Lack of Critical Thinking

Baroness Greenfield has kicked up something of a shitstorm.

It would appear that she declared, in the House of Lords, that the use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are likely to lead to "infantilisation".

Either in league with or coicident with this piece of "research". I qualify the expression research because, having read the fuller version of the paper it seemed to be taking a whole load of other research, that didn't seem to be directly related to the subject of people vs the internet.

The conclusion that the good lady and Aric Sigman seemed to draw was that:

A) There is a lot of research that says lonely people are less healthy than not-lonely people. Lonely isn't really explained as to whether it's a psychological or physical state...so it doesn't make any comment as to whether alone = lonely.

B) People who use the internet must be lonely

Ergo

C) Social networking sites make you ill.

Now - all this could be completely misrepresenting both Baroness Greenfield and Aric Sigman but certainly what is being reported, for the most part, is some panicky "The internet will damage your children" message.

Whilst their hypotheses may be not unreasonable, they seem to have made a big leap from several well documented, widely understood and known studies to a conclusion about something that wasn't covered in the studies.

I'm a reasonably intelligent woman (on a good day) with a pretty good grounding in scientific principals. I'm also confident and articulate enough to listen to what others say and appraise it critically. Others are not so lucky and could take what the good Baroness says as irrefutable and not open to question.

The theme was taken up in Woman's Hour on R4 today (I loathe and detest the programme but I was making coffee in the kitchen and it was on). A chap was being interviewed about his opinion about the evil thing that Twitter is.

The implication was that it was potentially rife with paedophillic grooming of the young and innocent and that Twitter were doing insufficient to counter it.

When asked whether young users were a big part of the Twitter populace he said "errr no, not at the moment". When asked if there had been reports of such problems he said "errr no" again. Then when asked whether the measures put in place by the likes of Beebo and Facebook were strong measures (for example age verification and parental permission) that couldn't be easily circumvented by a kid of reasonable intelligence he was forced, once again to say "errrr no". Thereby creating a complete farce out of the interview and his earlier rant.

What a waste of time!

But the point is that in the meantime the Daily Mail style of reporting has already taken hold in some minds and "The Internet" is once again labelled as a bad thing.

On a lighter note, whilst looking up some references I did find this article from the Guardian and that made me giggle.

Why did I post the picture at the top of this page?

Well, a couple of years ago I suddenly found myself needing to find a new and wider group of friends. I have been wholly successful in this and would count about 10 new people as very close friends (two of whom are sharing my house temporarily) and at least another 10 as good, sound acquaintances. Are they people I know "in the real world"? Yes. How did I meet them? Via the internet.

The people in the picture are in that 20 or so people.

In addition to all these people I spend real time with, there are another 4 or 5 people I reasonably regularly chat with by various internet means who I haven't met yet. Do they enrich my life? Hell yeah...why would they not? We share observations, photographs, jokes, articles about this and that...you know, just like real people do. That'll be cos they're real people.

As a shy woman, I can tell you it's easier to meet someone face to face after you've exchanged a few e-mails. There's a bit of common ground laid and you've probably already weeded out the people who you're not going to hit it off at all.

So, maybe it's best to have plenty of contact with real people (that sounds reasonable, after all) but my hypothesis would be that it's better to have virtual friends than none at all and that a virtual hug, might not be such a bad thing if that's the only way you can get your hugs just now.

So let's have a sense of proportion and a bit of rigour in our research papers, please.


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