British scientists warn, if Facebook doesn't kill you, it'll drive you nuts

[Dennis Baron]

There's a new post on the Web of Language:

British scientists warn, if Facebook doesn't kill you, it'll drive you
nuts

The British neuroscientist Lady Susan Greenfield told the House of
Lords last week that social networking sites like Facebook pose
significant dangers for developing young minds and called for research
to investigate whether "the near total submersion of our culture in
screen technologies over the last decade" might account for dramatic
increases during that period in autism and ADD (even though autism and
ADD tend to be diagnosed long before children spend much time on line).

In the same week Dr. Aric Sigman, a fellow of the Royal Society of
Medicine, launched a second broadside directed at the online world,
warning that facebooking, blogging, and other digital technologies put
us at risk for cancer, strokes, heart disease, and dementia.

. . . .

Before scientists attribute even more bogus physiological or
psychological damage to the rapidly-growing digital revolution, they
might consider this: literacy rates rose in Rome between the time that
Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE, and the ouster of Romulus
Augustus, the last Roman emperor, in 476 CE, yet it never occurred to
Edward Gibbon to blame the decline and fall of the Roman Empire on the
rise of the book.


Read why Facebook and the Web will only make you stronger ... read the
rest of this post on

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____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

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