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We Are Getting Smarter Because ofTechnology

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We Are Getting Smarter Because ofTechnology

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The argument over whether technology is making people smarter or stupider has become something of an eternal debate over the years. One study revealed that the cognitive ability of people has increased continuously since 1930.

Some people agree that it's making people smarter and others think that the Internet only makes you think you are smarter. Another study says that 90% of people are suffering from so-called digital amnesia.

MEL Science is one company that believes kids are smarter than ever before, but there's still a place for offline learning. Through combining the power of the Internet and two innovative chemistry sets, they are determined to help children continue their education.

With the help of MEL Science, this guide is going to explain to you why technology has actually increased how smart kids are.

More Information than Ever

Try getting a kid to do their homework or read a book. Parents have been screaming at their kids to do something useful since the invention of education. These days they don't have to do that because they're doing it of their own accord via Google.

The difference is they have a library of information at their disposal. Previously, if you wanted to find out about a subject you had to go to the library and find the right book. Now all you have to do is type it into Google and you'll soon come across a Wikipedia page on that subject. The difference is you didn't have to move and it happened in less than ten seconds.

The sheer wealth of information alone is one reason why kids are smarter than ever before.

Education and learning used to be something that kids found boring. Nobody likes to sit in front of a dusty textbook all day. They want to do something fun. That's why MEL Science makes their products practical. Kids still learn the theory, but they have a blast doing it.

Kids these days are using technology to find out new things because they want to not because they have to. Learning is something that's happening passively.

But What About the Crutch Argument?

The argument that technology is acting as a crutch is a common one, particularly since millennials have become a dirty word. It works like this. The majority of people who believe technology is making people dumber say that kids are lazy because they can just look up the answer and they don't have to absorb it.

To an extent, this is true, but by looking something up you have no choice but to absorb it. Furthermore, there are other ways of taking in information. The idea that you can just go to Wikipedia is the most basic form of education in technology. There are so many other ways to take in new information, such as through gaming and new technologies, like virtual reality.

New Technology is Making Learning Fun

No matter how much you try to drill into your kids that education is important, they are still just kids. They are not going to do something that they don't enjoy. That's why it's so difficult to actually get them to learn a subject they have no interest in. And that's why some people are better at some things than others.

But new technology is filling in these knowledge gaps through making learning fun. A lot of people have learned through gaming. They have used their practical knowledge, and the best part is they didn't even see it as learning. They saw it as just having fun.

And virtual reality is expected to take that to a whole new level. MEL Science believes there will still be room for practical objects in the real world, but they will be utilizing even more advanced technology. That's why their chemistry sets continue to be updated to match up with the real world.

So is Technology Making Kids Smarter?

There's no doubt that kids are getting smarter than ever before. Exam results are constantly climbing around the world, and a greater proportion of people possess higher education qualifications than ever before. That alone should demonstrate how the world is growing smarter.

As with all young people, it's about engagement. The only way they're going to keep getting smarter is through engagement. MEL Science has seen a huge amount of uptake in their chemistry sets because everything is about grabbing the attentions of young people and keeping them engaged.

What do you think technology has done in regards to making people smarter?

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How Technology Has Made Our Kids Smarter Than Ever

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The argument over whether technology is making people smarter or stupider has become something of an eternal debate over the years. One study revealed that the cognitive ability of people has increased continuously since 1930. Some people agree that it's making people smarter and others think that the Internet only makes you think you are smarter.

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Not too long ago, technology served as a divider between generations. Parents, for example, saw their iPod-using, headphone-wearing kids as blocking themselves off from the rest of the world. And grandparents could hardly boot up a computer, much less figure out how to IM. Yet, as times have changed, we're seeing formerly "divisive" technologies connecting older and younger generations in ways never before thought possible. Look no further than mobile apps, social networks and a host of some of the hottest games like Dots, Draw Something, and Words with Friends -- they're likely to be just as popular with moms and dads as they are with teenagers.

Revisiting the famous adage by Marshall McLuhan, the "medium is still the message," and technology now sits at the center of our conversations. So with Father's Day coming up and generations around the world joining together in the exchange of sentiments and ideas, here are some ways in which innovations in communications have helped and deepen family relationships and closed the generational gap.
Always-on, cross-platform devices means no more restrictions on how or where we communicate
Let's face it. We live in a world where people not only want, but expect, immediate access to everything -- and this extends to people, not just physical items. User friendly designs like those of the iPhone and iPad have broad appeal to old and young alike, and the interconnectedness of devices and ubiquity of apps like Twitter and Facebook Messenger, which allow you to reach friends across smartphones, feature phones or desktop, has opened the door for us to be many "places" at once, nearly always available at a moment's notice.

Whether it's having a Gchat with Mom, or IMing Dad on his BlackBerry, software has created a major leap forward from traditional landline and even mobile phone calls, allowing for faster response times, and more frequent connections.

As a result of conversations with my own family, I find it amazing that in just a few years we've gone from younger mobile phone users having to explain apps to older relatives to those same relatives recommending new apps to their children and grandchildren.
Social and mobile games are bringing back "family board game night"
In previous years, once kids move out of the house, bonding traditions like family game night quickly became a thing of the past. Now, social games are taking the place of that lost pastime, letting families connect and play with each other from distances near and far. To this end, plenty of classic board games such as Scrabble and Yahtzee have already found new life on smartphones and tablets.

With new features like text and voice chat becoming more commonplace, mobile games are a perfect example of how tech is transforming family interactions. But it doesn't stop there -- just look at the popularity of Nintendo's Wii when it first came out, and continued popularity of titles like " Just Dance," allowing the family to connect in ways that are fun for everyone.

Family game night is certainly not a new concept, but mobile and social games have been able to expand on this tradition and bring it back in a way fits into a more modern, on-the-go lifestyle, and reintroduce a little friendly competition to keep that element of closeness intact.
Tech-savvy baby boomers are quick social studies
We've come a long way from the time when a teenager's worst nightmare was getting a Facebook friend request from a parent. Now, for parents of the Gen X set, having a presence on social networks is considered almost as essential as having an email address.

It's no longer a surprise to see a mom posting a link on her daughter's Facebook wall, or by the same token sending a LinkedIn request to connect, or even a grandfather sharing a YouTube video from his favorite rock 'n' roll band with his friends.

While newer apps and social networks like Snapchat, Instagram, Tumblr and instant messaging apps like Kik show that many younger social network users still want ways to socialize online without parental involvement, the fact remains that presence of older generations on social networks is a trend that's here to stay, and one that will continue to keep future generations better, and more closely connected.
Free messaging and calling apps enhance family communication, leading to more frequent exchanges
Thanks to advancements in VoIP and over-the-top (OTT) messaging and services, there are now many more ways for family members to stay in touch aside from a traditional phone call. The best part of all is that many of them are free, so Grandpa doesn't have to say, "We should probably cut this call short -it's long distance, you know!"

Skype has played a large part in the adoption of alternative communication tools thanks to its free video calling, but in many ways Skype is just as limiting as an old-fashioned landline -- it's at its best when both users are sitting at home in front of their webcam.

As the world has become more mobile, new services have emerged that have become popular with millions of international users. Services like WhatsApp, Fring and my own company Rebtel make the problems and cost of staying in touch with distant relatives a thing of the past.

A recent report from Informa indicates that OTT messages sent by consumers will reach 41 billion per day by the end of 2013, more than doubling the output of SMS messages (19.5 billion). The good news is that you can download many of these services for free, and they each offer clever ways to circumvent those expensive carrier charges for texting, roaming and long-distance.

Obviously, there are plenty of ways that technology has changed our lives. But whereas it may have initially driven us apart, recent advances are bringing us back together, bridging the distance between families and friends and making loved ones feel closer and better connected than ever before.

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How Communications Technology Brings Generations Together Like Never Before

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Not too long ago, technology served as a divider between generations. Parents, for example, saw their iPod-using, headphone-wearing kids as blocking themselves off from the rest of the world. And grandparents could hardly boot up a computer, much less figure out how to IM.

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Cell Phones and Memory

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abstract Something that exists as an idea or thought but not concrete or tangible (touchable) in the real world. Beauty, love and memory are abstractions; cars, trees and water are concrete and tangible.

app Short for application, or a computer program designed for a specific task.

cancer Any of more than 100 different diseases, each characterized by the rapid, uncontrolled growth of abnormal cells. The development and growth of cancers, also known as malignancies, can lead to tumors, pain and death.

coauthor One of a group (two or more people) who together had prepared a written work, such as a book, report or research paper. Not all coauthors may have contributed equally.

colleague Someone who works with another; a co-worker or team member.

correlation A mutual relationship or connection between two variables. When there is a positive correlation, an increase in one variable is associated with an increase in the other. (For instance, scientists might correlate an increase in time spent watching TV with an increase in rates of obesity.) Where there is an inverse correlation, an increase in one value is associated with a drop in the other. (Scientists might correlate an increase in TV watching with a decrease in time spent exercising each week.) A correlation between two variables does not necessarily mean one is causing the other.

electromagnetic An adjective referring to light radiation, to magnetism or to both.

environmental health A research field that focuses on measuring the effects of pollutants and other factors in the environment on the health of people, wildlife or ecosystems.

epidemiologist Like health detectives, these researchers figure out what causes a particular illness and how to limit its spread.

factor Something that plays a role in a particular condition or event; a contributor.

federal Of or related to a country's national government (not to any state or local government within that nation). For instance, the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health are both agencies of the U.S. federal government.

field (in physics) A region in space where certain physical effects operate, such as magnetism (created by a magnetic field), gravity (by a gravitational field), mass (by a Higgs field) or electricity (by an electrical field).

Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) A part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, FDA is charged with overseeing the safety of many products. For instance, it is responsible for making sure drugs are properly labeled, safe and effective; that cosmetics and food supplements are safe and properly labeled; and that tobacco products are regulated.

gauge A device to measure the size or volume of something. For instance, tide gauges track the ever-changing height of coastal water levels throughout the day. Or any system or event that can be used to estimate the size or magnitude of something else. (v. to gauge) The act of measuring or estimating the size of something.

generation A group of individuals (in any species) born at about the same time or that are regarded as a single group. Your parents belong to one generation of your family, for example, and your grandparents to another. Similarly, you and everyone within a few years of your age across the planet are referred to as belonging to a particular generation of humans. The term also is sometimes extended to year classes of other animals or to types of inanimate objects (such as electronics or automobiles).

intelligence The ability to collect and apply knowledge and skills.

link A connection between two people or things.

National Institutes of Health (or NIH) This is the largest biomedical research organization in the world. A part of the U.S. government, it consists of 21 separate institutes - such as the National Cancer Institute and the National Human Genome Research Institute - and six additional centers. Most are located on a 300 acre facility in Bethesda, Md., a campus containing 75 buildings. The institutes employ nearly 6,000 scientists and provide research funding to more than 300,000 additional researchers working at more than 2,500 other institutions around the world.

network A group of interconnected people or things. (v.) The act of connecting with other people who work in a given area or do similar thing (such as artists, business leaders or medical-support groups), often by going to gatherings where such people would be expected, and then chatting them up. (n. networking)

peer review (in science) A process in which scientists in a field carefully read and critique the work of their peers before it is published in a scientific journal. Peer review helps to prevent sloppy science and bad mistakes from being published.

population (in biology) A group of individuals from the same species that lives in the same area.

preliminary An early step or stage that precedes something more important.

radiation (in physics) One of the three major ways that energy is transferred. (The other two are conduction and convection.) In radiation, electromagnetic waves carry energy from one place to another. Unlike conduction and convection, which need material to help transfer the energy, radiation can transfer energy across empty space.

radio To send and receive radio waves, or the device that receives these transmissions.

risk The chance or mathematical likelihood that some bad thing might happen. For instance, exposure to radiation poses a risk of cancer. Or the hazard - or peril - itself. (For instance: Among cancer risks that the people faced were radiation and drinking water tainted with arsenic.)

rodent A mammal of the order Rodentia, a group that includes mice, rats, squirrels, guinea pigs, hamsters and porcupines.

toxicologist A scientist who investigates the potential harm posed by physical agents in the environment. These may include materials to which we may be intentionally exposed, such as chemicals, cigarette smoke and foods, or materials to which we are exposed without choice, such as air and water pollutants. Toxicologists may study the risks such exposures cause, how they produce harm or how they move throughout the environment.

toxicology The branch of science that probes poisons and how they disrupt the health of people and other organisms. Scientists who work in this field are called toxicologists .

World Health Organization An agency of the United Nations, established in 1948, to promote health and to control communicable diseases. It is based in Geneva, Switzerland. The United Nations relies on the WHO for providing international leadership on global health matters. This organization also helps shape the research agenda for health issues and sets standards for pollutants and other things that could pose a risk to health. WHO also regularly reviews data to set policies for maintaining health and a healthy environment.

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Teens' cell phone use linked to memory problems

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abstract Something that exists as an idea or thought but not concrete or tangible (touchable) in the real world. Beauty, love and memory are abstractions; cars, trees and water are concrete and tangible. app Short for application, or a computer program designed for a specific task.

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The platform has cast itself as the internet's kindest place. But users argue harassment is rampant, and employees say efforts to stem it aren't funded well or prioritized.

Instagram / PrasongTakham / Barry Blackburn / Shutterstock / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

When Brandon Farbstein first joined Instagram in 2014, he was 14 and optimistic. Farbstein was born with a rare form of dwarfism, and he wanted to use the photo-sharing site to educate people about his condition-to, as he told me, "show people a glimpse into my life and inspire people."

Soon enough, though, the hateful messages started coming: death threats, expletive-laden comments about his appearance, worse. A meme page put his face on Hitler's body. Multiple accounts popped up with the explicit purpose of taunting him. His house was swatted. When he does a live video, the insults float onscreen, fast and furious. "It's been hard to keep my composure," Farbstein told me. After trolls started posting pictures of him in the hallways at his high school, he started to fear for his safety. Eventually, he left and finished high school online.

"My entire experience of high school was completely ruined by Instagram harassment," Farbstein said. "It's draining, it's anxiety producing. I'm used to people calling me names, but it's when people say that they're going to kill me or come find my family that really gets me in a sense of pure terror. Really nothing can prevent or get in the way of that taking over your thoughts and emotions."

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Farbstein has tried to make the harassment stop. He said he's filed numerous reports through Instagram's internal reporting tool, but the company takes days to address them, if it does at all. Most of the time he simply deletes the messages and comments himself. "The reporting system is almost like it's not there sometimes," Farbstein said. "You want it to end, but you also know that nothing is going to happen if it takes months and months for your report to go through. It produces more fear and anxiety ... than whatever's posted."

The harassment, he said, has escalated sharply over the past year. "Instagram is the No. 1 platform that I experience hate on," he said.

I won't be having instagram for awhile due to harassment :/
i love 💕 Twitter though 😇😇😇
- Sasha j. (@Sashaj34748217) October 2, 2018

He's not alone. Despite a long-standing and well-crafted reputation for being t he nicest place on the internet, to many of its users-a large number of whom are very young -Instagram doesn't feel very kind at all. To some, it's getting worse. In interviews, 22 users described painful, sustained, sometimes terrifying abuse on the platform-abuse they say Instagram has repeatedly failed to stem.

for years, Instagram has traded on its reputation as a place for positive, aspirational content- for shopping, connecting with friends, and following interests. Even as other major social platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and YouTube, have been forced through massive, public reckonings with harassment, Instagram has emerged largely unscathed. Often it's heralded as a good example for the rest of the social web.

In 2016, Instagram's founder and then-CEO, Kevin Systrom, touted his plans to turn it into what Wired editor in chief Nicholas Thompson described as "a kind of social media utopia: the nicest darn place online" in a long and rosy feature about the effort. A few months later, after Systrom took to the company's blog to announce new anti-harassment measures that included auto-banning inappropriate comments, HuffPost lauded the company for "tackling hate speech the way Twitter should have done."

Instagram doubled down on its warm and fuzzy image last fall with a multipronged "Commitment to Kindness," which included various product tweaks as well as a #KindComments campaign, in which celebrities like Jessica Alba encouraged users to leave nice feedback on one another's photos. "I've seen how other companies have misstepped in managing communities," Systrom told Variety at the time. He didn't specifically name Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook (Instagram's parent company), but his implication was clear: We're different, and we're better.

Shutterstock / Thanh Do / The Atlantic

"Our goal is to be the safest platform online," Karina Newton, Instagram's head of public policy, told me in September when I asked about harassment. "It's an investment that's not just in words." She highlighted as an example the company's recent " Kindness prom," where teen influencers ate free In-N-Out burgers and danced the evening away under a balloon arch that declared the space a BULLY FREE ZONE. Last week, Instagram announced a set of new features to limit bullying and "spread kindness," including comment filters on live videos, a "kindness camera effect to spread positivity," and the deployment of machine-learning technology to better detect bullying in photos.

When approached for comment, a Facebook spokesperson referred me to Instagram's communications team. Instagram declined to speak on the record about many of the particulars of its anti-harassment efforts.

"We want people to come to Instagram and have a positive experience-to make friends, find interests, and do all the things that make Instagram such a positive place," Newton wrote in an October statement to The Atlantic. " Bullying and harassment are completely counter to the experience we work to create. We want to stop this behavior, and we want people to feel safe on Instagram, but we know we have a lot more to do."

But in interviews, three current or former Instagram employees told The Atlantic that they do not believe the company has done enough to protect users from large-scale harassment, and that projects that would seem to tackle the issue are understaffed and unprioritized.

"There's an effort called 'kindness,' which is to reduce bullying and harassment, but there's not that many people working on it," said Alex, a current Instagram employee who asked to be referred to by a gender-neutral pseudonym. "Generally, what you'll find is a lot of these efforts on harassment or bullying, or there's a new feature to track how much time you spend-they're mostly done for PR." Another Instagram employee told me nearly the same thing: that Instagram's anti-bullying rhetoric "doesn't seem connected to what's actually going on in the company."

