Thank you CNN.com.
Crossposted at my blog.
Science reporting at its, uh, finest. Twitter is bad for you? It’s what CNN is pitching. The headline on the CNN.com mainpage attributes this finding to "Scientists" as in "Scientists: Too Much Twitter is Bad For You." All of them together? Did I not get invited to Science Party ‘09?
Anyway, the scenario offered is that rapid fire information can dull the brain - that compassion and kindness take a few moments to develop, therefore harming moral growth. Certainly possible - I’m in no position to say whether the science is any good. But as is the case in most of these articles, the actual study doesn’t say what the headline says it does.
The study here is really generalizing to all forms of fast-moving media, which applies much less to Twitter than to forms of media where your attention is instantly drawn away, you know, like television news reporting. And that’s not even my conclusion, the article says so:
USC sociologist Manuel Castells said the study raised more concerns over fast-moving TV than the online environment.
"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."
It just says so 3/4ths of the way through the article, after some paraphrasing to get the study to seem to be talking about twitter.
Fiction and infotainment aren’t part of the social networking scene - in fact, on facebook and twitter people are responding to their peers at their own rate, and since its interactive, are probably taking the time to engage their emotions. It’s infotainment - TV news, that seems to be the real culprit here.
So we’ve got a story about TV news dulling human emotional sensitivity, and naturally, a TV news network shunts it off on new media in another wave of technopanic. I wonder what kind of emotional maturity they're developing with constant but brief Caylee updates.
And there's more at Arken's diary: