Facebook and Narcissism
Thanks to Midge for sending along this article form the LA Times: Too much Facebook time may be unhealthy for kids. Of course, now that I read it, I think the title should have been truncated to Too much Facebook time may be unhealthy.
One quote from the researcher is particularly telling:“kids have been raised on the concept of connection. To them, it’s not the quality that’s important, but the connection itself. Phone or face-to-face conversations allow for a minimal number of connections, while other tools let them connect to the world.”
Of course, this is nothing new - we’ve been saying this for years. But the problem in my mind is the same one we’ve faced with numerous technologies: the concept of quantity over quality. I see this in undergraduates’ ability to think. There is no shortage of idea or opinion; but the quality of that thought is often suspect. Just because you have more of a thing (like information) does not mean that the knowledge produced is better. A lot of something does not = good, it only means there’s a lot of it. In this instance, a lot of connections doesn’t necessarily mean they are good connections, but may likely infer that they are superficial. My question I guess is: if they are superficial, why are they so important? And why do we spend so much of our time on them?
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