Users say harassment on Instagram can come from nearly any direction, or nearly any reason. For Riley, a 14-year-old who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym, it was on an account devoted to American Girl dolls; after she posted a pro-LGBT hashtag, trolls found her phone number and called it nonstop for days, threatening to find her house "and do horrible things" to her, she said. The harassment became so overwhelming that she deleted her account.
Read: The teens who post the same thing every day on Instagram
Sarah, a Montreal-based woman who runs the feminist Instagram account @douconsideryourselfafeminist, said, "There's not a day that goes by without death threads, rape threats, insults." She said she flags the harassment, but "most of the time you get a report saying they don't violate anything."

Violet Paley, an actress who accused James Franco of sexual misconduct early this year, said that since then, she's been relentlessly targeted on Instagram. "I get tagged in Stories, like 'this dumb bitch,' calling me a whore," she said. She showed me screenshots: One Instagram user offered $1,000 for her home address, promising to "teach these lying whores a lesson." Another is devoted to Photoshopping her in offensive and degrading positions. Yet another posted her address and phone number; the same user "started messaging all my friends and acquaintances, saying, 'I'm going to kill Violet,'" Paley said. At one point, the situation got so bad that she reached out to the FBI.

Paley said that aside from the time someone posted her address, Instagram has ignored the reports she's filed against her harassers. "When I report things, I think they just go into somewhere and they ignore it," she said. "Nothing ever happens."

When am I allowed to whine about the frequency of the sexual harassment I receive on Instagram in my DMs? Now?
- 8bitDee (@The8bitDee) October 4, 2018

Even lifestyle Instagrammers, long considered the platform's bread and butter, have begun questioning their place on it as a result of rampant harassment. In June, fashion-and-beauty Instagrammer Suzanne Jackson, who has more than 237,000 followers, spoke out, saying that she and other influencers are "no longer ignoring" the abuse they receive on the platform. Jeanette Johnson, a fashion blogger, told me that she has experienced harassment nonstop since joining Instagram several years ago, but that it's gotten worse in the past year. Recently, someone posted her home address in the comment section of a photo as an apparent threat. Johnson deleted the comment and reported the man to Instagram, but his account is still active. Johnson told me she no longer feels safe in her home.

Even those with a less glamorous Instagram presence aren't immune to attacks. "I'm a 42-year-old athlete, and I get harassed all the time. It's outrageous, but it's pervasive," said C. C. Rowe, a triathlete with just over 1,000 followers. "All of my friends have gotten it, and I would say Instagram is the worst."

Several things make Instagram a uniquely fertile breeding ground for harassment. First of all, it's huge: More than 1 billion people use the platform every month. That's much larger than the other default-public social network, Twitter, which has 335 million monthly active users, and which has unrolled sophisticated anti-harassment measures amid a sustained wave of bad press. But Instagram's privacy settings are less comprehensive and less granular than Facebook's, the other social network with more than a billion users. On Instagram, your profile and all its content are either public to the world or limited to your approved followers; many people, especially those looking to grow their personal brand or small business, say they feel compelled to remain public because there's no middle ground. In other words, Instagram is large and public enough to invite harassment, but unregulated enough to let it fester.

The platform is also a powerful discovery engine: On Instagram, it's easy to search by hashtag or location and pull up thousands of people's profiles and public images, and it's simple for anyone who wants to mobilize an army to encourage trolls to pile on a specific person by tagging them in an image or story. These trolls are often marshaled via Instagram's robust and sometimes ferocious fan culture, in which celebrities and dedicated fan accounts reach scales much greater than on other platforms. A single Justin Bieber fan account, for instance, has more than 1.6 million followers, and celebrities such as Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande have several fan accounts with more than 100,000 followers each.

One wrong comment and these fans can rally by the millions to attack. "When you're hanging out on Instagram, it's easy to feel part of a big, friendly, happy group," said Zoe Fraade-Blanar, author of the book Superfandom. "But being part of an angry mob with those same people is also a lot of fun, and that's why you get these huge uprisings."

Hey @instagram, I saw what the picture was of, and I saw the message telling my wife to choke to death on it. If that's not a violation of your community guidelines, then I don't want to be part of your community. pic.twitter.com/sIktA7AYCD
- Daniel Kibblesmith ☃️ (@kibblesmith) October 3, 2018

Last summer, Skye, an English 14-year-old, posted something about drama between the bands Fifth Harmony and 5 Seconds of Summer on the fan account she ran for the latter. Her post got picked up by other accounts, and within hours she was receiving hundreds of cruel comments. She tried to report each one to Instagram, she said, but for every account she blocked or reported, more would crop up.
Read: Why Instagram questions became so annoying
Timothy Heller saw the wrath of Instagram fans after she accusedher former friend, the pop star and former Voice contestant Melanie Martinez, of sexual assault in December 2017. Martinez's fans came after her on every major social platform-but Heller said it's on Instagram that the harassment has had the most lasting damage on her career, even almost a year later. "I model for brands sometimes, and these people will go to the brand Instagram account and mass comment on the pic of me," she said. She now sometimes warns people she works with that they should prepare to be trolled.

Shutterstock / Paul Spella / The Atlantic

In June, the actress Kelly Marie Tran of Star Wars: The Last Jedi deleted all her Instagram posts after months of relentless harassment on the platform. The following month, Pete Davidson quit because he was being harassed by fans of his then-fiancée, Ariana Grande, who herself temporarily left the platform as a result of harassment. Also this summer, the Titans star Anna Diop quit the platform because of out-of-control trolling. The actress Daisy Ridley quit for a time back in 2016 for the same reason, as did Justin Bieber. In September, Khloé Kardashian was forced to restrict permissions on her account after a flood of racist comments about her daughter, who is six months old.

If @instagram 's number 1 followed account is dealing with constant issues of bullying and harrassment on her page maybe they should actually enforce their policies of suspending and banning people who engage in that behavor. I never see reporting someone's comment actually work.
- Selegend (@SelOnTheBrain) September 25, 2018

Like Twitter, Instagram enables the easy setup of endless anonymous accounts: All you need is an email address, and you can start posting within minutes. Abusers leverage this functionality to create armies of fake accounts to attack people. But while Twitter now allows users to protect themselves-by muting replies from people who don't follow you, whom you don't follow, who aren't verified, who haven't confirmed an email address, and more-Instagram has implemented only some of these controls. For instance, on Instagram, you can hide comments from people you don't follow or who don't follow you-but you can't hide them from people who have a default avatar or haven't confirmed their email address, two hallmarks of burner accounts.

Earlier this month, the former Bachelor contestant Ashley Spivey was issued a stream of vivid death threats on Facebook and Instagram by fans of fellow Instagram star @GirlWithNoJob after the two had a dustup on the latter platform. Spivey went through the standard reporting process on Instagram and heard nothing, so she begged for help on her Instagram Story. She said a Facebook employee who follows her reached out, offering to help. Spivey doesn't know whether the Facebook employee had a direct impact, but the harassment on Facebook finally abated. On Instagram, it's still going strong.
Read: Teens Are being bullied 'constantly' on Instagram
"A long time ago, I stopped being as active on Twitter because I thought that was the place where I would get a lot of harassment," Spivey said. "But lately I get way more harassment on Instagram than I ever did on Twitter."

Users like Spivey who try to call out harassment problems say it's often their attempts at raising the issue that are punished rather than the original offender.

In the 24 hours I commented on her post, random men have been following me, sending me DMs asking me to pose naked or post photos of my breasts. They've even been tagging me in crude comments on her body. I reported accounts to Instagram and surprise, surprise...
- Rhea Arora (@RheaArora_) October 4, 2018

Late last year, Joanie Diana Goss, a physiotherapist who uses her account to document her workouts, started posting screenshots of some of the awful messages she receives on Instagram-messages that she said Instagram has "never once" addressed when she asked. Her account was then penalized for sharing the offensive content in the messages, while the accounts that originally sent them remain active.

While Instagram does auto-filter certain words from comments, users say trolls simply add an extra letter or symbol to escape the filters. "People always find new ways to spell terrible things," said Katie, a plus-size fashion Instagrammer with hundreds of thousands of followers who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym because she fears retaliation from both Instagram and her harassers. She said trolls have called her employer, attempted to sabotage her day job, threatened to mutilate her body, and more.

Why would anyone want to be on your platform when you so easily allow an environment of hate, abuse and harrassment to exist without consequence @instagram? And to the social media manager, how does it feel working for a company that does not prioritize their user's safety? pic.twitter.com/LuvyQXd1sj
- Selegend (@SelOnTheBrain) September 25, 2018

Sara Mills, a beauty-focused Instagrammer with more than half a million followers, tried using comment filters to silence certain terms-but blocking terms doesn't block the person who used them. "I feel like it just reinforces the behavior," said Mills. "Instagram should say, 'These words are blocked, you can't do this.' With all the psychology they put into making you spend more time on the app, or share more photos, or figuring out what color to make a button, you'd think they could put some of that into figuring out how to get people to treat each other like human beings."

Mills said the type of micro-celebrity that Instagram has so famously created are particularly vulnerable. "I always hear from people, 'Well, you put yourself out there. You have to deal with this.' Let me tell you, I don't make millions of dollars like a celebrity. I don't have a team to protect me. I don't have an admin running my page. I'm not four steps removed," she said. "In these people's mind, they're talking to a picture of someone. They don't realize that in the influencer world, most of us manage our own accounts."

The most upsetting thing, Mills said, is that she feels like the company-which is expected to make some $8 billion in revenue this year selling advertising against the kind of content she and people like her produce for free-has given her no recourse. "You can't reach out to Instagram-there's no reaching out," she said. "Even as someone that's verified, I've never been able to get an actual person to help me."

Shutterstock / Thanh Do / The Atlantic

Some users have even found more creative ways to beg for help. "@Kevin I have a pretty big file of insta screenshots of a woman bullying me and my coworkers and threatening to come after me, but your report bots keep coming back to me saying we're cool with this," user @RubiStudios wrote in a comment on one of Systrom's own Instagram photos. Systrom did not respond.

According to an Instagram spokesperson, Facebook and Instagram share a team of 20,000 people working on safety and security across both platforms. Of that team, 7,500 people-a mix of contractors, full-time employees, and staff from "partner companies"-are tasked with reviewing content from the more than 1 billion people who use Instagram, and 2 billion who use Facebook, every month around the world. It's a Sisyphean task, according to the people who do it.

"The people who I work with, who make $15 an hour, have to have expertise on regulation, fraud, bullying, hate speech," said Andy, who moderates content for Facebook and Instagram and who asked to use a pseudonym. Even he finds the reporting mechanism lacking: "I've used the Instagram app as a user just a little bit, and the couple times I've reported something, the experience has been totally frustrating," he said.

Andy said that the few times he's used Instagram, he's seen content that, as a moderator, he "knew should have been deleted." Indeed, it's not hard to find: I recently came across an account that was posting memes about "kill black and Jewish people" and "rape disabled women." It also posted multiple threats to carry out school shootings. The account had 6,400 followers, and all its posts had hundreds of likes. It was active for more than a year and had been reported to Instagram many times using its internal reporting tool, but wasn't taken down until I flagged it to Instagram's PR department.

so does anything on instagram ever meet the guidelines for harassment or @instagram
- manal (@cliffordoze) September 24, 2018

A September Business Insider investigation revealed that Instagram's new TV service recommended videos of potential child abuse showing graphic violence and genital mutilation. By the time they were removed, only after being flagged to Instagram's PR team, they had generated more than a million views. Four days later, The Washington Post reported that Instagram had failed to curb illegal drug sales on the platform, noting that illicit content had flourished there. Following a drug dealer, for instance, filled "up a person's feed with posts for drugs, suggesting other sellers to follow and introducing new hashtags, such as #xansforsale," The Post reported.

When it comes to moderation, context is often critical. Instagram is available in every country except China and North Korea; its users speak dozens of languages and interact with one another in ways specific to the nuances of innumerable cultures. They use regional slang, tell inside jokes, and communicate in code. But Instagram's current reporting pathway doesn't allow users to explain exactly why something is offensive, leaving moderators to guess.

Read: Posting Instagram sponsored content is the new summer job.

"There could be all sorts of things that the user understands that the moderator doesn't," Andy said. "So many of my co-workers are old, people who did not grow up thinking like anything like this would ever happen. They got hired because their résumé says, 'I have a Facebook account,' but you need a Ph.D. in 4chan slang sometimes, and stuff that's specific to Instagram, in order to understand what someone means when they post something. We just have no context about the stuff that we get related to harassment, and it makes it a lot harder to interpret who is attacking."

An increasing amount of content on Instagram is also just screenshots from Twitter, so moderators feel like they need to be experts in multiple social platforms to understand the nuances of each post, they told me. "We get it with YouTube, too-like the Logan Paul YouTube business or whatever is happening in the YouTube world, it obviously crosses over to Instagram, and we have to figure out what it means," Alex said.

Just went to have a look at Megan's Instagram cos they mentioned it on Aftersun. The comments. 😢
She is a human being, no one deserves this kind of misogynistic abuse. Social media needs to verify everyone & hold people to account for such hateful harassment! 😡#LoveIsland pic.twitter.com/apY804ex72
- Samantha Pressdee (@SammiePressdee) July 30, 2018

When Instagram introduces new features, the moderation-team members receive no warning, Andy said. Consequently, they are left scrambling to understand how they work and what constitutes harassment on each format. "When the Questions feature rolled out, same way as every other new feature, we had no idea," he said. "We didn't know which part is the question, which is the answer, who says what? That makes such a big difference on whether you're going to delete or ignore the post. The mods are just totally not kept up to date on how people use features."

Alex, the current Instagram employee who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym, said the company prioritizes growth above all else, often at costs to user experience. "The focus is still on getting people to spend more time, getting more users, getting more revenue. That doesn't change much internally," Alex said. "There's been a lot of effort to shape the narrative, but the reality is that it doesn't drive business impact."

Apparently for @instagram it's impossible to start blocking trolls using the IP address but AT LEAST the could use a better system to recognize harassment or bullying comments.
At least. pic.twitter.com/exKxGddxhb
- Beatrice 💙 (@itsmikapenniman) October 1, 2018

At Instagram and Facebook, Alex said, "features can make whatever progress ... but can't hurt the other metrics. A feature might decrease harassment 10 percent, but if it decreases users by 1 percent, that's not a trade-off that will fly. Internally right now, no one is willing to make that trade-off."

Allie, a former employee at Instagram, agreed. "Instagram has terrible tools. I think people haven't really focused on it much because so many harassment campaigns are just more visible on other platforms," she said. Throughout her time there, she said, "many of the efforts to reduce harassment were oriented toward PR, but very few engineering and community resources were put toward actually decreasing harassment."

She said that the company's focus on growth has crippled its ability to understand the deep problems within the communities the platform has created. "When you work in growth products for so long, you just kind of don't learn to understand community concerns," she said.

Even easy fixes were ignored during her time at the company, she said. "For almost a year, there was a link to a help page on the reporting flow that led to a broken page. It was like that for at least six months. How much do you have to drop the ball that on your harassment-reporting flow you have a broken page? It just shows how little resources and attention they have put toward it," she said.

Instagram has touted its automated moderation tools as a supplement to its human moderators. "We are working on AI technology that can find bullying or harassing content, which our teams can then review and remove," Instagram's Newton wrote in a statement. "Our aim is that in time we will be able to detect and remove this content faster than ever before so we can preserve the kind, safe environment our community deserves."

Earlier this year, for instance, Instagram announced it would be leveraging Facebook's machine-learning system, DeepText, to help moderate the platform. But Facebook has also struggled to stem harassment on its platform. It was Facebook's very own moderation system that led to women being locked out of their accounts or banned from posting on Facebook when they negatively commented about men in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

"Let's just say Facebook is totally screwing up their content-moderation policy on Facebook.com, and it's kind of sad that Instagram might suffer because of that," Andy said.

As Allie sees it, the issue is not that Instagram has anti-harassment features that are ready to be rolled out but haven't been; it's that no one is even given time or resources to develop these features in the first place.

"It's not even like, 'Oh, we decided we wanted to do a product, but we didn't," she said. "It's like, 'Oh, we didn't even have the resources to start.'"

For the time being, though, many users are bracing themselves every time they open the app. Others have left Instagram altogether, or taken their accounts private. Farbstein, now 19, is still public, and trying to stay positive. "For me it's really important to spread my message of empowerment and authenticity with the public," he said. "Especially to those who really need to hear it."

And instead of playing whack-a-mole with the abusive comments, he has a new strategy: He's leaving them up. "I want people to see the ugliness that exists in this world," he said. "It's gotten so easy to be a troll."

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Instagram Has a Massive Harassment Problem

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The platform has cast itself as the internet's kindest place. But users argue harassment is rampant, and employees say efforts to stem it aren't funded well or prioritized. When Brandon Farbstein first joined Instagram in 2014, he was 14 and optimistic.

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In this digital age, technology and the Internet are part of everyday life. Social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook are especially prominent in the lives of adolescents, and they're not just for talking with friends: adolescents use social media to express themselves and find information. Below, we look at their habits, the risks and benefits of social media use, and resources to keep youth safe online.

How Teens Are Connected

The Pew Research Center regularly conducts surveys on technology use in the United States, and collects data on adolescents' social media use.

Teens connect via mobile. Widespread and improved mobile technology means teens can access social media more easily. According to a Pew survey conducted during 2014 and 2015, 94 percent of teens who go online using a mobile device do so daily.

Teens use multiple social platforms. Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are the most popular, and 71 percent of teens say they use more than one social media site.

Teens' social media use differs by gender. Boys report going on Facebook most often; while girls are more likely than boys to use visually-oriented platforms such as Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram.

