June 12, 2013 • 27 mins
Are services like Facebook and Twitter rewiring kids' brains? Has social media had a measurable impact on how we make friends? Can social media actually help people make more meaningful connections?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hi. There in Love and afford Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says, Bob doo Wop,
Bob doo wop, debtop, Bob doo Wop. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
(00:21):
I'm Lauren Bob. That's always what we say. I'm Joe McCormick. Yeah,
And together we look at the future and we really
kind of break it down. We look at sort of
the technologies and trends that are in the present. We
try to project out to the future can be kind
of tricky, and today we're talking about something that's particularly
tricky and a little maybe controversial is not the right word,
but there's debate about it, and it's all that might
(00:42):
be the right word. Yeah, there's there's discussion about social media,
it's role in society and how it may be affecting
us on perhaps a biological level, affecting us. Yes, you
mean we're not just totally resilient past, you know. You
mean the media that we consume also consumes us. There
(01:04):
is this thing called plasticity. The brain has it, as
it turns out, and it means that that the brain
can change based upon the things that we encounter, and
normally this is something that can happen over a fairly
significant amount of time. But the whole that's one of
the reasons why human beings are so resilient is that
(01:25):
we are capable of adapting to changes in our environment. Right,
But it can happen both ways. So if you have, say,
a traumatic experience, like you're in a car accident or
something like that, it can change your brain thereafter, right, Yeah, yeah,
we see that. I mean there are lots of and
oh sorry, and I don't mean just like physical damage
to the brain, but that you can have a traumatic
(01:46):
experience and be it can change the way that your
thought patterns work later on. I would are you post
traumatic stress disorder is a manifestation of that. We also
see this in ways that are not necessarily associated with trauma.
I mean, they are are people who are very well
adjusted because of their uh, well, because of multiple reasons.
We can't really boil it down to one thing. But
(02:07):
that's kind of getting ahead of ourselves. To really understand this,
we thought we'd first start with a quick discussion about
where we are with social media right now, Like how
big a deal is it? Is it? Is it really
a big deal? I think it's officially a big deal.
I'm not only saying that because that's my job here,
Lauren's Lauren is both justifying her position and making a
(02:27):
valid argument. It's kind of scary that I can't remember
a time without it. I mean I can, but I
just feel like, oh yeah, I remember. I remember being
on my Space and thinking this new Facebook thing is
never gonna take off. I felt like that about Twitter. Yeah,
when Twitter first came out, I was like, hundred and
forty characters who can say anything in that, That's right.
(02:50):
I made fun of Twitter when it first came out.
I was like, this is ridiculous. I wrote the article
on Twitter and I made fun of it. It was
only about it. It was only about three months after
I wrote the iCal that I actually created an account
and stuck with it. But the point being that this
is a trend that has really taken off over the
last several years. When you get to the point where
(03:12):
Facebook has over one billion registered users, it's a big thing. Yeah. Yeah,
as of as of their six hundred and sixty five
million daily active users on Facebook, that's huge. And then
we've got all these different surveys, we can talk about
that sort of extrapolate how much people rely on social
networks and what they use it for. Uh. According to
(03:36):
the Pew Internet, Personal Networks and Communities Survey, it pulled
two thousand, five twelve adults. So first of all, let's
go ahead and acknowledge that that's a relatively smallies, right,
and then they extrapolate from that, Um, so let's keep
that in mind. They said that American adults said they
used the Internet, and nearly half of adults, which was arout,
(03:59):
said that they use at least one social networking service.
So this was in two thou eight that they took
this survey, right, So that's also I think these numbers
have changed. But remember and again as random people, we
don't know who they called. They could have called a
couple of senior living centers and the seniors might say, no,
I don't use anything like that. I do get on
(04:20):
the Internet, but I don't use a social networking service. Um.
And they said that out of the ones they serve,
of them used Facebook, so it was overwhelmingly the social
networking service of choice. Among the people they surveyed said
that they used my Space, so they I would hope
this would be back in two thousand eight and eighteen
(04:42):
percent used linked In and used Twitter. And again that
makes sense again if you're talking about two thoight, that's
young days for Twitter. Sure. As as of as of December,
Twitter had about two hundred million monthly active users, so
um compared to that sixty yeah, And I mean it's
(05:03):
hard to say because people some people never send out
a Twitter message at all. You know, they get on
Twitter and they follow people, but they aren't generating their
own messages. They're just following other folks. Only a relatively
small percent of people on the Internet are actually creating
new content, It's something like less than a fourth, and
everyone else is basically just reposting. I'm one of those
(05:23):
people creating. No one's reposting it though, so I'm not
really contributing in any meaningful way. And that's fine. I'm
alright with that. I wouldn't repost myself either, and now, um,
so on top of that, we also have some stats
from a Nielsen and in m Insight social media report
that gives us a little bit more data about some
(05:44):
of the more recent trends. One of those being that
if you look at all the time being spent on
the Internet, and this is social networking sites included, but
everything else added on top of that, they found that
in July two thousand twelve, uh, that people spent five
twenty point one billion minutes on the Internet, so you know,
(06:08):
more than half a trillion minutes in one month on
the Internet. Now, out of that, of the time that
was spent on PCs was on some sort of social
networking site, and thirty percent of the time spent on
mobile devices would be on social networking sites. So that
tells us also that the growth for the mobile market
(06:28):
is exploding. That's what you hear. Mobiles the trend right
social media, they're trend to down to that form exactly,
And that same survey said that that mobile accounted for
sixty three percent of year over year growth in social media.
