Social Media Is Killing Your Brain Unless It's Not

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 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 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

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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

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

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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

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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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,

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