Teens share a lot of their personal information. A survey of over 600 teens from 2012 found that nearly all shared their real name and photos of themselves, and most shared their school name, birthdate, and the city or town where they lived.

Teens use social media for romance too. Another 2015 Pew report on the role of technology in teen romantic relationships notes that half of teens say they've used Facebook or other social networking sites to express romantic interest in someone, and many use these sites to display their romantic relationships.

Social Media: Health Resource or Health Risk?

As with most technology, there are potential benefits and risks to teens' social media use. These platforms can help teens socialize and communicate with peers; find learning opportunities; and become engaged in causes important to them. Social media also provide a wealth of information and resources that teens can use to maintain their own health and relationships.

On the other hand, teens on social media are at risk of cyberbullying and other aggression online; inappropriate content or exposure to predators; and having their private information available publicly. There is also some evidence that frequent social media use may be linked to depression and other mental health problems.

Ultimately, social media becomes a tool or risk for teen's health based on how they use it, which is in turn shaped by the guidance they get from caring adults. To support teens' healthy social media use, parents and youth-serving professionals can use these resources:

The broad use of social media by adolescents means it is an influential piece of their lives. Talk with adolescents to help them use social media to support their health.

Want to stay informed about adolescent health? Learn more about OAH's work and its new national call to action, "Adolescent Health: Think, Act, Grow® (TAG)."

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In this digital age, technology and the Internet are part of everyday life. Social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook are especially prominent in the lives of adolescents, and they're not just for talking with friends: adolescents use social media to express themselves and find information.

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People assume that iPhones, laptops and Netflix are evidence of progress. In some ways, that's true. A moderate amount of Googling, for instance, can be good for your brain, and there are apps that can boost brain function and activity.

Yet tech advancements also come with some unintended consequences. Our brains being "massively rewired" by tech, says neuroscientist Michael Merzenich in The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, a Pulitzer-nominated 2011 book by Nicholas Carr. Merzenich warns that the effect of technology on human intelligence could be "deadly."

That got us thinking. How exactly is technology messing up our brains?

1. Tech is screwing up your sleep.

Studies have shown that blue-enriched light, which is emitted by gadgets like smartphones, tablets and laptops, can suppress the body's release of melatonin at night. Melatonin is a key hormone that helps regulate your internal clock, telling your body when it is nighttime and when to feel sleepy. Blue light can disrupt that process, making it impossible for you to stick to a proper sleep schedule.

Losing sleep has a number of negative effects on your brain. If you're not logging seven or more hours of sleep each night, you might suffer from increasingly bad moods, decreased focus at work and problems with memory, not to mention a loss of actual brain tissue -- all of which makes you less than a joy to be around.

2. You're easily distracted.

You don't really need science to know this, but technology makes it much easier to get distracted, whether that's stepping away from an important project to check your smartphone or flipping between multiple browser tabs without really focusing on any one. It has been proven that toggling between multiple tasks at once doesn't actually work -- in fact, you just wind up performing all your duties even worse.

Teens in particular are more distracted than ever. A 2012 Pew Research Center survey of more than 2,400 teachers found that most educators feel students are more distracted than previous generations. Some 87 percent of teachers agreed with the statement, "today's digital technologies are creating an easily distracted generation with short attention spans," while 64 percent agreed with the idea that "today's digital technologies do more to distract students than to help them academically." Yikes.

3. You can't remember much...

Technology's tendency to butt into whatever else you're doing makes it more difficult to form new memories. As Nicholas Carr explains in The Shallows, memory comes in two types: transient working memory and long-term memory, which is more permanent. Information needs to pass from working memory into long-term memory in order to be stored. Any break in the processes of working memory -- like, say, stopping to check your email or send a text message in the middle of reading an article -- can erase information from your mind before that transfer occurs.

There's also a limit to how much information your working memory can take in at once. Taking in too much information -- which happens a lot online -- is like "having water poured into a glass continuously all day long, so whatever was there at the top has to spill out as the new water comes down," productivity expert Tony Schwartz told The Huffington Post last year.

4. ...so you're relying on the Internet to remember things for you.

People used to be able to retain really vast quantities of knowledge -- like reciting entire novels, word for word -- but technology has eliminated both the need and the drive to do so. When you know that Google or your smartphone can retain a piece of information for you, you're less likely to store it in memory, studies have shown. Scientific American last year likened the Internet to an " external hard drive " for our brains, as we outsource an increasing amount of information to the web.

That's not the worst thing in the world, Scientific American adds. We've always outsourced some of that information to external "hard drives" of sorts, relying on friends rather than technology to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. But these day we're "outsourcing" way more.

5. And you're much more forgetful than you used to be.

Millennials are actually more likely to forget what day it is or where they put their keys than people over the age of 55, according to a 2013 Trending Machine survey. In a press release for the survey, family and occupational therapist Patricia Gutentag called out technology as one of the main culprits: "This is a population that has grown up multitasking using technology, often compounded by lack of sleep, all of which results in high levels of forgetfulness," she said.

6. You can't concentrate on what you're reading.

Even if you've shunned all distractions, you still won't absorb information you read online as well as you would if you'd read it in a book. And you can blame hypertext for that. Those colorful little links scattered throughout online articles (including this one) make your brain work harder than it would otherwise, leaving less brain power to process what you're reading. Even just reading on screens, like a laptop or iPad -- links or no links -- has been shown to diminish comprehension.

Research has shown that reading linked text "entails a lot of mental calisthenics -- evaluating hyperlinks, deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats -- that are extraneous to the process of reading," Carr wrote in " The Shallows." And giving your brain more work to do makes it harder to absorb information. Text that's peppered with photos, videos and ads is even worse.

7. You can't find your way around without GPS.

People who rely on GPS to get around have less activity in the hippocampus, an area of the brain involved in both memory and navigation, according to a series of studies presented in 2010. Using spatial memory -- which involves using visual cues to develop "cognitive maps" that remember routes -- instead of operating on GPS-induced autopilot can help avert memory problems later in life, the studies found.

A 2008 study from the University of London even found that taxi drivers had more developed hippocampi than non-taxi drivers -- perhaps because they are so accustomed to navigating cities using spatial memory, rather than relying on GPS (though that may no longer be true of smartphone-equipped taxi drivers).

8. You have the brain of a drug addict.

No, "Internet addiction" isn't just some BS term parents throw around to terrify youngsters who spend too much time playing Candy Crush. Spending too much time on the Internet can actually cause changes in the brain that mimic those caused by drug and alcohol dependence, according to a 2012 study.

Internet addicts -- most notably gamers who shun food, school and sleep to play for days on end -- have abnormal white and grey matter in their brains, which disrupts and cripples the regions involved in processing emotion and regulating attention and decision-making. Alcoholics and drug addicts have strikingly similar brain abnormalities, the study found.

"I have seen people who stopped attending university lectures, failed their degrees or their marriages broke down" because of Internet gaming addiction, Dr. Henriette Bowden Jones, who runs a British clinic for Internet addicts, told The Independent.

Now that you're properly terrified of the effects of technology on the old noggin, let us remind you that you do have the power to prevent brain drain and time-suck. Just log off every once in a while!

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People assume that iPhones, laptops and Netflix are evidence of progress. In some ways, that's true. A moderate amount of Googling, for instance, can be good for your brain, and there are apps that can boost brain function and activity. Yet tech advancements also come with some unintended consequences.

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(This is the full version of the phoneless photos.)

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The joining of people to devices has been rapid and unalterable. The application of the personal device in daily life has made tasks take less time. Far away places and people feel closer than ever before. Despite the obvious benefits that these advances in technology have contributed to society, the social and physical implications are slowly revealing themselves. In similar ways that photography transformed the lived experience into the photographable, performable, and reproducible experience, personal devices are shifting behaviors while simultaneously blending into the landscape by taking form as being one with the body. This phantom limb is used as a way of signaling busyness and unapproachability to strangers while existing as an addictive force that promotes the splitting of attention between those who are physically with you and those who are not.

The work began as I sat in a café' one morning. This is what I wrote about my observation:
Family sitting next to me at Illium café in Troy, NY is so disconnected from one another. Not much talking. Father and two daughters have their own phones out. Mom doesn't have one or chooses to leave it put away. She stares out the window, sad and alone in the company of her closest family. Dad looks up every so often to announce some obscure piece of info he found online. Twice he goes on about a large fish that was caught. No one replies. I am saddened by the use of technology for interaction in exchange for not interacting. This has never happened before and I doubt we have scratched the surface of the social impact of this new experience. Mom has her phone out now.
The image of that family, the mother's face, the teenage girls' and their father's posture and focus on the palm of their own hands has been burned in my mind. It was one of those moments where you see something so amazingly common that it startles you into consciousness of what's actually happening and it is impossible to forget. I see this family at the grocery store, in classrooms, on the side of the highway and in my own bed as I fall asleep next to my wife. We rest back to back on our sides coddling our small, cold, illuminated devices every night.

The large format portraits are of individuals who appear to be holding personal devices although the devices have been physically removed from the sitter's hand. They are asked to hold their stare and posture as I remove their device and then I make the exposure. The photographs represent reenactments of scenes that I experience daily. We have learned to read the expression of the body while someone is consuming a device and when those signifiers are activated it is as if the device can be seen taking physical form without the object being present.

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The joining of people to devices has been rapid and unalterable. The application of the personal device in daily life has made tasks take less time. Far away places and people feel closer than ever before. Despite the obvious benefits that these advances in technology have contributed to society, the social and physical implications are slowly revealing themselves.

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How are all Those Screens Changing Kids' Behavior?

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How are all Those Screens Changing Kids' Behavior?

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The medical and research fields have not yet come to a clear consensus on what constitutes technology "addiction" and which factors distinguish a true technology addiction disorder from problematic use or just bad habits. But the behavior Schwartz describes is remarkably familiar to those of us who are on our devices more than we know we ought to be.

It is important to reflect on how our human connections are being altered by our technological connections. The truth is, we simply don't know enough about how the frequency or quality of our technology use is changing basic human interactions and behaviors.

What we do know is that like us adults, our kids are spending more time than ever with their screens. The Common Sense Census, released earlier this year, sheds light on what kids age 8--18 are doing with entertainment media every day. Given the amount of time kids are spending -- six hours a day for tweens and nine for teens -- it certainly does matter.

Think about the fact that Schwartz, a smart adult and successful businessman, acknowledged his problem yet still struggled to kick the habit of looking at his device constantly. How can we possibly expect kids and teens to take it upon themselves to manage their digital behavior when adults can't do it?

Our world is changing, and kids are spending a lot of time with media -- and they're doing it in a variety of ways and on many platforms. Media use can be beneficial for our kids, from them using educational apps and websites to creating their own content -- and they should also enjoy media use for entertainment! But we must know how and when to create limits for ourselves.

As parents, we want to find ways to use media to support healthy development, learning, and community building. But we can't begin to make sense of what these technological changes mean for kids until we understand what's being used and for how long and how kids feel about technology and media. From there, we must delve deeper to understand how our technology is changing the way we live.

As we embrace exciting new technological innovations, it is important to articulate the need for balance in our media and technology use and to promote the new research so that we can all make informed decisions, both for ourselves and for our children.

We need to develop a better collective understanding of how our new technology habits are changing our behavior. Increased government or foundation-supported funding is needed for research into important questions such as: What is the impact of technology use on empathy? How can we develop strategies to minimize the cognitive costs associated with multitasking? How does media use affect our face-to-face communication?

We're in the middle of a huge unplanned experiment right now, one that many of us may not fully realize is happening. It would benefit us all to have research to separate facts from fiction when it comes to problematic technology use and to find ways in which technologies could better support our human connectedness rather than replace it.

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how are all those screens changing kids' behavior? - cnn

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How are all those screens changing kids' behavior? - CNN

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The medical and research fields have not yet come to a clear consensus on what constitutes technology "addiction" and which factors distinguish a true technology addiction disorder from problematic use or just bad habits. But the behavior Schwartz describes is remarkably familiar to those of us who are on our devices more than we know we ought to be.

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You Asked: Is My Smartphone Making Me Dumber?

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You Asked: Is My Smartphone Making Me Dumber?

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You Asked: Is My Smartphone Making Me Dumber?

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As our smartphones, screens and digital devices grow more powerful, our brains may be weakening, according to the latest research

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The argument over whether technology is making people smarter or stupider has become something of an eternal debate over the years. One study revealed that the cognitive ability of people has increased continuously since 1930.

Some people agree that it's making people smarter and others think that the Internet only makes you think you are smarter. Another study says that 90% of people are suffering from so-called digital amnesia.

MEL Science is one company that believes kids are smarter than ever before, but there's still a place for offline learning. Through combining the power of the Internet and two innovative chemistry sets, they are determined to help children continue their education.

With the help of MEL Science, this guide is going to explain to you why technology has actually increased how smart kids are.

More Information than Ever

Try getting a kid to do their homework or read a book. Parents have been screaming at their kids to do something useful since the invention of education. These days they don't have to do that because they're doing it of their own accord via Google.

The difference is they have a library of information at their disposal. Previously, if you wanted to find out about a subject you had to go to the library and find the right book. Now all you have to do is type it into Google and you'll soon come across a Wikipedia page on that subject. The difference is you didn't have to move and it happened in less than ten seconds.

The sheer wealth of information alone is one reason why kids are smarter than ever before.

Education and learning used to be something that kids found boring. Nobody likes to sit in front of a dusty textbook all day. They want to do something fun. That's why MEL Science makes their products practical. Kids still learn the theory, but they have a blast doing it.

Kids these days are using technology to find out new things because they want to not because they have to. Learning is something that's happening passively.

But What About the Crutch Argument?

The argument that technology is acting as a crutch is a common one, particularly since millennials have become a dirty word. It works like this. The majority of people who believe technology is making people dumber say that kids are lazy because they can just look up the answer and they don't have to absorb it.

To an extent, this is true, but by looking something up you have no choice but to absorb it. Furthermore, there are other ways of taking in information. The idea that you can just go to Wikipedia is the most basic form of education in technology. There are so many other ways to take in new information, such as through gaming and new technologies, like virtual reality.

New Technology is Making Learning Fun

No matter how much you try to drill into your kids that education is important, they are still just kids. They are not going to do something that they don't enjoy. That's why it's so difficult to actually get them to learn a subject they have no interest in. And that's why some people are better at some things than others.

But new technology is filling in these knowledge gaps through making learning fun. A lot of people have learned through gaming. They have used their practical knowledge, and the best part is they didn't even see it as learning. They saw it as just having fun.

And virtual reality is expected to take that to a whole new level. MEL Science believes there will still be room for practical objects in the real world, but they will be utilizing even more advanced technology. That's why their chemistry sets continue to be updated to match up with the real world.

So is Technology Making Kids Smarter?

There's no doubt that kids are getting smarter than ever before. Exam results are constantly climbing around the world, and a greater proportion of people possess higher education qualifications than ever before. That alone should demonstrate how the world is growing smarter.

As with all young people, it's about engagement. The only way they're going to keep getting smarter is through engagement. MEL Science has seen a huge amount of uptake in their chemistry sets because everything is about grabbing the attentions of young people and keeping them engaged.

What do you think technology has done in regards to making people smarter?

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How Technology Has Made Our Kids Smarter Than Ever

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The argument over whether technology is making people smarter or stupider has become something of an eternal debate over the years. One study revealed that the cognitive ability of people has increased continuously since 1930. Some people agree that it's making people smarter and others think that the Internet only makes you think you are smarter.

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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Given the thorough integration of social media into the lives of the majority of American teens, it is no surprise that these sites play an important role in the establishment of friendships and the everyday back and forth of peer relationships. This chapter takes an in-depth look at the role of social media in teens' friendships, looking at teen friendships more broadly defined.

Social media is an important venue for interaction and conversation among America's youth. Fully 76% of all teens use social media. Facebook is the dominant platform, with 71% of all teens using it. Instagram and Snapchat also have become increasingly important, with 52% of teens using Instagram and 41% using Snapchat. One-third of American teens use Twitter and another third use Google Plus. Fewer teens use Vine or Tumblr.

Social media plays a critical role in connecting teens to new friends, allowing teens to learn more about new friends and get to know them better. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of teens who have made a new friend online say they have met new friends on a social media platform. Two-thirds (62%) of teens say they've shared their social media username with a brand new friend as a way to stay in touch.

Beyond making new friends, social media is major way that teens interact with their existing friends. More than nine-in-ten teens (94%) say they spend time with friends on social media. Fully 30% say they spend time with friends on social media every day, and another third (37%) say they do so every few days. When asked to rank the ways they communicate with friends, social media sites like Facebook or Twitter are one of the top ways of communicating with friends for two-thirds (66%) of teens.

A Majority of Teens Say Social Media Better Connects Them to Their Friends' Feelings and Lives

As discussed earlier in the report, social media is a critical platform for making and staying in touch with friends. Given this, and the frequency with which many teens use social media, it is not surprising that teen social media users report that social media makes them feel better connected to their friends' feelings and to information about what is going on in their friends' lives. More than eight-in-ten (83%) social media-using teens say social media makes them more connected to information about what is happening in their friends' lives and 70% say these social platforms better connect them to their friends' feelings.

Girls who use social media are more likely than boys to say they are "a lot" better connected to information about their friends' lives (40% vs. 26% boys) and their friends' feelings (24% vs. 16% of boys) thanks to social media.

While teens of all races and ethnicities are equally likely to feel more connected to information about what's going on in their friends' lives through social media, black youth are more likely to say they feel "a lot" more connected. Hispanic teens are more likely than whites to say they feel more connected to friends' feelings through social media, with 78% of Hispanic youth saying this compared with 65% of white youth.