In fact, I believe PCs took a little bit of
a dip in the in that trend, but mobile more
(06:51):
than made up for it. And uh, we're seeing that
more and more. And you know that just means that
we it's always just uh a touch away. You've often
got one of these devices between between WiFi and three
G it's you're you're never really not connected if you're
in the you know, continental United States, certainly. Yeah, So
(07:11):
that raises some questions. If you are always, or for
all practical purposes, always connected to social media and the internet,
how could that possibly affect you beyond just the fact
that you can tweet out what you're eating any given
time of the day. So this is actually where we've
got some disagreements in in various circles about how much
(07:35):
does all this social networking actually affect us. Does it
just give us yet another outlet so that we can
connect with people, or is it supplanting our our our
tendency to form real lasting relationships with people, or is
it actually rewiring our brains to the point where the
normal kind of social interactions we would associate with face
(07:58):
to face meetings no longer are supported that we we
are we are essentially raising a generation of people who
are incapable of having a an interaction face to face
and pick up on things like facial cues and other
little social cues rewiring brains. Now, I just saw this
(08:18):
language come up all over the place on this topic,
and it got me a little curious, Uh, does that
originate anywhere? What rewiring the brain? Well, I mean this
this exact language, that it's going to rewire your kid's brain.
I would argue that. Well, I'll tell you someone who
definitely used that phrase and similar phrases over and over again.
(08:41):
And it's someone who is very prominent in science scientific circles,
particularly in the UK, and that was Susan Greenfield. And
Susan Greenfield better known as Baroness Greenfield, where she does
hold that title. She's a neuroscientist, neuroscientist and was until
the director the Royal Institution of Great Britain and as
(09:03):
such she had a very prominent role as a scientist,
someone who would popularize science and was very active in
courting the media to talk about science and that's an
important job. We've seen lots of people take up that mantle,
either officially or unofficially. We've seen a lot of it,
ironically enough on social media. Absolutely, people like Phil Play
(09:26):
and people you know talking professor Brian Cox, not the
actor but the but the professor out of the UK
who who does some fantastic work. Um, he talks a
lot about fusion. Phil Plate, of course, the bat astronomer
talks a lot about astronomy. There are a lot of
others too, who have used social networking to get information
about science across and make people excited. Susan Greenfield has
(09:50):
has used her position UH to talk about her concerns
about social media and its effect on the way we
think and the we create these interpersonal relationships, and maybe
even the way our brains develop. One of the fears
that she has expressed was that by kind of channeling
(10:12):
people's interactions online and removing that face to face interaction,
at least to some extent through the traditional personal model
of friendship, right, that this would lead the human brain
to develop differently, and the parts of the brain that
would develop with all that interaction, that face to face interaction,
would a trophy and or not even not even develop
(10:35):
in the first place. And that so you would have
again this this sort of generation of children who grow
up to be adults who cannot really interact in a
in a face to face physical environment UH effectively. Well,
that sounds alarming if we have research indicating that social
media is destroying our children's brains. It would in fact
(10:57):
be alarming if we had such research. But there in
line is one of the problems. Uh So, one of
the big criticisms leveled against Greenfield and and many many
people have brought this up, is that she would tend
to have these discussions but not really have an actual
study that she was citing to show that there was
(11:19):
a demonstrable effect. Uh that. It was almost like it
was armchair psychology or armchair neural biology, the idea that, well,
I do know that the brain can be affected by things,
and I know that this is a growing trend that
is becoming more and more important. And using that, yeah,
using that, I have to come to the conclusion that
(11:40):
this trend is affecting people's brains. But without the act.
And she may very well be right. Let's go ahead
and say that she could be absolutely right, but there's
no real hard evidence to point that way. Yeah. From
what I read, it seemed more like this was emanating
from the intuitions of an established authority rather than empirical day. Right,
(12:01):
the argument from authority, which is a logical fallacy, right, Um,
And and there there is plenty of research being done
about this. Back in two thousand five, one of the
big studies that you might hear quoted about about social
isolation and the Internet UM was done by Norman ny
and the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society UM,
and it found that uh, people who use the Internet
(12:23):
at that time, it was one of the US population.
They uh had extrapolated of of those that use the
internet frequently, UM, they spend seventy minutes less daily interacting
with their family UM, which which sounds which sounds scary,
I mean because you know, family interaction is a big
important thing. And uh, and that in seventy minutes, you know,
(12:45):
of twenty four hours, that's a you know, that's a
that's a sizeable chunk of time. However, you know this
was a and two thousand five before social media, social
networking was really out there. You know, people weren't going
to be on Facebook in two thousand five talking to
their aunt. Uh. So so that's that's part of that.
