carr, a former business of the Harvard Business Review, whose books include The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, said email exploits a basic human instinct to search for new information, causing us to become addicted to our inboxes.

The natural impulses that helped early humans find food and avoid predators are causing us to regress to a state no more sophisticated than a rat in a laboratory, he said.

A recent study found that British office workers look at their email inboxes at least 30 times an hour. For each bit of new information we find our brain releases a dose of dopamine, a pleasure-inducing chemical which has been linked to addictive behaviour.

Mr Carr told Esquire magazine: “Our gadgets have turned us into hi-tech lab rats, mindlessly pressing levers in the hope of receiving a pellet of social or intellectual nourishment. What makes digital messages all the more compelling is their uncertainty. There’s always the possibility that something important is waiting for us in our inbox …[which] overwhelms our knowledge that most online missives are trivial.”

Scientists fear that divided attention could damage the thought process and the ability to concentrate, and possibly lead to irrational behaviour. Earlier this year Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, expressed his concerns that “instantaneous devices” could be having an impact on the thought process. He said: “I worry that the level of interruption, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information – and especially of stressful information – is in fact affecting cognition, affecting deep thinking.”

Mr Carr said the abundance of information we are exposed to through various screens “gets in the way of deep thinking” and “obstructs understanding, impedes the formation of memories and makes learning more difficult”.

He explained: “When we take in too much data too quickly, as we do skipping between links, our working memory gets swamped. We suffer from what brain scientists call cognitive overload.” This results in us retaining very little information and failing to connect what we do remember to experiences stored in our long-term memory, meaning our thoughts are “thin and scattered”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8184149/Email-has-turned-us-into-lab-rats.html

Is the Internet lying to us?

November 25, 2010 By Ileiren Poon

(PhysOrg.com) -- University of Alberta scholars talk about the relativity of truth on the World Wide Web.

Truth and lies on the Internet are all a matter of context according to some of the University of Alberta’s foremost scholars in humanities computing and information science.

Geoffrey Rockwell, a professor of philosophy and humanities computing and the director of the Canadian Institute for Research in Computing and the Arts, was the keynote speaker and mediator of a panel discussion hosted by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Panelists Ofer Arazy from the Department of Accounting and Management Information Systems in the Alberta School of Business; Susan Brown, a professor in the Department of English & Film Studies and lead researcher on the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory project; Peter Baskerville, from the departments of history and classics, humanities computing, and co-leader of West and North, Canadian Century Research Infrastructure; and Lisa Given, a professor in the School of Library and Information Studies and the Department of Humanities Computing, each brought a different focus to the discussion of ‘truth’ in this digital age.

“It seems that what is true and false is often negotiated in a community or a microcommunity. Has the Internet changed how we negotiate truths?” Rockwell asked. “I’m interested in a slightly different phenomenon where you have communities forming that basically reinforce each other’s truths and are not listening—and this is probably something that’s always happened—to other voices, and are not actually asking the questions that we ask of information.”

Ofer said that two things are happening simultaneously and exist on a large scale. “Some people argue that over the Internet you see a variety and diversity of ideas, and that’s what drives innovation, that’s what drives the wisdom of the crowd—the quality of Wikipedia for example,” he said. “But, on the other hand, if you look at some of the smaller communities where people of the same opinions come together to reinforce one another, they’re not open to other opinions.

Given, who has been asked to assess the quality of evidence, including documents submitted by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, in Canada’s courts, said that people need to be trained to sort the garbage from the useful information. “People will often get into circular arguments where they can start to use self citation, or selective citation, in particular ways in order to sell their particular argument, often without a lot of critical thought. Along comes an outsider to look at these trappings of credibility as it were, and sometimes it’ll be a mix of information overload, sometimes just a lack of knowledge about how to now assess credibility,” she said. “There are certain ways that information can be manipulated and used to play on that normal notion of, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s a lot out there and how will I weed my way through it?’”

When Rockwell asked whether the Internet can be made to tell more compelling, more comprehensive and useable truths, the panellists all agreed that context was key.

“Context is all, in many ways,” said Brown. “The same text can, out of context, be a piece of hate speech, and, within context, be a historicized document that works against hate speech. I think we do need to move, as a scholarly community, away from the notion that truth as it operates in something like Wikipedia is not sufficient. I think in the humanities, in particular, we’ve moved beyond the idea of singular truth or objective truth, to an understanding of truth as situated and negotiated by communities.”

“The big thing is, the Internet can provide more useable, richer and more nuanced context,” agreed Baskerville. “The key word is context and the real danger on the Internet is lack thereof. So, anything that builds that and maintains that is good. Number two, we have to keep it open. There’s this tension with commercialization and I think that has to be really looked at closely because it’s a creeping, eroding and sinister kind of thing from the point of view of open scholarship.”

http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-internet-lying.html