Smartphones offer near constant access to friends and for social media users, their friends' online postings. Not surprisingly, teens who have access to smartphones and use social media are more likely to report that they feel "a lot" more connected to what's happening in their friends lives than teens without a smartphone. While both groups are equally likely to say they feel more connected to friends through their social media use, 36% of smartphone owners say they feel "a lot" better connected to friends while a quarter (25%) of teens without smartphone access report the same degree of connectedness.

Teens from our focus groups told us that they appreciate the way social media keeps them in the loop with friends. One high school boy explained, "One good thing to come out it is you can find out what your friends do and check on them if you're not there. So like find out who they hooked up with and what they did..."

Teens also enjoy the way social media better connects them to more people. As one high school boy said, "And you can talk to people a lot more often 'cause you don't need to see them in person."

Nearly nine-in-ten social media-using teens believe people overshare on these platforms

Even as teens often feel better connected to friends' feelings and information about their lives through social media, they also report that they are sometimes too connected to their friends' lives. Fully 88% of social media-using teens agree that people share too much information about themselves on social media, with 35% agreeing strongly. These data hold true regardless of which social media platforms teens use.

Teens from rural areas are more likely to agree strongly that people share too much information about themselves on social media than their urban or suburban counterparts, with 46% of rural teens strongly agreeing, compared with 31% of suburban teens and 39% of urban youth.

Nearly Seven-in-Ten Teens Receive Support From Friends Through Social Media During Tough Times

Social media not only connects teens to information and friends, but also connects them to opportunities for social support from their friends, peers and broader social networks. Among teens, 68% have received support on social media during challenges or tough times.

Following adult gender patterns around asking for and receiving social support on social media, girls are more likely to report receiving such support on social media, with nearly three-quarters (73%) of girls garnering support, compared with 63% of social media-using boys.

When examining overall support on social media during tough times, white social media-using teens are more likely than Hispanic teens to report receiving support on the platforms. Nearly three-quarters (72%) of white teens who use social media receive support for tough times on these platforms, while 59% of Hispanics receive similar encouragement. Digging down into the data, black teens who use social media are just as likely overall as white and Hispanic teens to garner support on social media in these situations. Still, they are more likely than white youth who use social media to say they receive that support frequently - with 28% of black teens reporting frequent support, while 15% of white teens report similar boosting from their online network during tough times.

Social media-using teens from households with more modest incomes are more likely than teens from the wealthiest families to say people frequently support them through challenges on social media. While 23% of teens from families earning less than $50,000 annually say they frequently have people supporting them on social media, 14% of teens from families earning more than $75,000 per year report frequent support.

Smartphone users are more likely than teens without access to smartphones to say people support them through challenges or tough times through social media. Fully 71% of smartphone-using teens who use social media say people support them through tough times on those platforms, while 58% of teens without a smartphone say the same.

Negative Feelings From Social Media Viewing

Even as social media connects teens to friends' feelings and experiences in ways both positive and excessive, that same sharing can reveal events and activities to which teens weren't invited, and can lead to negative comparisons between their own lives and the lives of those they are connected to on social media.

53% of social media-using teens have seen people posting to social media about events to which they were not invited

A bit more than half (53%) of social media-using teens have witnessed others posting to social media about gatherings, events or parties that they weren't invited to. Most teens don't experience this very often, with the bulk of teens (42%) saying it happens occasionally and just 11% saying it happens frequently.

Teens from households with more highly educated parents are more likely to say they haven't been invited to events they later saw posted on social media. Two-thirds (65%) of teen social media users with parents with a college education or more say they've seen postings for events they weren't invited to, as have half (50%) of teens whose parents have completed some college and 47% of teens whose parents have a high school diploma or less.

Most teens don't feel worse about their lives based on what they see from others on social media

Social media exposes teens and adults to information about the lives of their friends. Given what we know about how teens curate and manage information posted to their social media platforms, some profiles post a highlight reel of individual lives, rather than a fuller picture of ups and downs. And while some youth feel worse about their own lives because of what they see on friends' social media postings, the majority of teen social media users say they generally do not feel bad about their lives based on what they see on these platforms.

More than three-quarters (78%) of teens say they do not feel worse about their own lives based on what others post to social media, while 21% of teens say they do. Among those who do feel worse about their lives based on what they see on social media, most do not feel this particularly acutely; 17% say they feel "a little" worse and 4% say they feel "a lot" worse.

Hispanic youth are somewhat more likely to report that they feel worse about their own lives because of social media

More than a quarter (28%) of Hispanic teens report feeling worse about their lives because of social media postings, significantly more than the 12% of black youth who feel this way. The difference between these two groups and the 21% of white teens who say they feel worse is not statistically significant.

Self-Presentation and Curation of Social Media Presence

Teens as well as adults spend time curating and planning how to present themselves in online social spaces. Adults have often admonished teens to think carefully about what they post and share online, and in many cases, teens have taken this to heart. Online profiles and presence are constructed things for youth. With this need to be careful comes a need to present themselves to multiple audiences - to be authentic and compelling to peers and to simultaneously present a potentially sanitized and appropriate digital persona to adults like parents, teachers, future employers and college admissions officers.

Teens struggle to balance the needs of their different audiences and it shows in the pressures they experience and the attitudes they express about how their peers present themselves.

A large majority of teen social media users agree that people get to show different sides of themselves on social media that they cannot show offline

Some 85% of teen social media users agree that people get to show different sides of themselves on social media that they cannot show offline. This sentiment is consistent across most major demographic groups.

Teens with access to smartphones are also more likely to say people show different sides of themselves on social media, with 88% of smartphone owners agreeing with that statement, compared with 76% of teens without a smartphone.

In one of our focus groups, a high school girl explains what she considers a positive side of social media: "It allows you to show, like, a different side of yourself. ... I mean, you can talk about different things. If you're in person with them, you can joke around. But then like if you're texting with them or talking about something serious, you can talk about serious things and politics and stuff, and it shows a different side of yourself that you might not talk about with them in person."

Roughly three-quarters of teens think people are less authentic and real on social media than they are offline

Even as teens have the opportunity to share parts of themselves on social media that they can't share in person, those same self-presentations don't always feel authentic to their peers. Roughly three-quarters (77%) of social media-using teens agree people are less authentic and real on social media than they are offline.

Again, there are few major differences among different groups of teens in their agreement with this statement.

Many teens feel pressure to curate positive and well-liked content

While a majority of teens do not feel pressure to post content that makes them look good to others (such as parents or peers), 40% of teens do report feeling pressure to post positive and attractive content about themselves. The bulk of teens (30%) report feeling "a little" pressure, while just 10% say they feel "a lot" of pressure.

Teens with more highly educated parents are substantially more likely than teens who have parents with less education to report pressure to only post content that makes them look good. More than half (54%) of social media-using teens whose parents have a college degree or more report such pressure, while about of third of teens whose parents have some college experience or a high school diploma or less say the same. The bulk of teens whose parents have a college degree (42%) report feeling the pressure "a little" - just 12% feel "a lot" of pressure to post only positive content about themselves to social media. There are no significant differences between boys and girls, different ages or races and ethnicities in feeling this pressure.

Teens who are generally more interactive with others in a digital space - using it to make friends or play games with people they have never met - are all more likely to feel pressure to only post content that makes them look good to others.

Many teens want to be liked by friends and peers and that extends to digital "likes" as well.

In addition to the pressure some teens feel to post content that makes them look good, teens also feel pressure to post content that others like and comment on. Similar to the percentage of teens who feel pressure to post content that makes them look good, 39% of teens on social media say they feel pressure to post content that will be popular and get lots of comments or likes.

One middle school girl in our focus groups explained the pressure to post cool content to Instagram and how that led to the end of a friendship: "So it's on Instagram. In my school, it's like so you post quality pictures, I guess, and that makes you cool. I don't know. It's like a lot of girls have ... they buy cameras just to do this - expensive cameras. So anyway, I guess K was accusing C of like being too much like her, and one of the reasons was because C was posting pictures. So she would edit her pictures like in such a way that it would look cool. ... I don't know how to describe it. It's just a quality cool thing, I guess. So like they lost their friendship, and part of the reason was because of her social media account."

Teens with more highly educated parents are more likely to report feeling pressure to post content that will garner likes or comments on social media. Nearly half (47%) of teens with parents with a college degree or more report feeling such pressure, while just 36% of teens whose parents have some college experience and 35% of teens whose parents have a high school diploma or less report feeling pressure to post well-liked content.

However, there are no differences between boys and girls, younger and older teens, or those of different racial or ethnic backgrounds when it comes to feeling pressure around posting content that others will like or comment on.

Teens who feel pressure to post content that garners likes or comments frequently feel that they must post only content that makes them look good. Fully 59% of teens who feel "a lot" of pressure to post popular content feel similarly pressured to post content that makes them look good to others.

42% of teens have had someone post things about them that they cannot change or control; older teens and white teens are especially likely to report this

The pressure to post content that others like and find appealing may be, in part, to counteract another challenge that teens and adults face on social media platforms: People posting content about them that they cannot control. Some 42% of teen social media users experience people posting things about them that they can't change or control, with 9% indicating that this happens to them "frequently."

Older teen social media users are more likely to say they've experienced this: 46% of teens ages 15 to 17 say they've had people posting things about them that they can't change, compared with just over a third (35%) of teens ages 13 to 14. Broadly, there are no differences between boys and girls in their likelihood of having people posting things about them that they can't change or control.

White teen social media users are more likely than Hispanic teens to report that people have posted things about them that they can't control: 45% of white teens have experienced this, as have 32% of Hispanic teens. The 38% of black youth who have experienced this is not significantly different than white or Hispanic teens. All groups, but especially white teens, are likely to say this happens occasionally rather than frequently.

Among social media-using teens, those with more highly educated parents are more likely than teens with parents with lower levels of educational attainment to experience people posting things about them that they can't change or control. Nearly half (48%) of social media-using teens whose parents have a college degree or more say content has been posted about them on social media that they can't control, while 38% of teens whose parents have a high school diploma or less report similar experiences.

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Given the thorough integration of social media into the lives of the majority of American teens, it is no surprise that these sites play an important role in the establishment of friendships and the everyday back and forth of peer relationships.

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"Man accused of seducing young girl on web"[2]
Headlines like these from the news and shows like NBC's "To Catch a Predator" have made parents understandably anxious about their teen's Internet use, especially when it comes to social media websites, like Facebook. The Internet can seem like a big city at night-full of hidden dangers and temptations; a place you wouldn't let your children go to alone.

But is the Internet really such a menace? A report by the Internet Safety Task Force (created by 49 state attorneys general) found that "the problem of bullying among children, both online and offline, poses a far more serious challenge than the sexual solicitation of minors by adults. "[3] In fact, the report found that "children and teenagers were unlikely to be propositioned by adults online. In the cases that do exist . . . teenagers are typically willing participants and are already at risk because of poor home environments, substance abuse or other problems."[4]

It may help parents and caregivers to learn that the Web-and digital tools in general-can actually be beneficial for teens. This may be especially true for teens who are otherwise isolated or marginalized. Youth who are lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) often grapple with the social risk of losing family and friends by coming out and the physical risk of being attacked. For LGB youth, the Internet can provide a welcoming community of other young people looking to share their experiences and gain support. Discrimination at schools is sometimes so widespread that recently the ACLU found "some public schools are using web filtering software to block student access to positive information about LGBT issues and organizations" yet allowing web access to anti-LGBT sites or sites with information about changing LGB sexual orientation.[5] With such hostile environments offline, an accepting and supportive online space can be lifesaving.

The Internet also can be helpful to young people who are looking for information about health and sexuality, yet don't feel like they can ask about these issues at home or in their schools. Websites that answer questions about sex, STDs, and even puberty give reassurance to youth.

And digital tools can be used to promote healthier behavior in teens. For example, the Center for Innovative Public Health Research (CiPHR) has developed a smoking cessation via text message program aimed at young adults, based upon pioneering work by Dr. Anthony Rodgers in New Zealand. CiPHR's program was piloted in Turkey, using cognitive behavioral therapy-based messages to help adults stop smoking. Over two-thirds of young adults in the United States own a cell phone and use text messages, so this new communication tool is a great way to reach the one in four young adult smokers in the country. Indeed, text messaging is fast becoming the preferred method of communication for this age group. One important advantage of text messaging is that it instantly reaches its audience; they don't have to go anywhere or take any steps to retrieve the information.[6]

Other tools, such as smartphone applications (apps) can be used to promote healthy behaviors. For example, a new program recently highlighted in a New York Times article allows you to record your daily exercise and diet. Everyone knows that to maintain good health they need to eat less and exercise more, yet few adhere to this simple rule. Having the facts right in front of you, though, may jumpstart real behavioral change. Thomas Goetz, executive editor of Wired and author of Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Area of Personalized Medicine, explains that ". . . the key to long-term changes in health behavior is engaging people emotionally as well as rationally. . . . [Digital tools] offer self-awareness, a way to turn action into change and to do it scientifically, rigorously, methodically. To do it with data."[7] Digital apps also provide a personal connection by providing instant feedback and encouragement via text message or website.

Let's not forget the way technology is most widely used today: to help people keep in touch. Social media websites allow young people (and their parents) to stay in contact with friends from all walks of life. Today's generation is one that can conceivably grow up without ever losing touch with their friends from summer camp!

When we look at the positive ways that technology affects our lives-bringing us closer together, providing easy access to information, and helping us stay healthier-we can see all the ways that the quality of our lives has improved. Most of us cannot imagine life now without the Internet, so don't be afraid to embrace all the positive things it has to offer and educate young people about ways to use technology responsibly.

Acknowledgments: Thank you to Amina Sharma for her contributions to this blog.

References:
[1] Hunt, K., "Chatroom pervert jailed for attack on boy" KentOnline. 2011 http://www.kentonline.co.uk/kentonline/news/2011/january/7/chatroom_pervert_jailed.aspx

[2] Marsh, V., "Man seduces young girl on web" News Mail. 2011 http://www.news-mail.com.au/story/2011/02/28/man-seduces-girl-on-internet-bundaberg-jail/

[3] Stone, B., "Report Finds Online Threats to Children Overblown" New York Times. 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/14/technology/internet/14cyberweb.html?scp=1&sq=internet%20safety&st=Search.

[4] Ibid.

[5] "Don't Filter Me!" American Civil Liberties Union, LGBT Rights, Youth and Schools, https://www.aclu.org/lgbt-rights/aclu-launches-don-t-filter-me-initiative-stop-unconstitutional-web-filtering-lgbt-conten

[6] Smoking Cessation via Text Messaging in the U.S., http://innovativepublichealth.org/projects/sms-usa/.

[7] "Technology Can Improve Health Care," New York Times, March 27, 2010. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/technology-can-improve-healthcare/?scp=8&sq=health&st=Search.

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What are the benefits of technology for teens?

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"Chat room pervert jailed for attack on boy"[1] "Man accused of seducing young girl on web"[2] Headlines like these from the news and shows like NBC's "To Catch a Predator" have made parents understandably anxious about their teen's Internet use, especially when it comes to social media websites, like Facebook.

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The upside of selfies: Social media isn't all bad for kids - CNN

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Social media positive for teens? It just might be, according to a recent report, which says it can build self-confidence and improve relationships.

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https://nobullying.com/six-unforgettable-cyber-bullying-cases/

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When Penn State professor Benjamin Hickerson wants to touch base with one of his far-away friends, he doesn't turn to Facebook, email, videochatting or even text messaging.

Instead, Hickerson picks up a game controller and logs in to play "Call of Duty."

Hickerson's friend isn't just far away - he's stationed overseas in the military.

"I don't call my friends on the phone much anymore and without video games, he and I wouldn't talk," Hickerson said. "But we play 'Call of Duty' together and it's like it's 1999 again."

Hickerson and his friend aren't alone in using gaming as a way to keep in touch. A 2013 study Hickerson helped with found that most of the teen gamers surveyed had a strong group of friends and were far from anti-social. And this month, Pew Research Center released a study that found that different forms of technology - from social media to mobile devices to video games - can help kids make new friends and maintain existing relationships.

The study is a ray of hope in a research landscape that's been largely dedicated to deriding the benefits of teen technology use. Almost as quickly as it became a part of daily life, digital technology and social media use became the object of worry for parents and researchers alike. But some experts say such worries may be a thing of the past as the public has adapted to life in the digital age.

Read more: Teaching students to be good citizens in a digital age

Studies dating back to the early 2000s looked at how social media was a venue for harassment and contributed to everything from depression to anxiety and loneliness. Gaming culture has endured similar treatment in research, amid findings that games can exacerbate aggression, ADHD and even hinder child brain development. Still more research has found that screen time in general may erode children's social skills.

While Hickerson and Pew's findings don't invalidate any of that research, it may be a signal of how public attitudes toward technology use has changed.

"The big take-away here is that these digital tools are really important to teens and their relationships," said Amanda Lenhart, Pew's associate director for research and the study's co-author. "A lot of times we have a very negative view of this technology in teens' lives, and it's important for parents to remember that teens are actually doing the important work of being an adolescent in the time they spend using these tools."

Social upgrades

The change in the public's attitude toward teen technology use has a lot to do with how technology has improved over the past few decades.

Since the invention of Facebook, social media has improved dramatically, said Dr. Yalda Uhls, child psychologist and author of the upcoming parenting book "Media Moms and Digital Dads: A Fact-Not-Fear Approach to Parenting in the Digitial Age."

"All the sudden, social media was much safer because sites like Facebook created a closed network of friends rather than a chat room, where anyone can talk to anyone," Uhls said.

Video game technology has undergone profound changes as well, Hickerson says. Since Xbox and Playstation consoles integrated Internet access as part of game play in the early 2000s, Hickerson says gaming has become a leading social networking tool, especially for boys.

"The inlaid social mechanisms in the games nowadays gives gaming a social nature," Hickerson said. "Even if you're not talking to the other people playing online, you feel their presence (when you observe them in the game)."