And also it's uh Norman and I has has admitted
(13:06):
to being a an Internet addict. He's self professed in this,
and so I feel like possibly his findings are a
little bit colored by that. And that therefore, Yeah, when
when people throw around numbers from the study, that it's
maybe not as unbiased or as a clear cut here
in as it otherwise could be. Right, Well, I mean
(13:27):
the difference between two thousand five and ten. It might
be one thing, and I don't know bacteriology, but in
internet use, in social media, this is a this is
like a century. You know, it's so different now. Yeah,
and again you know, this is one of those things
where I think the problem is that it's so young
(13:49):
that we don't have enough scientific rigor there to really
be able to say one way or the other. Well,
there are a lot of problems with this, right, I mean,
first of all, yes, it's the widespread social media phenomenon
is extremely new, and so there has just hasn't been
enough research. Number two, even if it had been around
(14:10):
for a while, it's hard to conduct studies on this
kind of thing because you're studying social phenomenon where there's
a lot of variables and it's difficult to pin down causes,
exactly like in a in a traditional scientific inquiry. Let's
say that we are studying we're trying to determine the
effects of a particular chemical reaction, for example, and if
(14:34):
you were really studying that in a scientific way, you
would try to eliminate as many other variables as possible,
so that you could be reasonably certain that any effect
you observed was in fact a result of that chemical reaction. Right,
So you would want to make sure that your instruments
were properly cleaned and calibrated and all of this so
that you could you could eliminate, right, yeah, eliminate, eliminate
(14:59):
anything that's going to cause a problem. The problem with
the social science is not maybe a problem is the
wrong word. The challenge is that you can't eliminate the variables.
It's if you were one of the most uh frequently
used methodologies is the survey, which you know, we kind
of opened up talking about surveys, but surveys themselves, you
can't eliminate all those other variables that go into a
(15:22):
person's background that may guide him or her to make
certain choices. So you could say, out of all the
people we survey said, they're using social networking services more
and interacting with people real people less. But and I
mean in a study like that, to be honest, I
have no idea how much I use social media. Like
(15:43):
if you were to ask me, I'd have to guess,
and that would show up on a survey as some
kind of guess, you know, whatever number I estimated, they
might have really no bearing on on how much time
I actually spend staring at Facebook. And and also that
can change. Oh of course, yeah, a day to day,
hour to hour. You know, how fully they would be
using some kind of a computer tracking method, some kind
of digital tracking method to actually look at the number
(16:06):
of hours you did spend doing that thing. I mean
that that would be more accurate. But but but but
a survey is yeah, usually the way that these things go.
And also, even if you were able to show that
there was some sort of correlation between the two, you
can't be certain that there's causation because there could be
other factors that you did not control for that are
impacting that situation. That the experiment even more difficult, because
(16:30):
you'd have to isolate all the differing how many troll
for different variables, how many of those people moved away
from home to go work somewhere else, And therefore all
of the people that we were part of their social
network are now a thousand miles away. Maybe the social
networking sites is how that's how they maintain the real
relationships they've already developed. Absolutely, there's been a bunch of
(16:53):
medical research done into people with physical and mental disabilities,
figuring out that actually for these for these folks, social
media is very useful in maintaining and foraging new relationships.
Right And according to the Pew Internet study, which again
dated from several years ago, they said that the people
who were using social networking sites were forty percent more
(17:16):
likely to visit a cafe, more likely to visit a library,
percent more likely to visit a fast food restaurant, more
likely to visit other restaurants, and forty two percent more
likely to visit a public park, saying that the the
the image that people have in their minds of the
person who has sequestered him or herself into the basement. Yeah,
(17:39):
they're just sitting down and on the computer and they
never go outside. That that is a fallacy. Um. But
they also said that uh that that bloggers, people who
are actively uh posting things on the Internet for others
to read, were more likely to belong to a local
voluntary association than those who do not blog, and that
(18:00):
six of all the people who are using the web
regularly often talked to a neighbor at least once per month,
and that that may in fact be higher than people
who don't use the web frequently. So these are not Again,
nothing here is is telling me specifically that internet use
(18:21):
and social networking sites in particular are positively or negatively
impacting our ability to socialize outside the realm of the web.
There's conflicting information. Some of it, you know, seems very intuitive.
Like if you were to tell me that people using
social networking sites more and more frequently is resulting in
(18:42):
UM higher instance of people misunderstanding social cues and physical settings,
I would think that makes total sense to me. Intuitively,
that makes sense, But we don't have the hard data
there yet, so we really need to to hold off
on making any assumptions, even though we may have some
(19:02):
preliminary information that seems to either support or contradict that
that that conclusion right and their overall societal trends UM
that are that are in effect here and have been
working I think since the Industrial Revolution at least UM
wherein you know, A couple of the numbers that get
thrown around is that as of the nineteen eighties or so,
before the internet really hit UM, people had about three
(19:26):
close social conducts UM. And they're talking about confidence, they're
talking about someone who you can go to when you
have a serious problem and hash it out with them. Um,
and who am you know, strange package wrapped in a
carpet and right, yeah, the people who will help you
move a body. Yeah, yeah, the the what's in the
box people? And uh and that this number has has
(19:48):
gone down to about one point eight um since since
you know whatever, you know, a few decades ago, and
that's I don't know, I mean, you know, it's it
is significant certainly. However, I don't think that the internet
the other things have gone on on the planet because
the Internet since then. Again, that's why the whole social
(20:09):
science stuff is so complicated, because while it's simple for
us to say, hey, this coincides with the rise of
the Internet, there are all these other things that also
happened in that span of time. And you know, we've
we've also seen the move to UH to urban areas
growing year over year over year. So that's another UH
factor that you have to consider when you're thinking about
(20:31):
these things. It's it's complicated what we're saying. It's very complicated.