But plenty of teens are talking to other players online. According to the new study from Pew, 52 percent of all teens play video games with friends and 13 percent say they play with friends on a daily basis. Pew found that 89 percent played with friends they knew in real life, but more than half - 54 percent - play with friends they know "only online" and 52 percent play with people online who they don't qualify as friends.

The study also supported Hickerson's findings that gaming doesn't turn kids into isolated loners - 78 percent of teens who play online reported that they felt more connected to friends they already knew and 52 percent said they felt close with other gamers they didn't know.

This sense of community and closeness teens report feeling, Hickerson said, flies in the face of stereotypes about gaming.

"There's an age-old perception of the person who plays video games as living in their parent's basement, guzzling Mountain Dew and never talking to anyone," Hickerson said. "Especially since gaming became social, that's just not the case."

People have also accepted technology use as part of daily life and maybe learning that there's less to be afraid of than was once thought.

"When I was a kid playing (a Sega Genesis console), the technology was a foreign concept to my mom and grandma," Hickerson said. "We're more accepting of it as we age. We see our children and their children interact with the technology and we have a personal experience with it that works as a reference. Soon, it will be normal."

Improving relationships

While many still speculate over whether social media and technology use may make kids less social and more alienated, there's growing evidence that technology actually improves teen friendships.

"It's sort of like when you made a friend at camp and would never talk to person again - social media keeps these relationships going as a way for people far away to know you care about them," Uhls said. "Nothing can replace face-to-face communication, but kids do have to learn how to communicate in these forums, and social media is a great way to do it."

Hickerson said that like social media, games can give teens - especially boys - a sort of "safe space" to belong and develop social skills.

"Games allow so many ways to interact now that I think the way you choose to conduct yourself that is an indicator of how you're going to interact with people in life," Hickerson said. "There are many games that require people to enlist help from other players for a game to work. So you can try out and build social skills in that way."

Hickerson says it's possible that because gaming is now inherently social, it may have become a healthier activity for teens than it was before, but like a lot of social media, it depends on how its used.

"In our study, if people reported playing games for social reasons, like bonding with friends, they felt they had greater, stronger social network than others," Hickerson said. "But for someone who's centralized their life around games, if they reported their relationship was with the game itself or the machine (they played on), they reported minor deterioration (in social connections)."

And unlike past generations, kids today who have trouble fitting in may find a community of friends online they would otherwise go without, Uhls said.

"A teen who may feel they're not fitting in can reach out to make friends online or not in vicinity," Uhls said. "More kids feel better about themselves through social media than worse. There are trolls, there is bullying, but there's much more positive reinforcement than negative to be found."

In a way, the integration of technology into teen friendships changes nothing, says Dr. Linda Perlman Gordon, Maryland-based psychotherapist and co-author of " How to Connect with Your iTeen: A Parenting Roadmap."

"When I read the survey (from Pew), nothing really surprised me - kids are still doing what they've always done," Gordon said. "When something changes, we say the sky is falling, but we don't know full impact of the good or the bad. This is an evolution of how human beings have molded the media they have to their need to feel connected."

Related links:
How your teen is using social media, in 4 charts Why Facebook is good and bad for friendship How parents can help kids understand social media risks
Email: chjohnson@deseretnews.com

Twitter: ChandraMJohnson

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Effects of technology on teens are not all doom and gloom

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When Penn State professor Benjamin Hickerson wants to touch base with one of his far-away friends, he doesn't turn to Facebook, email, videochatting or even text messaging. Instead, Hickerson picks up a game controller and logs in to play "Call of Duty." Hickerson's friend isn't just far away - he's stationed overseas in the military.

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You got an e-reader over the holidays. What should you load it up with?

Beach reads? Sure. "Ulysses"? Probably not.

We know a lot about the pros and cons of reading a hard-copy book vs. reading electronically. The problem is, many of us refuse to listen.

Don't get me wrong: Digital reading has some real advantages. Ask people what they like most about reading on digital screens (a question I've put to several hundred university students in the United States, Germany, Japan and Slovakia), and you hear over and again about convenience: "easy to carry" and "compact." We also know electronic texts (especially when they are open-access or donated) are vital for democratizing learning opportunities. Just look at projects like the Digital Public Library of America or Worldreader.

More points for digital reading: e-books tend to be cheaper than print versions (though outside America, tax structures sometimes complicate the comparison). There's also the environmental argument. Think of the trees!

Yet the soundness of this case is arguable. The earth metals we're using up to build e-readers and tablets are not just rare but highly toxic. And think about all that energy needed to run servers and cooling fans. And remember, trees are a renewable resource.

Then, there's the appeal of a hard copy. What fascinates me is how many people - from teenagers to millennials to those of a certain age - prefer print when reading both for pleasure and for school or work. Drawing examples from my own research, some of the reasons are aesthetic ("charm of actually turning pages" and "scent of a new book"). Others involve a sense of accomplishment ("able to see how much I read"), ease of annotation ("I can write on the pages"), and navigation ("easy to locate where I was"). In contrast, I hear abundant complaints about eye strain and headaches when using screens.

Much of what students liked about reading print involved their minds. They said "it's easier to focus," "my spatial memory works best," and "feel like the content sticks in my head more easily." Some also acknowledged they took more time with printed text and read more carefully - not really a surprise, since digital screens encourage scrolling and hasten us along to grab the next Web site or tweet.

But the real nail in the coffin for one-size-fits-all electronic reading is concentration. Over 92 percent of those I surveyed said they concentrate best when reading a hard copy. The explanation is hardly rocket science. When a digital device has an Internet connection, it's hard to resist the temptation to jump ship: I'll just respond to that text I heard come in, check the headlines, order those boots that are on sale.

Readers are human. If you dangle distractions in front of us (or if we know they are just a click or swipe away), it's hard not to take the bait.

Which brings us back to question of what sorts of readings it make sense to do onscreen and which to reserve for paper. If digital interruptions don't threaten your enjoyment or understanding of a text (but here, you have to be honest), then medium may not matter. Casual reading like Baldacci? If you break to check sports scores, little harm done. Just don't expect to understand much of Joyce this way.

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The case against e-readers: Why reading paper books is better for your mind.

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You got an e-reader over the holidays. What should you load it up with? Beach reads? Sure. "Ulysses"? Probably not. We know a lot about the pros and cons of reading a hard-copy book vs. reading electronically. The problem is, many of us refuse to listen.

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While browsing the bookstore to buy a gift for that special someone (or yourself), you may be faced with a tough decision: e-books or the old-fashioned kind? Each one has its pros and cons, and choosing the best option depends on a number of factors.

Some of the practical advantages of going digital are obvious: A portable little e-reader can carry an entire library wherever you go, which is great for travelers or those who always want a choice of reading material.

On the other hand, research has been stacking up to show that reading on paper has a number of benefits, too. Plus, there's the nostalgia factor.

"First and foremost, consider the person and their lifelong preferences," Dr. Matthew H. Schneps, director of the Laboratory for Visual Learning, a collaboration between the University of Massachusetts Boston and MIT, told CBS News in an email. "Some people absolutely love the look, smell, and feel of the classical book held in the hand, and such people may not want to give up the sensory experience of reading from a paper book. If the recipient of your gift is someone who is adventurous when it comes to gadgets, but otherwise doesn't read much using traditional books, giving the gift of an e-reader can be a life-changing experience for them."

Here's a look at some of the science to consider before you spring for a Kindle, a Nook or a stack of new hardcovers.
Young, reluctant readers prefer e-readers
A 2014 study published in the journal Library & Information Science Research found that out of 143 10th grade students, most preferred e-readers. Boys and those who did not care much for reading also shared a strong preference for e-readers.

"An e-reader has more in common with the electronic devices that young people use all the time, like smartphones or iPads, than a paper book, when it comes to turning of pages, the possibilities of adjusting font size, etc.," lead author of the study, Åse Kristine Tveit, told CBS News in an email.
Reading on paper may boost retention
Several small studies suggest that reading on paper instead of an electronic screen is better for memory retention and focus. The Guardian reported on an experiment from Norway where people were given a short story to read either on a Kindle or in a paperback book; when they were quizzed later, those who read the paperback were more likely to remember plot points in the right order.

"When you read on paper you can sense with your fingers a pile of pages on the left growing, and shrinking on the right," the lead researcher, Anne Mangen, of Norway's Stavanger University, told the Guardian. "You have the tactile sense of progress ... Perhaps this somehow aids the reader, providing more fixity and solidity to the reader's sense of unfolding and progress of the text, and hence the story."
Paper suits readers with sleep problems and eye strain
High levels of screen luminance from an electronic device can contribute to visual fatigue, a condition marked by tired, itching, burning eyes.

There are also potential considerations for those reading e-books on light-emitting e-readers at night (although a number of e-readers do not use light-emitting screens), Dr. Margaret K. Merga, a reading and education specialist in Australia, told CBS News in an email. "Artificial light exposure from light-emitting e-readers may interfere with users' ability to sleep, ultimately leading to adverse impacts on health."

A 2014 study published in the journal PNAS found that reading an e-book before bedtime decreased the production of melatonin, a hormone that preps the body for sleep. E-books also impaired alertness the following day.
E-books help the visually impaired
Individuals with poor eyesight or reading disorders like dyslexia can benefit more from e-books because they provide a range of options for changing the text size and spacing of lines. A 2013 study in the journal PLOS One observed reading comprehension and speed in 103 high school students with dyslexia. The study found that people with dyslexia read more effectively, and with greater ease, when using the e-reader compared with reading on paper.

Schneps, who was the lead author on the paper, said, "What made the difference was the ability of the device to display lines of text that were extremely short (about two or three words per line), as well as its ability to space out the text. When these people read using the modified formatting, their reading instantly improved."

His team has a website where people can preview the effects of some of these features before making a purchase. Try out the interactive tips at readeasy.labvislearn.org.
A fondness for books
Many book-lovers still prefer the traditional option and value the tactile sensation of a bound paper book. "Paper books are, as a rule, very well designed, they look and smell good, and they carry with them a more human touch," Tveit said.

In Merga's experience with students in Australia, avid readers also tend to prefer reading on paper. While conducting the West Australian Study in Adolescent Book Reading (WASABR), Merga and colleagues found that students preferred reading paper books. "One student described this attitude as a preference to 'own something (rather) than just use it,'" Merga said.

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Books vs. e-books: The science behind the best way to read

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While browsing the bookstore to buy a gift for that special someone (or yourself), you may be faced with a tough decision: e-books or the old-fashioned kind? Each one has its pros and cons, and choosing the best option depends on a number of factors.

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The answer, researchers say, is not yet entirely clear. "We know how children learn to read," said Kyle Snow, the applied research director at the National Association for the Education of Young Children. "But we don't know how that process will be affected by digital technology."

Part of the problem is the newness of the devices. Tablets and e-readers have not been in widespread use long enough for the sorts of extended studies that will reveal their effects on learning.

Dr. Pamela High, the pediatrician who wrote the June policy for the pediatrics group, said electronic books were intentionally not addressed. "We tried to do a strongly evidence-based policy statement on the issue of reading starting at a very young age," she said. "And there isn't any data, really, on e-books."

But a handful of new studies suggest that reading to a child from an electronic device undercuts the dynamic that drives language development.

"There's a lot of interaction when you're reading a book with your child," Dr. High said. "You're turning pages, pointing at pictures, talking about the story. Those things are lost somewhat when you're using an e-book."

In a 2013 study, researchers found that children ages 3 to 5 whose parents read to them from an electronic book had lower reading comprehension than children whose parents used traditional books. Part of the reason, they said, was that parents and children using an electronic device spent more time focusing on the device itself than on the story (a conclusion shared by at least two other studies).

"Parents were literally putting their hands over the kids' hands and saying, 'Wait, don't press the button yet. Finish this up first,' " said Dr. Julia Parish-Morris, a developmental psychologist at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the lead author of the 2013 study that was conducted at Temple University. Parents who used conventional books were more likely to engage in what education researchers call "dialogic reading," the sort of back-and-forth discussion of the story and its relation to the child's life that research has shown are key to a child's linguistic development.

Complicating matters is that fewer and fewer children's e-books can strictly be described as books, say researchers. As technology evolves, publishers are adding bells and whistles that encourage detours.

"What we're really after in reading to our children is behavior that sparks a conversation," said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple and co-author of the 2013 study. "But if that book has things that disrupt the conversation, like a game plopped right in the middle of the story, then it's not offering you the same advantages as an old-fashioned book."

Of course, e-book publishers and app developers point to interactivity as an educational advantage, not a distraction. Many of those bells and whistles - Clifford's bark, the sleepy narration of "Goodnight Moon," the appearance of the word "ham" when a child taps the ham in the Green Eggs and Ham app - help the child pick up language, they say.

There is some evidence to bear out those claims, at least in relation to other technologies. A study by the University of Wisconsin in 2013 found that 2-year-olds learned words faster with an interactive app as opposed to one that required no action.

But when it comes to learning language, researchers say, no piece of technology can substitute for a live instructor - even if the child appears to be paying close attention.

Patricia K. Kuhl, a director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, led a study in 2003 that compared a group of 9-month-old babies who were addressed in Mandarin by a live instructor with a group addressed in Mandarin by an instructor on a DVD. Children in a third group were exposed only to English.

"The way the kids were staring at the screen, it seemed obvious they would learn better from the DVDs," she said. But brain scans and language testing revealed that the DVD group "learned absolutely nothing," Dr. Kuhl said.

"Their brain measures looked just like the control group that had just been exposed to English. The only group that learned was the live social interaction group."

In other words, "it's being talked with, not being talked at," that teaches children language, Dr. Hirsh-Pasek said.

Today, what Dr. Kuhl found is commonly referred to as the "Baby Einstein" effect, named for thepopular video series that entranced children from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, but was ultimately found to have a negative association with language development in infants. In 2009, the Walt Disney Company, facing the threat of a class-action lawsuit, offered refunds to people who had bought the videos.

Similarly, perhaps the biggest threat posed by e-books that read themselves to children, or engage them with games, is that they could lull parents into abdicating their educational responsibilities, said Mr. Snow of the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

"There's the possibility for e-books to become the TV babysitters of this generation," he said. "We don't want parents to say, 'There's no reason for me to sit here and turn pages and tell my child how to read the word, because my iPad can do it.' "

But parents may find it difficult to avoid resorting to tablets.

Claudia Raleigh, a mother of three children under 6 years old in Berkley, Mich., said she adhered strictly to the A.A.P. guidelines but found that she needed to distract her toddler, Teddy, during his sister's swim class. "You know how hard it is to wait somewhere with a 2-year-old," she said. "So that was his introduction to the iPad. It kept him from jumping in the pool."

"I considered it a lifesaving device," she said with a laugh.

The guilt, she added, did not linger for long. "I literally read to my kids every day since birth," she said. "I'm over feeling guilty about a little screen time."

Even literacy advocates say the guidelines can be hard to follow, and that allowing limited screen time is not high on the list of parental missteps. "You might have an infant and think you're down with the A.A.P. guidelines, and you don't want your baby in front of a screen, but then you have a grandparent on Skype," Mr. Snow said. "Should you really be tearing yourself apart? Maybe it's not the world's worst thing."

"The issue is when you're in the other room and Skyping with the baby cause he likes it," he said. Even if screen time is here to stay as a part of American childhood, good old-fashioned books seem unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Parents note that there is an emotional component to paper-and-ink storybooks that, so far, does not seem to extend to their electronic counterparts, however engaging.

"Lilly definitely has an iPad, and there are education apps she uses," Amy Reid, a publicist at CNBC, said of her 4-year-old. "But for her, there is nothing like the excitement of choosing her own book and bringing it home from the library."

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Is E-Reading to Your Toddler Story Time, or Simply Screen Time?

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The answer, researchers say, is not yet entirely clear. "We know how children learn to read," said Kyle Snow, the applied research director at the National Association for the Education of Young Children. "But we don't know how that process will be affected by digital technology."

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"More is better." From the number of gigs in a cellular data plan to the horsepower in a pickup truck, this mantra is ubiquitous in American culture. When it comes to college students, the belief that more is better may underlie their widely-held view that laptops in the classroom enhance their academic performance. Laptops do in fact allow students to do more, like engage in online activities and demonstrations, collaborate more easily on papers and projects, access information from the internet, and take more notes. Indeed, because students can type significantly faster than they can write, those who use laptops in the classroom tend to take more notes than those who write out their notes by hand. Moreover, when students take notes using laptops they tend to take notes verbatim, writing down every last word uttered by their professor.

Obviously it is advantageous to draft more complete notes that precisely capture the course content and allow for a verbatim review of the material at a later date. Only it isn't. New research by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer demonstrates that students who write out their notes on paper actually learn more. Across three experiments, Mueller and Oppenheimer had students take notes in a classroom setting and then tested students on their memory for factual detail, their conceptual understanding of the material, and their ability to synthesize and generalize the information. Half of the students were instructed to take notes with a laptop, and the other half were instructed to write the notes out by hand. As in other studies, students who used laptops took more notes. In each study, however, those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who used took notes with their laptops.

What drives this paradoxical finding? Mueller and Oppenheimer postulate that taking notes by hand requires different types of cognitive processing than taking notes on a laptop, and these different processes have consequences for learning. Writing by hand is slower and more cumbersome than typing, and students cannot possibly write down every word in a lecture. Instead, they listen, digest, and summarize so that they can succinctly capture the essence of the information. Thus, taking notes by hand forces the brain to engage in some heavy "mental lifting," and these efforts foster comprehension and retention. By contrast, when typing students can easily produce a written record of the lecture without processing its meaning, as faster typing speeds allow students to transcribe a lecture word for word without devoting much thought to the content.

To evaluate this theory, Mueller and Oppenheimer assessed the content of notes taken by hand versus laptop. Their studies included hundreds of students from Princeton and UCLA, and the lecture topics ranged from bats, bread, and algorithms to faith, respiration, and economics. Content analysis of the notes consistently showed that students who used laptops had more verbatim transcription of the lecture material than those who wrote notes by hand. Moreover, high verbatim note content was associated with lower retention of the lecture material. It appears that students who use laptops can take notes in a fairly mindless, rote fashion, with little analysis or synthesis by the brain. This kind of shallow transcription fails to promote a meaningful understanding or application of the information.

If the source of the advantage for longhand notes derives from the conceptual processes they evoke, perhaps instructing laptop users to draft summative rather than verbatim notes will boost performance. Mueller and Oppenheimer explored this idea by warning laptop note takers against the tendency to transcribe information without thinking, and explicitly instructed them to think about the information and type notes in their own words. Despite these instructions, students using laptops showed the same level of verbatim content and were no better in synthesizing material than students who received no such warning. It is possible these direct instructions to improve the quality of laptop notes failed because it is so easy to rely on less demanding, mindless processes when typing.

It's important to note that most of the studies that have compared note taking by hand versus laptop have used immediate memory tests administered very shortly (typically less than an hour) after the learning session. In real classroom settings, however, students are often assessed days if not weeks after learning new material. Thus, although laptop users may not encode as much during the lecture and thus may be disadvantaged on immediate assessments, it seems reasonable to expect that the additional information they record will give them an advantage when reviewing material after a long delay.

Wrong again. Mueller and Oppenheimer included a study in which participants were asked to take notes by hand or by laptop, and were told they would be tested on the material in a week. When participants were given an opportunity to study with their notes before the final assessment, once again those who took longhand notes outperformed laptop participants. Because longhand notes contain students' own words and handwriting, they may serve as more effective memory cues by recreating the context (e.g., thought processes, emotions, conclusions) as well as content (e.g., individual facts) from the original learning session.

These findings hold important implications for students who use their laptops to access lecture outlines and notes that have been posted by professors before class. Because students can use these posted materials to access lecture content with a mere click, there is no need to organize, synthesize or summarize in their own words. Indeed, students may take very minimal notes or not take notes at all, and may consequently forego the opportunity to engage in the mental work that supports learning.

Beyond altering students' cognitive processes and thereby reducing learning, laptops pose other threats in the classroom. In the Mueller and Oppenheimer studies, all laptops were disconnected from the internet, thus eliminating any disruption from email, instant messaging, surfing, or other online distractions. In most typical college settings, however, internet access is available, and evidence suggests that when college students use laptops, they spend 40% of class time using applications unrelated to coursework, are more likely to fall off task, and are less satisfied with their education. In one study with law school students, nearly 90% of laptop users engaged in online activities unrelated to coursework for at least five minutes, and roughly 60% were distracted for half the class.

Technology offers innovative tools that are shaping educational experiences for students, often in positive and dynamic ways. The research by Mueller and Oppenheimer serves as a reminder, however, that even when technology allows us to do more in less time, it does not always foster learning. Learning involves more than the receipt and the regurgitation of information. If we want students to synthesize material, draw inferences, see new connections, evaluate evidence, and apply concepts in novel situations, we need to encourage the deep, effortful cognitive processes that underlie these abilities. When it comes to taking notes, students need fewer gigs, more brain power.
Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and regular contributor to NewYorker.com. Gareth is also the series editor of Best American Infographics, and can be reached at garethideas AT gmail dot com or Twitter @garethideas.

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A Learning Secret: Don't Take Notes with a Laptop

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Students who used longhand remembered more and had a deeper understanding of the material

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As laptops become smaller and more ubiquitous, and with the advent of tablets, the idea of taking notes by hand just seems old-fashioned to many students today. Typing your notes is faster - which comes in handy when there's a lot of information to take down. But it turns out there are still advantages to doing things the old-fashioned way.

For one thing, research shows that laptops and tablets have a tendency to be distracting - it's so easy to click over to Facebook in that dull lecture. And a study has shown that the fact that you have to be slower when you take notes by hand is what makes it more useful in the long run.

In the study published in Psychological Science, Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles sought to test how note-taking by hand or by computer affects learning.

"When people type their notes, they have this tendency to try to take verbatim notes and write down as much of the lecture as they can," Mueller tells NPR's Rachel Martin. "The students who were taking longhand notes in our studies were forced to be more selective - because you can't write as fast as you can type. And that extra processing of the material that they were doing benefited them."

Mueller and Oppenheimer cited that note-taking can be categorized two ways: generative and nongenerative. Generative note-taking pertains to "summarizing, paraphrasing, concept mapping," while nongenerative note-taking involves copying something verbatim.

And there are two hypotheses to why note-taking is beneficial in the first place. The first idea is called the encoding hypothesis, which says that when a person is taking notes, "the processing that occurs" will improve "learning and retention." The second, called the external-storage hypothesis, is that you learn by being able to look back at your notes, or even the notes of other people.

Because people can type faster than they write, using a laptop will make people more likely to try to transcribe everything they're hearing. So on the one hand, Mueller and Oppenheimer were faced with the question of whether the benefits of being able to look at your more complete, transcribed notes on a laptop outweigh the drawbacks of not processing that information. On the other hand, when writing longhand, you process the information better but have less to look back at.

For their first study, they took university students (the standard guinea pig of psychology) and showed them TED talks about various topics. Afterward, they found that the students who used laptops typed significantly more words than those who took notes by hand. When testing how well the students remembered information, the researchers found a key point of divergence in the type of question. For questions that asked students to simply remember facts, like dates, both groups did equally well. But for "conceptual-application" questions, such as, "How do Japan and Sweden differ in their approaches to equality within their societies?" the laptop users did "significantly worse."

The same thing happened in the second study, even when they specifically told students using laptops to try to avoid writing things down verbatim. "Even when we told people they shouldn't be taking these verbatim notes, they were not able to overcome that instinct," Mueller says. The more words the students copied verbatim, the worse they performed on recall tests.

And to test the external-storage hypothesis, for the third study they gave students the opportunity to review their notes in between the lecture and test. The thinking is, if students have time to study their notes from their laptops, the fact that they typed more extensive notes than their longhand-writing peers could possibly help them perform better.

But the students taking notes by hand still performed better. "This is suggestive evidence that longhand notes may have superior external storage as well as superior encoding functions," Mueller and Oppenheimer write.

Do studies like these mean wise college students will start migrating back to notebooks?

"I think it is a hard sell to get people to go back to pen and paper," Mueller says. "But they are developing lots of technologies now like Livescribe and various stylus and tablet technologies that are getting better and better. And I think that will be sort of an easier sell to college students and people of that generation."

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Attention, Students: Put Your Laptops Away

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Researchers Pam Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer found that students remember more via taking notes longhand rather than on a laptop. It has to do with what happens when you're forced to slow down.

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Timothy Cook for The Chronicle Review

The inexorable spread of new technologies has spurred a cottage industry of intellectual hand-wringing about their adverse effects on our lives. Books like Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains or Sherry Turkle's Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other offer research from neuroscience and psychology to analyze the deleterious influence of our omnipresent devices.

I find the work of one astute thinker in this area especially compelling: "For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies."

That last sentence really hits it on the head, even though it was written more than 200 years ago by William Wordsworth. As new technologies have made our lives increasingly uniform - sitting all day at desks, doing the same thing over and over again, and then sitting around in the evening in front of our screens, watching the same plotlines repeated in movies and television shows - we seek variety and stimulation through the brief bursts of pleasure and interest we get from our devices, our social-media connections, and our society's endless news cycles.

That, at least, is my modern updating of Wordsworth's 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems he wrote with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth was writing about the movement of people into cities to find work in the early factories and mills of the budding industrial revolution, and of the proliferation of newspapers and pamphlets during that era.

Defenders of our modern devices love to point to quotes like Wordsworth's as evidence of the fact that we have been wringing our hands about the harmful influence of technology on our brains for a very long time now, beginning with the rise of literacy, and continuing with the invention of the printing press, the typewriter, the computer, the smart phone, and so on. That people have been articulating these fears for so long - coupled with the fact that the world continues to bang along as always - leads many to conclude that there is nothing new under the sun, including short attention spans in the face of fascinating new gadgets.

But the story is not quite so simple, as the neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley and the psychologist Larry D. Rosen argue in The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, the book which I am featuring in this multipart series on the challenges that phones, tablets, and laptops pose to sustained learning, both for teachers and students.

Last month's column outlined the attention problem in the classroom, where the learning goals of our courses clash with the cognitive-control limitations of students. The Distracted Mind presents some compelling findings about the difficulties we humans face in directing and sustaining our attention, remembering things, and switching back and forth between tasks.

This month, I want to pinpoint the special role that our modern-day devices play in exacerbating our cognitive limitations.

Our cognitive limitations are part of the architecture of our brains. And we have been plagued by those limitations for as long as our recorded history.

Technology advocates would argue that, with the arrival of any new technology, humans have always fretted about our inability to pay attention - and then adjusted. One part of Gazzaley and Rosen's research would support that argument. New devices did not create our current struggles with attention and distraction. Our cognitive limitations are part of the architecture of our brains. And we have been plagued by those limitations for as long as our recorded history.

In the past, however, the arrival of new technologies - and especially ones with the capacity to reshape our thought, like literacy or the printing press - occurred over very long stretches of time, and with long gaps in between. We had time to adjust to the rapid spread of the printed word, as that technology arrived and then remained the primary means of transmission of thought for centuries.

That is no longer the case. The arrival and widespread adoption of new technologies has occurred in increasingly intense bursts. In The Distracted Mind, Gazzaley and Rosen point out that, if you assume a benchmark of 50 million worldwide users, radio arrived at that level within 38 years of its invention. The time frame shrinks with each new invention: telephone, 20 years; television, 13 years; cellphones; 12 years; the internet, four years. Social media amped up the curve: Facebook, two years; YouTube, one year. And the winner, at least at the time of their writing the book? "Angry Birds" took over our lives in 35 days.

As any neuroscientist will tell you - and as handy little books like Moheb Costandi's Neuroplasticity will explain - our brains have vast capacities to change and adapt to new circumstances. But the rapid pace with which changes are arriving today makes such adaptation challenging for even the most plastic of brains.

All of which brings us to those handy devices which pose such a tantalizing temptation to our distractible brains: laptops, tablets, and phones. They have rapidly and intensely penetrated the lives of students and the college classroom. Most faculty members are still torn between seeing those devices as tools for exciting new learning and recognizing them as barriers to attention and focus.

Gazzeley and Rosen use a fascinating argument to articulate why today's technologies pose a much more serious threat to our brains than inventions from previous eras.

Humans, like other primates, are information-foraging animals. "Molecular and physiological mechanisms that originally developed in our brain to support food foraging for survival," they write in the book, "have now evolved in primates to include information foraging." They cite studies which show that macaque monkeys "respond to receiving information similarly to the way that they respond to primitive rewards such as food or water." That response includes receiving small bursts of pleasure in the brain, which then drives us to repeat the behavior when we are bored or in search of stimulation.

For a very long time in human history we have had limited access to information beyond what we could see in our immediate environment. In 2017 and beyond we have instant access to a magical information source in our pockets.

When we are in want of a quick burst of stimulation - because we are sitting in the waiting room at the dentist's office, or slogging through a difficult article in our field, or listening to Professor Lang introduce the poetry of William Wordsworth in "British Literature Survey II" - we turn to that device and get a little short-term reward from our brains.

As anyone who has ever eaten too many cookies or drunk too many beers will tell you, though: Short-term rewards don't always have positive long-term effects. And the same goes for our constant search for quick stimulation from phones and laptops.

The Distracted Mind points to three separate studies - conducted by different research teams - which found that when people engaged in a conversation with a cellphone present but not in use (such as resting on a table or held in their hands), they tended to rate the quality of the conversation lower, or rate their relationship with their conversation partner lower, than when those conversations were conducted without the presence of cellphones. The mere presence of a visible device, this research would suggest, led people to focus less on the person in front of them, as one part of their brain remained angled toward the phone, wondering whether a neurological cookie was waiting for them there.

Such findings present difficult challenges for those of us who teach. Learning is hard work and requires sustained attention - whether it takes place in a students' bedrooms as they watch a video lecture, in the library as they pore over a textbook, or in the classroom as they participate in a difficult discussion.

The learning we offer can bring students both deep satisfaction and immediate pleasure, but it must compete with the quick bursts available to them from their phones and computers.

Just as cookies (or beer) have a longer impact on us than the few seconds they spend on our palate, so do device checks have a long impact on our attention.

Multiple studies of both workers and students have found that when people pause from a task for a digital distraction, they might devote a very short time to the distraction itself, but the effect lingers: According to one study cited by Gazzaley and Rosen, observations of people interrupted during the pursuit of a task revealed that it took them almost 30 minutes to refocus and fully engage with the original task.

To paraphrase Wordsworth, that quick check of a phone in class trails clouds of distractions well beyond the experience itself.

None of this necessarily means that we should ban technology from the classroom, since - as I mentioned in my previous column as well - we are graduating students into a world full of distractions. Rather than keep them in a technology-free bubble, we have to help them learn to manage it. We can also help them understand how to use computers and phones most effectively to support their learning, rather than distract from it.

In the final two columns of this series, we'll consider the general recommendations that The Distracted Mind offers for managing distraction, and the implications of those recommendations for teachers and students alike.

James M. Lang is a professor of English and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College, in Worcester, Mass. His latest book, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Learning, was published in the spring of 2016. Follow him on Twitter at @LangOnCourse.

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The Distracted Classroom: Is It Getting Worse?

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The inexorable spread of new technologies has spurred a cottage industry of intellectual hand-wringing about their adverse effects on our lives. Books like Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains or Sherry Turkle's Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other offer research from neuroscience and psychology to analyze the deleterious influence of our omnipresent devices.

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As recent high school graduates prepare for their migration to college in the fall, one item is sure to top most students' shopping wish lists: a laptop computer. Laptops are ubiquitous on university campuses, and are viewed by most students as absolute must-have items, right alongside laundry detergent, towels, and coffee pots.

Without question, personal laptops can enhance the college experience by facilitating engagement with online course material, providing access to sources for research, maximizing internship searches, and even improving communication with friends and parents. Many students also opt to bring their laptops to class so that they can take notes, view online lecture slides, and search the web for course-related material. This practice, it turns out, may be a mistake.

New research by scientists at Michigan State University suggests that laptops do not enhance classroom learning, and in fact students would be better off leaving their laptops in the dorm during class. Although computer use during class may create the illusion of enhanced engagement with course content, it more often reflects engagement with social media, YouTube videos, instant messaging, and other nonacademic content. This self-inflicted distraction comes at a cost, as students are spending up to one-third of valuable (and costly) class time zoned out, and the longer they are online the more their grades tend to suffer.

To understand how students are using computers during class and the impact it has on learning, Susan Ravizza and colleagues took the unique approach of asking students to voluntarily login to a proxy server at the start of each class, with the understanding that their internet use (including the sites they visited) would be tracked. Participants were required to login for at least half of the 15 class periods, though they were not required to use the internet in any way once they logged in to the server. Researchers were able to track the internet use and academic performance of 84 students across the semester.

Ravizza and colleagues evaluated the time that students spent online, the specific sites they visited, and the number of different requests sent to the server each session. They also asked students to estimate their own time online during class and to judge how time online affected their learning. Finally, the researchers obtained measures of intelligence (here, ACT scores), final exam performance, and self-reported interest and motivation.

Together, these led to a number of important insights into computer use in the classroom. First, participants spent almost 40 minutes out of every 100-minute class period using the internet for nonacademic purposes, including social media, checking email, shopping, reading the news, chatting, watching videos, and playing games. This nonacademic use was negatively associated with final exam scores, such that students with higher use tended to score lower on the exam. Social media sites were the most-frequently visited sites during class, and importantly these sites, along with online video sites, proved to be the most disruptive with respect to academic outcomes.

In contrast with their heavy nonacademic internet use, students spent less than 5 minutes on average using the internet for class-related purposes (e.g., accessing the syllabus, reviewing course-related slides or supplemental materials, searching for content related to the lecture). Given the relatively small amount of time students spent on academic internet use, it is not surprising that academic internet use was unrelated to course performance. Thus students who brought their laptops to class to view online course-related materials did not actually spend much time doing so, and furthermore showed no benefit of having access to those materials in class.

Why do students spend so much class time online? The finding that surfing the web and diminished learning go hand in hand is fairly intuitive, so Ravizza and colleagues sought to understand why students chose to do it. One possibility is that although internet use is related to poor academic performance, it is a symptom rather than a cause, in the same way that low energy is a symptom of obesity and not a causal factor in heart disease. If students disengage with a lecture when they are disinterested or bored and instead check social media, then boredom and not internet use may be the source of lower exam scores. Indeed in other studies, Facebook and internet use increased when people were bored with an ongoing task, and students reported that they texted in class as a result of boredom.

In this case, however, boredom was not the answer - at least not entirely. Students who reported lower interest in the class did tend to have lower exam scores, but this relationship did not account for the relationship between internet use and exam performance. Similar findings held for motivation and intelligence. For example, students with high versus low ACT scores were equally likely to browse the web during class, and were similarly affected by that browsing on their final exams. Thus although interest, motivation, and intelligence all contributed to course performance, analyses showed that internet use negatively influenced exam performance over and above these factors.

Perhaps students are woefully unaware of their internet use. Other research shows that people perceive fun tasks as taking less time than dull tasks, and so it is possible that time spent enjoying social media or video sites is misperceived as short. In line with this idea are data from studies showing that students may underestimate their actual internet use. Surprisingly however, Ravizza and colleagues found that their participants were fairly accurate in estimating the time they spent on the internet. They also found that participants had a good sense of whether their internet use had a disruptive effect on their academic performance. Students who rated their internet use as having "no effect" on their learning tended to use the internet less and showed no relationship between internet use and exam performance; in contrast, those who rated their internet use as having a "disruptive effect" tended to use the internet more, had lower exam scores, and showed a negative relationship between internet use and exam performance.