And also you know that the fear that the media
that we use changes us is certainly not a new thing.
Socrates was really concerned that that reading and writing was
going to ruin people's brains, that you know, that that
memory was going to be so weakened that we would
all be infants. And then the two generations there were
(20:52):
people who are afraid that the printing press was going
to completely ruin the brains of everybody. I think those
most a monks who are really hoping to keep on
that illumination and manuscript writing. Uh, then you had things radio,
television anytime. And this this also really applies to the
youth as well, where there's this fear that social networking
(21:15):
sites is really changing the way young people think. But
the same argument has been made time and time again
for lots of different stuff like rock and roll. You know,
I think of the children, Yeah exactly, And I think
it also this is why this is why you know,
horror movies today are things like, you know, children like
Samara in The Ring showing up being a product of
(21:36):
technology versus Rosemary's Baby being a product of Satan. Satan,
yeah so well, or or or medical science or whatever
you wanna, yeah, whatever you want to attribute that kind
of thing. Too nice that the pop culture references are
flying fast and furious there's another one. Uh then diesel there. Um. Now,
(21:56):
I do want to say that even though we don't
really know right now what the effects of social networking
services are on us neurologically, Uh, that's not to say
that there isn't an effect and that we won't you know, always,
we won't always be in the dark about it. I
do think that we will figure that out as time
goes on. I think that's going to change as time
goes on. But I also I am not so worried
(22:20):
about saying, you know, stay away from social networking sites. Uh,
it's going to ruin your kid's brains. I don't really
believe that. I think the humans are more resilient. I
think that we are capable of adapting to new situations
and to retain old methods of communication as well. I
don't think we're ever going to get to a point
where people are so concentrated on social networking sites so
(22:43):
that if you put two people in a room together,
they can't have a meaningful conversation. I think that's that's unrealistic.
I think part of the the fear here is the
old cyborg fear. Yeah, I mean, people are um at
at the core of it, they're afraid of having kind
of human biological essence corrupted by the invasion of this foreign,
(23:05):
synthetic kind of thing. And that's what the technological incarnation
of a social network represents. Um. It seems more steel
and wires and plastic than than human flesh. But I
think it's something we're going to get over, because we
got over it with every other technology that has ever
(23:27):
enabled human interaction before. I mean, we got like there
was a time when you couldn't write letters to people
who were far away, and then you could, and then
there was a time where you couldn't communicate in real time.
Was someone who was right? And when when the generation
that did not grow up with social networking goes into decline,
then I think that that's going to be the basic Well,
(23:50):
and the other point being that even let's let's say
that the worst case scenario, according to what I guess
Baroness Greenfield would say is true. Let's say worst case
scenario is that it's fundamentally changing the way people's brains
are quote unquote wired. How do we know that that's
necessarily a bad thing. We're judging that based upon what
(24:11):
our own perceptions of good and bad are right now.
But if you were to project yourself out twenty years
into the future and you're in the world where that's
just the norm. That's not to say that people then
would consider it to be a bad thing or that
they had actually lost anything. There may be other elements
of social interaction that we have not yet considered that
(24:32):
would be very much the norm for them, and it
would be fine. Yeah, what if it's actually i mean,
assuming it is rewiring our brains, which again we don't
have any necessarily good reason to believe. What if it
makes our lives more fulfilling, right, And then again to
look at the future, there's the whole idea of reaching
this this level of augmented reality. Yeah, where where the
(24:54):
social networking reality and our physical reality mesh and they
are a new thing. They're all dimension rather than Yeah,
I think this, I think this is an artificial distinction anyway,
And I'm going to make my case. You go home
and you get on Facebook and you talk to people
(25:14):
maybe that you were talking to at work a couple
hours earlier, and there's this assumption that you're doing something
fundamentally different in these two ways. But you're communicating either way.
I mean, you're communicating with an avatar that maps to
a real person, and they're getting what the message you send,
and they're sending messages back. It's it's no more artificial
(25:38):
than like we're just saying a letter or a phone call.
I mean, I think that this idea that there's the
real world and then there's the Internet is something that's
going to go away with time. The Internet is part
of the world. The Internet is the real world, right,
And with that overlaid, that will become even more of uh,
(25:59):
you know, a less integration, right exactly. Yeah, with augmented reality,
it's going to become even more impossible to ignore the
fact that this distinction is artificial. When you have Google
Glass and you have what we would probably call I
think we called in our video social reality, right, you know,
you can walk around your environment and so you see
(26:20):
the world you live in annotated with the likes and
comments and and whatever new kinds of feedback there are
from your friends and family. Right. I mean that that's
a more social world than we've ever had before. Yeah.
At that point, it actually becomes a challenge to filter
your world to your preferences. So that you're not just
overwhelmed with information from all those social contacts that you
(26:43):
actually have. Well, you can always take the glasses off
right that for now, Dune Dune done well. I think
that's a good place to stop. This was a fun conversation. Guys.