It is possible that the internet use during class reflects habit or even an inability to inhibit the disruptive behavior. Use of social networking sites can be addictive for some, and the amount of time students spent online in this study suggests their attachment to technology was significant. In addition to the nearly 40 minutes students spent surfing the web, they also reported using their phones to text for an additional 27 minutes. It's a wonder they learned anything at all!

Regardless of the reason for internet use during class, it is clear that students are not experiencing the oft-touted benefits of laptop use in class. They spend minimal time accessing supplemental course material or surfing the web for content related to the ongoing lecture, and these activities do not appear to enhance course performance. Although students may use the internet to download slides and take notes, related research shows that taking notes by hand is more effective than doing so with a laptop. Thus, there seems to be little upside to laptop use in class, while there is clearly a downside. Students are distracting themselves for significant periods of class time by using laptops to surf social media sites, visit chat rooms, watch videos, and play games, and these activities harm the learning process. Furthermore, related research suggests that multitasking laptop users also distract their classmates, as peers with a direct view of those laptops suffer academically. Perhaps it is time for students to consider going "old school," and adding one more item to their shopping wish lists: a good old fashioned spiral notebook.

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Students are Better Off without a Laptop in the Classroom

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As recent high school graduates prepare for their migration to college in the fall, one item is sure to top most students' shopping wish lists: a laptop computer. Laptops are ubiquitous on university campuses, and are viewed by most students as absolute must-have items, right alongside laundry detergent, towels, and coffee pots.

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Technology was supposed to connect us. But we're more disconnected than ever: Rogette Harris

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Technology was supposed to connect us. But we're more disconnected than ever: Rogette Harris

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Modern technology enables us to connect to anyone in the world whenever we want. A recent film called " Disconnect" challenges us to think about whether or not we are really more connected to each other or more alone since human interaction decreases the more technology increases.

" Disconnect" brings to the forefront a big issue of the 21st century. Being "connected" to machinery 24/7 is affecting our ability to connect with our lives and the people around us.

The film is much more about the power of human communication and interaction, and how anti-social we've become. The tools and gadgets we use are good or bad depending on how we utilize them.

Disconnect connects three separate stories, each involving people whose lives have reached a crisis worsened by their dependence on technology. There's a couple that lost a baby, and turns to online chat rooms, and longer work hours rather than grieve together.

There are two teenage boys who use Facebook to cyber-bully and take advantage of a lonely, unpopular classmate to the point that he attempts suicide. His unhappiness is partly caused by his father's preoccupation with work and email, as he is constantly pulled away from what really matters.

The third story involves a female reporter who becomes involved with an 18-year-old webcam porn performer. She exploits him for her own personal career ambitions. These stories become entangled, and finally explode together at the end. In each situation, it takes a catastrophe to wake the characters up to what is really important in life.

The film displays how easy it is to allow mechanical devices bait us into a make believe life, as we are slowly being pulled away from a sense of who we are and what really matters.

It's easy to get seduced by technology because it makes everything so easy. Why go to a new art gallery opening or concert to meet new people when you can just make an account on Match.com and meet thousands more people with the click of a finger? Why join clubs and organizations to make real friends when you can spend hours on social media websites?

Even applying to jobs is impersonal now. Most companies have automatic answering machines, and rather than walk a resume into an HR office, and actually speak to someone, we now email everything or use websites like LinkedIn, which make us just another number - not showcase the individual that we are.

How many of us can get through a meal without someone's cell phone ringing, whether it be a text or a phone call?

Is it really that important to answer right then and there, rather than spend an hour with family and friends uninterrupted?

Furthermore, why can't we pick up the phone and talk to someone rather than send hundreds or thousands of texts a month? How many people are more excited about getting the new IPhone versus spending quality time with family and friends?

Don't misunderstand. I am not saying technology is bad. I certainly use plenty of it. Plus, technology originally was a way to allow us to stay in contact. For instance, the invention of the telephone meant we could talk to people far away. Car phones made it possible to call for roadside assistance.

The Internet allows us to virtually meet people we would never have been able to otherwise, and it allows us to research and learn about other people, culture, and history without stepping foot in a library.

Texts and forums such as Facebook allow us to reconnect with old classmates and friends we may have lost touch with. Technology is a valuable tool when used correctly. However, the law has to catch up with privacy and safety issues such as texting while driving.

We have access to the world in ways our parents and grandparents never did. However, we must remember that as we connect more to the virtual world as technology advances, our connection to the real world cannot diminish.

That is a lesson that we should not only be teaching our children, but also follow ourselves. There are many advantages to being "connected" as I outlined above, but it's the disadvantages that are often overlooked or ignored, which Disconnect reminds us. Maybe we're too" connected" to see just how "disconnected" we've become.

We spend too much time isolating ourselves and disconnecting from the real world in order to maintain the perception of being connected.

Not only to reflect on how big a role technology plays in my life, but because it so vividly exposes one of the great contradictions of the modern world; which is being connected and disconnected at the same time.
Rogette Harris is a PennLive/Patriot-News community columnist. Her work appears monthly.

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Technology was supposed to connect us. But we're more disconnected than ever: Rogette Harris

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Modern technology enables us to connect to anyone in the world whenever we want. A recent film called " Disconnect" challenges us to think about whether or not we are really more connected to each other or more alone since human interaction decreases the more technology increases.

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Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have long since stopped being the sole domain of the young. More than half of the people in a 2018 survey, regardless of age, said they could not go a day without using platforms like these.

This is not always a bad thing. Social media can provide opportunities to reunite with long-lost friends and relatives, meet potential romantic partners, stay connected to casual acquaintances - all from the comfort of your living room couch.

But it can become a problem if you never leave your couch to connect with other human beings in real life. In-person interaction is key to our well-being and most people don't do well without it, says Elisabeth Netherton, MD, and psychiatrist at Mindpath Health.

Beyond that, if you spend too much time on social media, you risk giving up a huge chunk of your time, attention, and energy for very little return in terms of your quality of life, Netherton says.

In some cases, it can even start to chip away at your sense of emotional well-being.

It can make us feel bad when we forget that our friends' feeds are often more "highlight reel" than real life, Netherton says. Seeing "where everybody's on vacation and things that look really rosy," makes it easy to fall into the comparison trap, especially if your social connections are weak.

Still, with care and attention, Netherton says, you can use social media to enrich rather than weaken your social connections. You simply need to pay attention to the way you use social media and the time you spend on it.

How Much Social Media Time?

It's no secret that social media can gobble up huge blocks of time. You can lose hours a day just trying to keep up with what other people are doing and saying.

Studies have shown that more time on social media can lower mood and increase mental health issues.

There is a simple solution: Try to limit your time online. A 2018 study found that people who limited social media use to 30 minutes a day appeared to gain "significant improvement in well-being" and reduction in loneliness and depression compared with their peers who used social media as much as they wanted.

There are numerous apps that can help you do this by tracking your usage and even shutting off access to certain social media apps after a certain amount of time.

What Should You Do on Social Media?

Research shows that it's not just the amount of time you spend on social media that makes the difference, it's how you use that time.

"Most of us can relate to sitting down at night after the kids go to bed, and just scrolling. Just scrolling Instagram, scrolling TikTok, and feeling crummier about themselves when they finish than they did when they started," Netherton says.

This is what scientists call "passive social media use" - endless scrolling without posting or making plans with people you know. It can lower your sense of well-being.

Older people may be more vulnerable to these issues than younger people, Netherton says,

"I think there are a lot of younger people who grew up with social media who have reached the point of really trying to disconnect from it," she says. That's less the case with older users, Netherton says, and it continues to take a toll.

According to a 2019 study, older adults who showed signs of "problematic social media use" (as measured by the BSMAS addiction scale) were more likely to feel more lonely, no matter how much time they spent on social media.

But different use of social media can have different effects.

One healthy way to use social media is to use it to strengthen casual connections with people you see, at least now and then, in person, says Lisa D'Ambrosio, PhD, a research scientist at MIT's AgeLab.

For example, you can use Facebook, Instagram, and even text messaging to send memes or thoughts to someone who you may not be able to see for a while.

This can be especially helpful for older adults, D'Ambrosio says. Older adults who don't get out as much may feel more connected to their families and their communities through social media. If they can see and comment on pictures of children and grandchildren or connect with others around shared interests, it can help keep isolation at bay, she says.

But these types of online interactions should help nurture in-person relationships, not replace them, D'Ambrosio says.

How Can You Build a Healthy Relationship With Social Media?

Healthy social media interaction can also happen in more unexpected ways. For example, when Karen Arrington, 62, posted about her dad's death on Facebook, roughly 400 people sent her messages of support and sympathy. Many sent flowers and food gifts as well, says Arrington, a success coach in Marlboro, MD.

It really made a difference as she worked through her grief, she says. "It was really inspiring to know that there are people out there who just really care."

Arrington tries to avoid the pitfalls of social media by carefully curating what she sees.

Anything that appears to be negative, I unfollow," she says. That means she can remain friends with someone without having their posts appear in her newsfeed. She also creates specific lists to customize her experience even further.

For instance, when she wants to feel uplifted, she clicks on a list of people whose posts inspire her. (You can learn how to create specific lists of your on Facebook.com.)

Of course, each person is different and what works for one person may not work for another. But there are some general guidelines that may help you build a healthy relationship with social media:

Be intentional: A set of general questions can serve as a good starting point, says Netherton: "What matters to me? Where do I want to be active with my time? What feels meaningful and purposeful?" And remember, she says, the goal of healthy social media use is to strengthen your in-person relationships, not weaken them.

Check in with yourself: Ask yourself how you feel after using social media. Are you having FOMO because you feel like everyone is having fun without you? Or do you feel excited to join a new online community or conversation? If you relate more to the former than the latter, it may be time to cut back on your social media use, Netherton says.

Look at your calendar: "Look at how you're spending your time," Netherton says. Have you made regular plans for in-person interaction? Your social media use should never be a replacement for real-life interactions with friends and family. If you're spending more time with your phone than your friends, consider making plans to meet up.

Use social media to meet people: If you've recently relocated or just want to expand your social circle, you can use your online social networks to find in-person events. Netherton suggests using resources including Facebook, NextDoor, and Meetup to find groups who share your political beliefs, hobbies, or faith.

Get help with technology: If you're older and less handy with technology, reach out to younger friends and family who may be able to help you navigate new social media platforms. It may be easier than you think. Some apps are even able to address problems with hearing or vision. Other apps may specialize in helping older people socialize with each other in a friendly or even romantic way.

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Use Social Media to Help, Not Hurt, Your Mental Health

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Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have long since stopped being the sole domain of the young. More than half of the people in a 2018 survey, regardless of age, said they could not go a day without using platforms like these. This is not always a bad thing.

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Technology and human life cannot be separated; society has a cyclical co-dependence on technology. We use technology; depend on technology in our daily life and our needs and demands for technology keep on rising. Humans use technology to travel, to communicate, to , to do and to live in comfort. However, technology has also caused us concerns. Its poor application has resulted in the pollution of the environment and it has also caused a serious threat to our lives and society. This calls for the proper use of technology. The biggest challenge facing people is to determine the type of future we need to have and then create relevant technologies which will simplify the way we do things.

It is impossible to explore how each new advanced technology has impacted our lives and how it will impact the future. Technology impacts the environment, people and the society as a whole. The way we use technology determines if its are positive to the society or negative. For example, ( POSITIVE IMPACT) we can use corn to make ethanol and this ethanol can be used as fuel. Fuel can be used to run machines and cars which will increase the output of manufacturing industries at a lower cost. ( NEGATIVE IMPACT) However, if we decide to shift large quantities of corn to fuel production from food production, humans will be left with no food and this will cause world hunger which even is a worse situation.

Basing on the example above, technology by its self is not harmful to the society, but the way society uses technology to achieve specific goals is what results into negative impacts of technology on the society. Humans need to use energy to process products in factories, to run cars, to light homes and also run technological machines like computers, but the only way we can do this without affecting the environment and society is by shifting from exhaustible energy sources to renewable and inexhaustible sources like Solar / Wind energy.I have listed both positive and negative impacts of technology on our society.

Positive Impacts of Technology on Society

Technology has mechanized agriculture: Modern agricultural technology allows a small number of people to grow vast quantities of food in a short period of time with less input which results into high yields and RIO "return on investment". Through government subsidies, small and medium-sized farmers have managed to acquire plowing, sowing, watering and harvesting machines. The use of technology in agriculture has also resulted in the manufacturing of genetic crops which can grow fast and they can be resistant to many pests and diseases. Also, farmers have access to artificial fertilizers which add value to the soil and boost the growth of their crops and enable them to produce high-quality yields. Farmers in dry areas have been in a position to grow healthy crops, they use advanced water pumps and sprinklers which derive water from rivers to the farms, the all process can be automated to save time. A good example is Egypt, this is a desert country which receives little rain, but small and big farmers have used automated sprinklers to irrigate their farms. In Egypt, they grow a lot of rice, yet this crop needs sufficient water to grow well. The water is pumped from River Nile to the rice fields on a daily basis.

Technology has improved transportation: Transportation is one of the basic areas of technological activity. Both society and businesses have benefited from the new transpiration methods. Transportation provides mobility for people and goods. Transportation, like all other technologies, can be viewed as a system. It is a series of parts that are interrelated. These parts all work together to meet a certain goal. Transportation uses vehicles, trains, airplanes, motorbikes, people, roads, energy, information, materials, finance and time. All these parts I have mentioned work together to move and relocate people and goods. Technology has helped in advancing all the four types of transportation and these include ; (1) road transport used by automobiles ,(2) air transport which is used by airplanes , (3)water transportation which is used by ships and speed boats and (4) space transportation used to go to the moon. The most used of all these is Road transportation, this one facilitates the movement of goods and people. Technologies like automobiles, buses, and trucks have improved the way humans move and how they transport their goods from place to another. Also, developing countries are getting funds from wealthy countries to improve their road transport which has resulted in the development of rural remote areas.

Technology has improved communication: Communication is used for a number of purposes. Both society and organizations depend on communication to transfer information. People use technology to communicate with each other. Electronic media like radios, televisions, internet, social media have improved the way we exchange ideas which can develop our societies. In many countries, radios and televisions are used to voice the concerns of the society, they organize live forums where the community can contribute through mobile phones or text service systems like tweeter. During political elections, leaders use radio, television and internet media to reach the people they want to serve. A good example is the recent presidential election in the USA, "President Barak Obama " has embraced the communication technology to reach and voice out his concerns towards the development of America. Communication technologies like Televisions, radios, and internet can be used to persuade, entertain and inform the society. Small businesses have also used the internet and mobile communication technology to grow and improve their customer service. Learn more about Communication Technology here >>>

Technology has improved and learning process: Education is the backbone of every economy. People need well and organized educational infrastructures so that they can learn how to interpret information. Many schools have started integrating educational technologies in their schools with a great aim of improving the way students learn. Technologies like smart whiteboards, computers, mobile phones, iPads, projectors, and internet are being used in classrooms to boost students moral to learn. Visual education is becoming more popular and it has proved to be the best method of learning in many subjects like mathematics, physics, biology, geography, economics and much more. The business community has invested money in various educational technologies which can be used by both teachers and their students. For example, on iTunes, you will find many educational applications which can allow students and teachers exchange academic information at any time, this has made learning mobile. Also, programs like Long distance learning have opened boundaries too so many scholars around the world.

Negative Impacts of Technology on Society

The more demand for new technologies and advancement of current technologies, the more pressure we put on earth's natural resources. Look at the total number of mobile phones and computers being manufactured today, our population is increasing every day and all these billion consumers demand either a mobile phone or a computer in their homes or offices. This is good news for the manufactures, like Apple or Samsung, the demand for their gadgets is high, but to sustain this demand, they have to exploit Mother Nature for resources like aluminum, once these resources are extracted from the earth plates, they will never return back because it took them a billion years to mature. That means that at one time, we shall be left with no natural resource which can be a problem to the future generation and economy. Likewise, the intensive farming practices will deplete the soil. This makes heavy applications of commercial fertilizers necessary to yield healthy harvests, but also these fertilizers have chemicals which are dangerous to the soil and human lives.

Technology has helped us live longer by improving health facilities and aiding in the research for solutions for most health problems which affect humans. This is good news for developed countries but is bad news for developing countries which have not been in a position to access these health care benefits brought by technology. In developed countries population growth is controlled by advanced birth control methods, this has helped them balance their population in relation to natural resources and other opportunities which come with a planned population. This is different in developing countries, the rate at which people produce is very high, the mortality rate is high, food is scarce and health care is poor.

Pollution affects the land we grow crops on, the water we drink and the air we breathe. The increased demand for new technologies and advancement of technologies has resulted in many manufacturing and processing factories. As they work so hard to create the best technologies for both society and business, they release harmful chemicals and gasses which have polluted our environment and this has resulted in climate changes (global warming). So the more technology we enjoy, the more we harm our environment. Experts have tried to implement ways of reducing this impact by encouraging factories to go green, to a small extent, this has been achieved through the development of green technologies like; green cars, green computers, but a great effort is still needed to reduce the pollution of the air and the earth.

Serious research has been undertaken to publish this content, so you're in the right place. I love technology, I believe embracing its potential for personal, business or educational advancement will pave the way forward for us all. We've all heard "knowledge is power", with this website I hope, to some degree, to empower you!

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Technology And Society - Impact of Technology On Society -

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Technology and human life cannot be separated; society has a cyclical co-dependence on technology. We use technology; depend on technology in our daily life and our needs and demands for technology keep on rising. Humans use technology to travel, to communicate, to learn, to do business and to live in comfort.