If you have suggestions for topics we should cover in
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(27:07):
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(27:57):
Let's go places,
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hi. There in Love and afford Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says, Bob doo Wop,
Bob doo wop, debtop, Bob doo Wop. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
(00:21):
I'm Lauren Bob. That's always what we say. I'm Joe McCormick. Yeah,
And together we look at the future and we really
kind of break it down. We look at sort of
the technologies and trends that are in the present. We
try to project out to the future can be kind
of tricky, and today we're talking about something that's particularly
tricky and a little maybe controversial is not the right word,
but there's debate about it, and it's all that might
(00:42):
be the right word. Yeah, there's there's discussion about social media,
it's role in society and how it may be affecting
us on perhaps a biological level, affecting us. Yes, you
mean we're not just totally resilient past, you know. You
mean the media that we consume also consumes us. There
(01:04):
is this thing called plasticity. The brain has it, as
it turns out, and it means that that the brain
can change based upon the things that we encounter, and
normally this is something that can happen over a fairly
significant amount of time. But the whole that's one of
the reasons why human beings are so resilient is that
(01:25):
we are capable of adapting to changes in our environment. Right,
But it can happen both ways. So if you have, say,
a traumatic experience, like you're in a car accident or
something like that, it can change your brain thereafter, right, Yeah, yeah,
we see that. I mean there are lots of and
oh sorry, and I don't mean just like physical damage
to the brain, but that you can have a traumatic
(01:46):
experience and be it can change the way that your
thought patterns work later on. I would are you post
traumatic stress disorder is a manifestation of that. We also
see this in ways that are not necessarily associated with trauma.
I mean, they are are people who are very well
adjusted because of their uh, well, because of multiple reasons.
We can't really boil it down to one thing. But
(02:07):
that's kind of getting ahead of ourselves. To really understand this,
we thought we'd first start with a quick discussion about
where we are with social media right now, Like how
big a deal is it? Is it? Is it really
a big deal? I think it's officially a big deal.
I'm not only saying that because that's my job here,
Lauren's Lauren is both justifying her position and making a
(02:27):
valid argument. It's kind of scary that I can't remember
a time without it. I mean I can, but I
just feel like, oh yeah, I remember. I remember being
on my Space and thinking this new Facebook thing is
never gonna take off. I felt like that about Twitter. Yeah,
when Twitter first came out, I was like, hundred and
forty characters who can say anything in that, That's right.
(02:50):
I made fun of Twitter when it first came out.
I was like, this is ridiculous. I wrote the article
on Twitter and I made fun of it. It was
only about it. It was only about three months after
I wrote the iCal that I actually created an account
and stuck with it. But the point being that this
is a trend that has really taken off over the
last several years. When you get to the point where
(03:12):
Facebook has over one billion registered users, it's a big thing. Yeah. Yeah,
as of as of their six hundred and sixty five
million daily active users on Facebook, that's huge. And then
we've got all these different surveys, we can talk about
that sort of extrapolate how much people rely on social
networks and what they use it for. Uh. According to
(03:36):
the Pew Internet, Personal Networks and Communities Survey, it pulled
two thousand, five twelve adults. So first of all, let's
go ahead and acknowledge that that's a relatively smallies, right,
and then they extrapolate from that, Um, so let's keep
that in mind. They said that American adults said they
used the Internet, and nearly half of adults, which was arout,
(03:59):
said that they use at least one social networking service.
So this was in two thou eight that they took
this survey, right, So that's also I think these numbers
have changed. But remember and again as random people, we
don't know who they called. They could have called a
couple of senior living centers and the seniors might say, no,
I don't use anything like that. I do get on
(04:20):
the Internet, but I don't use a social networking service. Um.
And they said that out of the ones they serve,
of them used Facebook, so it was overwhelmingly the social
networking service of choice. Among the people they surveyed said
that they used my Space, so they I would hope
this would be back in two thousand eight and eighteen
(04:42):
percent used linked In and used Twitter. And again that
makes sense again if you're talking about two thoight, that's
young days for Twitter. Sure. As as of as of December,
Twitter had about two hundred million monthly active users, so
um compared to that sixty yeah, And I mean it's
(05:03):
hard to say because people some people never send out
a Twitter message at all. You know, they get on
Twitter and they follow people, but they aren't generating their
own messages. They're just following other folks. Only a relatively
small percent of people on the Internet are actually creating
new content, It's something like less than a fourth, and
everyone else is basically just reposting. I'm one of those
(05:23):
people creating. No one's reposting it though, so I'm not
really contributing in any meaningful way. And that's fine. I'm
alright with that. I wouldn't repost myself either, and now, um,
so on top of that, we also have some stats
from a Nielsen and in m Insight social media report
that gives us a little bit more data about some
(05:44):
of the more recent trends. One of those being that
if you look at all the time being spent on
the Internet, and this is social networking sites included, but
everything else added on top of that, they found that
in July two thousand twelve, uh, that people spent five
twenty point one billion minutes on the Internet, so you know,
(06:08):
more than half a trillion minutes in one month on
the Internet. Now, out of that, of the time that
was spent on PCs was on some sort of social
networking site, and thirty percent of the time spent on
mobile devices would be on social networking sites. So that
tells us also that the growth for the mobile market
(06:28):
is exploding. That's what you hear. Mobiles the trend right
social media, they're trend to down to that form exactly,
And that same survey said that that mobile accounted for
sixty three percent of year over year growth in social media.
In fact, I believe PCs took a little bit of
a dip in the in that trend, but mobile more
(06:51):
than made up for it. And uh, we're seeing that
more and more. And you know that just means that
we it's always just uh a touch away. You've often
got one of these devices between between WiFi and three
G it's you're you're never really not connected if you're
in the you know, continental United States, certainly. Yeah, So
(07:11):
that raises some questions. If you are always, or for
all practical purposes, always connected to social media and the internet,
how could that possibly affect you beyond just the fact
that you can tweet out what you're eating any given
time of the day. So this is actually where we've
got some disagreements in in various circles about how much
(07:35):
does all this social networking actually affect us. Does it
just give us yet another outlet so that we can
connect with people, or is it supplanting our our our
tendency to form real lasting relationships with people, or is
it actually rewiring our brains to the point where the
normal kind of social interactions we would associate with face
(07:58):
to face meetings no longer are supported that we we
are we are essentially raising a generation of people who
are incapable of having a an interaction face to face
and pick up on things like facial cues and other
little social cues rewiring brains. Now, I just saw this
(08:18):
language come up all over the place on this topic,
and it got me a little curious, Uh, does that
originate anywhere? What rewiring the brain? Well, I mean this
this exact language, that it's going to rewire your kid's brain.
I would argue that. Well, I'll tell you someone who
definitely used that phrase and similar phrases over and over again.
(08:41):
And it's someone who is very prominent in science scientific circles,
particularly in the UK, and that was Susan Greenfield. And
Susan Greenfield better known as Baroness Greenfield, where she does
hold that title. She's a neuroscientist, neuroscientist and was until
the director the Royal Institution of Great Britain and as
(09:03):
such she had a very prominent role as a scientist,
someone who would popularize science and was very active in
courting the media to talk about science and that's an
important job. We've seen lots of people take up that mantle,
either officially or unofficially. We've seen a lot of it,
ironically enough on social media. Absolutely, people like Phil Play
(09:26):
and people you know talking professor Brian Cox, not the
actor but the but the professor out of the UK
who who does some fantastic work. Um, he talks a
lot about fusion. Phil Plate, of course, the bat astronomer
talks a lot about astronomy. There are a lot of
others too, who have used social networking to get information
about science across and make people excited. Susan Greenfield has
(09:50):
has used her position UH to talk about her concerns
about social media and its effect on the way we
think and the we create these interpersonal relationships, and maybe
even the way our brains develop. One of the fears
that she has expressed was that by kind of channeling
(10:12):
people's interactions online and removing that face to face interaction,
at least to some extent through the traditional personal model
of friendship, right, that this would lead the human brain
to develop differently, and the parts of the brain that
would develop with all that interaction, that face to face interaction,
would a trophy and or not even not even develop
(10:35):
in the first place. And that so you would have
again this this sort of generation of children who grow
up to be adults who cannot really interact in a
in a face to face physical environment UH effectively. Well,
that sounds alarming if we have research indicating that social
media is destroying our children's brains. It would in fact
(10:57):
be alarming if we had such research. But there in
line is one of the problems. Uh So, one of
the big criticisms leveled against Greenfield and and many many
people have brought this up, is that she would tend
to have these discussions but not really have an actual
study that she was citing to show that there was
(11:19):
a demonstrable effect. Uh that. It was almost like it
was armchair psychology or armchair neural biology, the idea that, well,
I do know that the brain can be affected by things,
and I know that this is a growing trend that
is becoming more and more important. And using that, yeah,
using that, I have to come to the conclusion that
(11:40):
this trend is affecting people's brains. But without the act.
And she may very well be right. Let's go ahead
and say that she could be absolutely right, but there's
no real hard evidence to point that way. Yeah. From
what I read, it seemed more like this was emanating
from the intuitions of an established authority rather than empirical day. Right,
(12:01):
the argument from authority, which is a logical fallacy, right, Um,
And and there there is plenty of research being done
about this. Back in two thousand five, one of the
big studies that you might hear quoted about about social
isolation and the Internet UM was done by Norman ny
and the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society UM,
and it found that uh, people who use the Internet
(12:23):
at that time, it was one of the US population.
They uh had extrapolated of of those that use the
internet frequently, UM, they spend seventy minutes less daily interacting
with their family UM, which which sounds which sounds scary,
I mean because you know, family interaction is a big
important thing. And uh, and that in seventy minutes, you know,
(12:45):
of twenty four hours, that's a you know, that's a
that's a sizeable chunk of time. However, you know this
was a and two thousand five before social media, social
networking was really out there. You know, people weren't going
to be on Facebook in two thousand five talking to
their aunt. Uh. So so that's that's part of that.
And also it's uh Norman and I has has admitted
(13:06):
to being a an Internet addict. He's self professed in this,
and so I feel like possibly his findings are a
little bit colored by that. And that therefore, Yeah, when
when people throw around numbers from the study, that it's
maybe not as unbiased or as a clear cut here
in as it otherwise could be. Right, Well, I mean
(13:27):
the difference between two thousand five and ten. It might
be one thing, and I don't know bacteriology, but in
internet use, in social media, this is a this is
like a century. You know, it's so different now. Yeah,
and again you know, this is one of those things
where I think the problem is that it's so young
(13:49):
that we don't have enough scientific rigor there to really
be able to say one way or the other. Well,
there are a lot of problems with this, right, I mean,
first of all, yes, it's the widespread social media phenomenon
is extremely new, and so there has just hasn't been
enough research. Number two, even if it had been around
(14:10):
for a while, it's hard to conduct studies on this
kind of thing because you're studying social phenomenon where there's
a lot of variables and it's difficult to pin down causes,
exactly like in a in a traditional scientific inquiry. Let's
say that we are studying we're trying to determine the
effects of a particular chemical reaction, for example, and if
(14:34):
you were really studying that in a scientific way, you
would try to eliminate as many other variables as possible,
so that you could be reasonably certain that any effect
you observed was in fact a result of that chemical reaction. Right,
So you would want to make sure that your instruments
were properly cleaned and calibrated and all of this so
that you could you could eliminate, right, yeah, eliminate, eliminate
(14:59):
anything that's going to cause a problem. The problem with
the social science is not maybe a problem is the
wrong word. The challenge is that you can't eliminate the variables.
It's if you were one of the most uh frequently
used methodologies is the survey, which you know, we kind
of opened up talking about surveys, but surveys themselves, you
can't eliminate all those other variables that go into a
(15:22):
person's background that may guide him or her to make
certain choices. So you could say, out of all the
people we survey said, they're using social networking services more
and interacting with people real people less. But and I
mean in a study like that, to be honest, I
have no idea how much I use social media. Like
(15:43):
if you were to ask me, I'd have to guess,
and that would show up on a survey as some
kind of guess, you know, whatever number I estimated, they
might have really no bearing on on how much time
I actually spend staring at Facebook. And and also that
can change. Oh of course, yeah, a day to day,
hour to hour. You know, how fully they would be
using some kind of a computer tracking method, some kind
of digital tracking method to actually look at the number
(16:06):
of hours you did spend doing that thing. I mean
that that would be more accurate. But but but but
a survey is yeah, usually the way that these things go.
And also, even if you were able to show that
there was some sort of correlation between the two, you
can't be certain that there's causation because there could be
other factors that you did not control for that are
impacting that situation. That the experiment even more difficult, because
(16:30):
you'd have to isolate all the differing how many troll
for different variables, how many of those people moved away
from home to go work somewhere else, And therefore all
of the people that we were part of their social
network are now a thousand miles away. Maybe the social
networking sites is how that's how they maintain the real
relationships they've already developed. Absolutely, there's been a bunch of
(16:53):
medical research done into people with physical and mental disabilities,
figuring out that actually for these for these folks, social
media is very useful in maintaining and foraging new relationships.
Right And according to the Pew Internet study, which again
dated from several years ago, they said that the people
who were using social networking sites were forty percent more
(17:16):
likely to visit a cafe, more likely to visit a library,
percent more likely to visit a fast food restaurant, more
likely to visit other restaurants, and forty two percent more
likely to visit a public park, saying that the the
the image that people have in their minds of the
person who has sequestered him or herself into the basement. Yeah,
(17:39):
they're just sitting down and on the computer and they
never go outside. That that is a fallacy. Um. But
they also said that uh that that bloggers, people who
are actively uh posting things on the Internet for others
to read, were more likely to belong to a local
voluntary association than those who do not blog, and that
(18:00):
six of all the people who are using the web
regularly often talked to a neighbor at least once per month,
and that that may in fact be higher than people
who don't use the web frequently. So these are not Again,
nothing here is is telling me specifically that internet use
(18:21):
and social networking sites in particular are positively or negatively
impacting our ability to socialize outside the realm of the web.
There's conflicting information. Some of it, you know, seems very intuitive.
Like if you were to tell me that people using
social networking sites more and more frequently is resulting in
(18:42):
UM higher instance of people misunderstanding social cues and physical settings,
I would think that makes total sense to me. Intuitively,
that makes sense, But we don't have the hard data
there yet, so we really need to to hold off
on making any assumptions, even though we may have some
(19:02):
preliminary information that seems to either support or contradict that
that that conclusion right and their overall societal trends UM
that are that are in effect here and have been
working I think since the Industrial Revolution at least UM
wherein you know, A couple of the numbers that get
thrown around is that as of the nineteen eighties or so,
before the internet really hit UM, people had about three
(19:26):
close social conducts UM. And they're talking about confidence, they're
talking about someone who you can go to when you
have a serious problem and hash it out with them. Um,
and who am you know, strange package wrapped in a
carpet and right, yeah, the people who will help you
move a body. Yeah, yeah, the the what's in the
box people? And uh and that this number has has
(19:48):
gone down to about one point eight um since since
you know whatever, you know, a few decades ago, and
that's I don't know, I mean, you know, it's it
is significant certainly. However, I don't think that the internet
the other things have gone on on the planet because
the Internet since then. Again, that's why the whole social
(20:09):
science stuff is so complicated, because while it's simple for
us to say, hey, this coincides with the rise of
the Internet, there are all these other things that also
happened in that span of time. And you know, we've
we've also seen the move to UH to urban areas
growing year over year over year. So that's another UH
factor that you have to consider when you're thinking about
(20:31):
these things. It's it's complicated what we're saying. It's very complicated.
And also you know that the fear that the media
that we use changes us is certainly not a new thing.
Socrates was really concerned that that reading and writing was
going to ruin people's brains, that you know, that that
memory was going to be so weakened that we would
all be infants. And then the two generations there were
(20:52):
people who are afraid that the printing press was going
to completely ruin the brains of everybody. I think those
most a monks who are really hoping to keep on
that illumination and manuscript writing. Uh, then you had things radio,
television anytime. And this this also really applies to the
youth as well, where there's this fear that social networking
(21:15):
sites is really changing the way young people think. But
the same argument has been made time and time again
for lots of different stuff like rock and roll. You know,
I think of the children, Yeah exactly, And I think
it also this is why this is why you know,
horror movies today are things like, you know, children like
Samara in The Ring showing up being a product of
(21:36):
technology versus Rosemary's Baby being a product of Satan. Satan,
yeah so well, or or or medical science or whatever
you wanna, yeah, whatever you want to attribute that kind
of thing. Too nice that the pop culture references are
flying fast and furious there's another one. Uh then diesel there. Um. Now,
(21:56):
I do want to say that even though we don't
really know right now what the effects of social networking
services are on us neurologically, Uh, that's not to say
that there isn't an effect and that we won't you know, always,
we won't always be in the dark about it. I
do think that we will figure that out as time
goes on. I think that's going to change as time
goes on. But I also I am not so worried
(22:20):
about saying, you know, stay away from social networking sites. Uh,
it's going to ruin your kid's brains. I don't really
believe that. I think the humans are more resilient. I
think that we are capable of adapting to new situations
and to retain old methods of communication as well. I
don't think we're ever going to get to a point
where people are so concentrated on social networking sites so
(22:43):
that if you put two people in a room together,
they can't have a meaningful conversation. I think that's that's unrealistic.
I think part of the the fear here is the
old cyborg fear. Yeah, I mean, people are um at
at the core of it, they're afraid of having kind
of human biological essence corrupted by the invasion of this foreign,
(23:05):
synthetic kind of thing. And that's what the technological incarnation
of a social network represents. Um. It seems more steel
and wires and plastic than than human flesh. But I
think it's something we're going to get over, because we
got over it with every other technology that has ever
(23:27):
enabled human interaction before. I mean, we got like there
was a time when you couldn't write letters to people
who were far away, and then you could, and then
there was a time where you couldn't communicate in real time.
Was someone who was right? And when when the generation
that did not grow up with social networking goes into decline,
then I think that that's going to be the basic Well,
(23:50):
and the other point being that even let's let's say
that the worst case scenario, according to what I guess
Baroness Greenfield would say is true. Let's say worst case
scenario is that it's fundamentally changing the way people's brains
are quote unquote wired. How do we know that that's
necessarily a bad thing. We're judging that based upon what
(24:11):
our own perceptions of good and bad are right now.
But if you were to project yourself out twenty years
into the future and you're in the world where that's
just the norm. That's not to say that people then
would consider it to be a bad thing or that
they had actually lost anything. There may be other elements
of social interaction that we have not yet considered that
(24:32):
would be very much the norm for them, and it
would be fine. Yeah, what if it's actually i mean,
assuming it is rewiring our brains, which again we don't
have any necessarily good reason to believe. What if it
makes our lives more fulfilling, right, And then again to
look at the future, there's the whole idea of reaching
this this level of augmented reality. Yeah, where where the
(24:54):
social networking reality and our physical reality mesh and they
are a new thing. They're all dimension rather than Yeah,
I think this, I think this is an artificial distinction anyway,
And I'm going to make my case. You go home
and you get on Facebook and you talk to people
(25:14):
maybe that you were talking to at work a couple
hours earlier, and there's this assumption that you're doing something
fundamentally different in these two ways. But you're communicating either way.
I mean, you're communicating with an avatar that maps to
a real person, and they're getting what the message you send,
and they're sending messages back. It's it's no more artificial
(25:38):
than like we're just saying a letter or a phone call.
I mean, I think that this idea that there's the
real world and then there's the Internet is something that's
going to go away with time. The Internet is part
of the world. The Internet is the real world, right,
And with that overlaid, that will become even more of uh,
(25:59):
you know, a less integration, right exactly. Yeah, with augmented reality,
it's going to become even more impossible to ignore the
fact that this distinction is artificial. When you have Google
Glass and you have what we would probably call I
think we called in our video social reality, right, you know,
you can walk around your environment and so you see
(26:20):
the world you live in annotated with the likes and
comments and and whatever new kinds of feedback there are
from your friends and family. Right. I mean that that's
a more social world than we've ever had before. Yeah.
At that point, it actually becomes a challenge to filter
your world to your preferences. So that you're not just
overwhelmed with information from all those social contacts that you
(26:43):
actually have. Well, you can always take the glasses off
right that for now, Dune Dune done well. I think
that's a good place to stop. This was a fun conversation. Guys.
If you have suggestions for topics we should cover in
Forward Thinking and you just want to be part of conversation,
we highly recommend you get in touch with us. You
can do that via email our addresses f W Thinking
(27:07):
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(27:29):
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