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unplug: raising kids in a technology addicted world

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The Impact of Technology on Adolescent Brains

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Children are being given smartphones and other tech devices at younger and younger ages each year, but what is the impact introducing technology to children this young doing to their development? Clinical psychologist and author Dr. Lisa Strohman compares how we used to monitor technology use to the systems in place today.

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The Atlantic Magazine

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Social media-from Facebook to Twitter-have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)-and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill. A report on what the epidemic of loneliness is doing to our souls and our society.

Phillip Toledano

Yvette Vickers, a former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner's report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs, she found Vickers's body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the empty space.

The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined "Mummified Body of Former Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers Found in Her Benedict Canyon Home," which quickly went viral. Within two weeks, by Technorati's count, Vickers's lonesome death was already the subject of 16,057 Facebook posts and 881 tweets. She had long been a horror-movie icon, a symbol of Hollywood's capacity to exploit our most basic fears in the silliest ways; now she was an icon of a new and different kind of horror: our growing fear of loneliness. Certainly she received much more attention in death than she did in the final years of her life. With no children, no religious group, and no immediate social circle of any kind, she had begun, as an elderly woman, to look elsewhere for companionship. Savage later told Los Angeles magazine that she had searched Vickers's phone bills for clues about the life that led to such an end. In the months before her grotesque death, Vickers had made calls not to friends or family but to distant fans who had found her through fan conventions and Internet sites.

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Vickers's web of connections had grown broader but shallower, as has happened for many of us. We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible. Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment. In 2010, at a cost of $300 million, 800 miles of fiber-optic cable was laid between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange to shave three milliseconds off trading times. Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.

At the forefront of all this unexpectedly lonely interactivity is Facebook, with 845 million users and $3.7 billion in revenue last year. The company hopes to raise $5 billion in an initial public offering later this spring, which will make it by far the largest Internet IPO in history. Some recent estimates put the company's potential value at $100 billion, which would make it larger than the global coffee industry-one addiction preparing to surpass the other. Facebook's scale and reach are hard to comprehend: last summer, Facebook became, by some counts, the first Web site to receive 1 trillion page views in a month. In the last three months of 2011, users generated an average of 2.7 billion "likes" and comments every day. On whatever scale you care to judge Facebook-as a company, as a culture, as a country-it is vast beyond imagination.

Despite its immense popularity, or more likely because of it, Facebook has, from the beginning, been under something of a cloud of suspicion. The depiction of Mark Zuckerberg, in The Social Network, as a bastard with symptoms of Asperger's syndrome, was nonsense. But it felt true. It felt true to Facebook, if not to Zuckerberg. The film's most indelible scene, the one that may well have earned it an Oscar, was the final, silent shot of an anomic Zuckerberg sending out a friend request to his ex-girlfriend, then waiting and clicking and waiting and clicking-a moment of superconnected loneliness preserved in amber. We have all been in that scene: transfixed by the glare of a screen, hungering for response.

When you sign up for Google+ and set up your Friends circle, the program specifies that you should include only "your real friends, the ones you feel comfortable sharing private details with." That one little phrase, Your real friends -so quaint, so charmingly mothering-perfectly encapsulates the anxieties that social media have produced: the fears that Facebook is interfering with our real friendships, distancing us from each other, making us lonelier; and that social networking might be spreading the very isolation it seemed designed to conquer.

Facebook arrived in the middle of a dramatic increase in the quantity and intensity of human loneliness, a rise that initially made the site's promise of greater connection seem deeply attractive. Americans are more solitary than ever before. In 1950, less than 10 percent of American households contained only one person. By 2010, nearly 27 percent of households had just one person. Solitary living does not guarantee a life of unhappiness, of course. In his recent book about the trend toward living alone, Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, writes: "Reams of published research show that it's the quality, not the quantity of social interaction, that best predicts loneliness." True. But before we begin the fantasies of happily eccentric singledom, of divorcées dropping by their knitting circles after work for glasses of Drew Barrymore pinot grigio, or recent college graduates with perfectly articulated, Steampunk-themed, 300-square-foot apartments organizing croquet matches with their book clubs, we should recognize that it is not just isolation that is rising sharply. It's loneliness, too. And loneliness makes us miserable.

We know intuitively that loneliness and being alone are not the same thing. Solitude can be lovely. Crowded parties can be agony. We also know, thanks to a growing body of research on the topic, that loneliness is not a matter of external conditions; it is a psychological state. A 2005 analysis of data from a longitudinal study of Dutch twins showed that the tendency toward loneliness has roughly the same genetic component as other psychological problems such as neuroticism or anxiety.

Still, loneliness is slippery, a difficult state to define or diagnose. The best tool yet developed for measuring the condition is the UCLA Loneliness Scale, a series of 20 questions that all begin with this formulation: "How often do you feel ...?" As in: "How often do you feel that you are 'in tune' with the people around you?" And: "How often do you feel that you lack companionship?" Measuring the condition in these terms, various studies have shown loneliness rising drastically over a very short period of recent history. A 2010 AARP survey found that 35 percent of adults older than 45 were chronically lonely, as opposed to 20 percent of a similar group only a decade earlier. According to a major study by a leading scholar of the subject, roughly 20 percent of Americans-about 60 million people-are unhappy with their lives because of loneliness. Across the Western world, physicians and nurses have begun to speak openly of an epidemic of loneliness.

The new studies on loneliness are beginning to yield some surprising preliminary findings about its mechanisms. Almost every factor that one might assume affects loneliness does so only some of the time, and only under certain circumstances. People who are married are less lonely than single people, one journal article suggests, but only if their spouses are confidants. If one's spouse is not a confidant, marriage may not decrease loneliness. A belief in God might help, or it might not, as a 1990 German study comparing levels of religious feeling and levels of loneliness discovered. Active believers who saw God as abstract and helpful rather than as a wrathful, immediate presence were less lonely. "The mere belief in God," the researchers concluded, "was relatively independent of loneliness."

But it is clear that social interaction matters. Loneliness and being alone are not the same thing, but both are on the rise. We meet fewer people. We gather less. And when we gather, our bonds are less meaningful and less easy. The decrease in confidants-that is, in quality social connections-has been dramatic over the past 25 years. In one survey, the mean size of networks of personal confidants decreased from 2.94 people in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. Similarly, in 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said they had no one with whom to discuss important matters, and 15 percent said they had only one such good friend. By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk to, and 20 percent had only one confidant.

In the face of this social disintegration, we have essentially hired an army of replacement confidants, an entire class of professional carers. As Ronald Dworkin pointed out in a 2010 paper for the Hoover Institution, in the late '40s, the United States was home to 2,500 clinical psychologists, 30,000 social workers, and fewer than 500 marriage and family therapists. As of 2010, the country had 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers, 400,000 nonclinical social workers, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 105,000 mental-health counselors, 220,000 substance-abuse counselors, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists, and 30,000 life coaches. The majority of patients in therapy do not warrant a psychiatric diagnosis. This raft of psychic servants is helping us through what used to be called regular problems. We have outsourced the work of everyday caring.

We need professional carers more and more, because the threat of societal breakdown, once principally a matter of nostalgic lament, has morphed into an issue of public health. Being lonely is extremely bad for your health. If you're lonely, you're more likely to be put in a geriatric home at an earlier age than a similar person who isn't lonely. You're less likely to exercise. You're more likely to be obese. You're less likely to survive a serious operation and more likely to have hormonal imbalances. You are at greater risk of inflammation. Your memory may be worse. You are more likely to be depressed, to sleep badly, and to suffer dementia and general cognitive decline. Loneliness may not have killed Yvette Vickers, but it has been linked to a greater probability of having the kind of heart condition that did kill her.

And yet, despite its deleterious effect on health, loneliness is one of the first things ordinary Americans spend their money achieving. With money, you flee the cramped city to a house in the suburbs or, if you can afford it, a McMansion in the exurbs, inevitably spending more time in your car. Loneliness is at the American core, a by-product of a long-standing national appetite for independence: The Pilgrims who left Europe willingly abandoned the bonds and strictures of a society that could not accept their right to be different. They did not seek out loneliness, but they accepted it as the price of their autonomy. The cowboys who set off to explore a seemingly endless frontier likewise traded away personal ties in favor of pride and self-respect. The ultimate American icon is the astronaut: Who is more heroic, or more alone? The price of self-determination and self-reliance has often been loneliness. But Americans have always been willing to pay that price.

Today, the one common feature in American secular culture is its celebration of the self that breaks away from the constrictions of the family and the state, and, in its greatest expressions, from all limits entirely. The great American poem is Whitman's "Song of Myself." The great American essay is Emerson's "Self-Reliance." The great American novel is Melville's Moby-Dick, the tale of a man on a quest so lonely that it is incomprehensible to those around him. American culture, high and low, is about self-expression and personal authenticity. Franklin Delano Roosevelt called individualism "the great watchword of American life."

Self-invention is only half of the American story, however. The drive for isolation has always been in tension with the impulse to cluster in communities that cling and suffocate. The Pilgrims, while fomenting spiritual rebellion, also enforced ferocious cohesion. The Salem witch trials, in hindsight, read like attempts to impose solidarity-as do the McCarthy hearings. The history of the United States is like the famous parable of the porcupines in the cold, from Schopenhauer's Studies in Pessimism -the ones who huddle together for warmth and shuffle away in pain, always separating and congregating.

We are now in the middle of a long period of shuffling away. In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam attributed the dramatic post-war decline of social capital-the strength and value of interpersonal networks-to numerous interconnected trends in American life: suburban sprawl, television's dominance over culture, the self-absorption of the Baby Boomers, the disintegration of the traditional family. The trends he observed continued through the prosperity of the aughts, and have only become more pronounced with time: the rate of union membership declined in 2011, again; screen time rose; the Masons and the Elks continued their slide into irrelevance. We are lonely because we want to be lonely. We have made ourselves lonely.

The question of the future is this: Is Facebook part of the separating or part of the congregating; is it a huddling-together for warmth or a shuffling-away in pain?

Well before Facebook, digital technology was enabling our tendency for isolation, to an unprecedented degree. Back in the 1990s, scholars started calling the contradiction between an increased opportunity to connect and a lack of human contact the "Internet paradox." A prominent 1998 article on the phenomenon by a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon showed that increased Internet usage was already coinciding with increased loneliness. Critics of the study pointed out that the two groups that participated in the study-high-school journalism students who were heading to university and socially active members of community-development boards-were statistically likely to become lonelier over time. Which brings us to a more fundamental question: Does the Internet make people lonely, or are lonely people more attracted to the Internet?

The question has intensified in the Facebook era. A recent study out of Australia (where close to half the population is active on Facebook), titled "Who Uses Facebook?," found a complex and sometimes confounding relationship between loneliness and social networking. Facebook users had slightly lower levels of "social loneliness"-the sense of not feeling bonded with friends-but "significantly higher levels of family loneliness"-the sense of not feeling bonded with family. It may be that Facebook encourages more contact with people outside of our household, at the expense of our family relationships-or it may be that people who have unhappy family relationships in the first place seek companionship through other means, including Facebook. The researchers also found that lonely people are inclined to spend more time on Facebook: "One of the most noteworthy findings," they wrote, "was the tendency for neurotic and lonely individuals to spend greater amounts of time on Facebook per day than non-lonely individuals." And they found that neurotics are more likely to prefer to use the wall, while extroverts tend to use chat features in addition to the wall.

Moira Burke, until recently a graduate student at the Human-Computer Institute at Carnegie Mellon, used to run a longitudinal study of 1,200 Facebook users. That study, which is ongoing, is one of the first to step outside the realm of self-selected college students and examine the effects of Facebook on a broader population, over time. She concludes that the effect of Facebook depends on what you bring to it. Just as your mother said: you get out only what you put in. If you use Facebook to communicate directly with other individuals-by using the "like" button, commenting on friends' posts, and so on-it can increase your social capital. Personalized messages, or what Burke calls "composed communication," are more satisfying than "one-click communication"-the lazy click of a like. "People who received composed communication became less lonely, while people who received one-click communication experienced no change in loneliness," Burke tells me. So, you should inform your friend in writing how charming her son looks with Harry Potter cake smeared all over his face, and how interesting her sepia-toned photograph of that tree-framed bit of skyline is, and how cool it is that she's at whatever concert she happens to be at. That's what we all want to hear. Even better than sending a private Facebook message is the semi-public conversation, the kind of back-and-forth in which you half ignore the other people who may be listening in. "People whose friends write to them semi-publicly on Facebook experience decreases in loneliness," Burke says.

On the other hand, non-personalized use of Facebook-scanning your friends' status updates and updating the world on your own activities via your wall, or what Burke calls "passive consumption" and "broadcasting"-correlates to feelings of disconnectedness. It's a lonely business, wandering the labyrinths of our friends' and pseudo-friends' projected identities, trying to figure out what part of ourselves we ought to project, who will listen, and what they will hear. According to Burke, passive consumption of Facebook also correlates to a marginal increase in depression. "If two women each talk to their friends the same amount of time, but one of them spends more time reading about friends on Facebook as well, the one reading tends to grow slightly more depressed," Burke says. Her conclusion suggests that my sometimes unhappy reactions to Facebook may be more universal than I had realized. When I scroll through page after page of my friends' descriptions of how accidentally eloquent their kids are, and how their husbands are endearingly bumbling, and how they're all about to eat a home-cooked meal prepared with fresh local organic produce bought at the farmers' market and then go for a jog and maybe check in at the office because they're so busy getting ready to hop on a plane for a week of luxury dogsledding in Lapland, I do grow slightly more miserable. A lot of other people doing the same thing feel a little bit worse, too.

Still, Burke's research does not support the assertion that Facebook creates loneliness. The people who experience loneliness on Facebook are lonely away from Facebook, too, she points out; on Facebook, as everywhere else, correlation is not causation. The popular kids are popular, and the lonely skulkers skulk alone. Perhaps it says something about me that I think Facebook is primarily a platform for lonely skulking. I mention to Burke the widely reported study, conducted by a Stanford graduate student, that showed how believing that others have strong social networks can lead to feelings of depression. What does Facebook communicate, if not the impression of social bounty? Everybody else looks so happy on Facebook, with so many friends, that our own social networks feel emptier than ever in comparison. Doesn't that make people feel lonely? "If people are reading about lives that are much better than theirs, two things can happen," Burke tells me. "They can feel worse about themselves, or they can feel motivated."

Burke will start working at Facebook as a data scientist this year.

John Cacioppo, the director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, is the world's leading expert on loneliness. In his landmark book, Loneliness, released in 2008, he revealed just how profoundly the epidemic of loneliness is affecting the basic functions of human physiology. He found higher levels of epinephrine, the stress hormone, in the morning urine of lonely people. Loneliness burrows deep: "When we drew blood from our older adults and analyzed their white cells," he writes, "we found that loneliness somehow penetrated the deepest recesses of the cell to alter the way genes were being expressed." Loneliness affects not only the brain, then, but the basic process of DNA transcription. When you are lonely, your whole body is lonely.

To Cacioppo, Internet communication allows only ersatz intimacy. "Forming connections with pets or online friends or even God is a noble attempt by an obligatorily gregarious creature to satisfy a compelling need," he writes. "But surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing." The "real thing" being actual people, in the flesh. When I speak to Cacioppo, he is refreshingly clear on what he sees as Facebook's effect on society. Yes, he allows, some research has suggested that the greater the number of Facebook friends a person has, the less lonely she is. But he argues that the impression this creates can be misleading. "For the most part," he says, "people are bringing their old friends, and feelings of loneliness or connectedness, to Facebook." The idea that a Web site could deliver a more friendly, interconnected world is bogus. The depth of one's social network outside Facebook is what determines the depth of one's social network within Facebook, not the other way around. Using social media doesn't create new social networks; it just transfers established networks from one platform to another. For the most part, Facebook doesn't destroy friendships-but it doesn't create them, either.

In one experiment, Cacioppo looked for a connection between the loneliness of subjects and the relative frequency of their interactions via Facebook, chat rooms, online games, dating sites, and face-to-face contact. The results were unequivocal. "The greater the proportion of face-to-face interactions, the less lonely you are," he says. "The greater the proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are." Surely, I suggest to Cacioppo, this means that Facebook and the like inevitably make people lonelier. He disagrees. Facebook is merely a tool, he says, and like any tool, its effectiveness will depend on its user. "If you use Facebook to increase face-to-face contact," he says, "it increases social capital." So if social media let you organize a game of football among your friends, that's healthy. If you turn to social media instead of playing football, however, that's unhealthy.

"Facebook can be terrific, if we use it properly," Cacioppo continues. "It's like a car. You can drive it to pick up your friends. Or you can drive alone." But hasn't the car increased loneliness? If cars created the suburbs, surely they also created isolation. "That's because of how we use cars," Cacioppo replies. "How we use these technologies can lead to more integration, rather than more isolation."

The problem, then, is that we invite loneliness, even though it makes us miserable. The history of our use of technology is a history of isolation desired and achieved. When the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company opened its A&P stores, giving Americans self-service access to groceries, customers stopped having relationships with their grocers. When the telephone arrived, people stopped knocking on their neighbors' doors. Social media bring this process to a much wider set of relationships. Researchers at the HP Social Computing Lab who studied the nature of people's connections on Twitter came to a depressing, if not surprising, conclusion: "Most of the links declared within Twitter were meaningless from an interaction point of view." I have to wonder: What other point of view is meaningful?

Loneliness is certainly not something that Facebook or Twitter or any of the lesser forms of social media is doing to us. We are doing it to ourselves. Casting technology as some vague, impersonal spirit of history forcing our actions is a weak excuse. We make decisions about how we use our machines, not the other way around. Every time I shop at my local grocery store, I am faced with a choice. I can buy my groceries from a human being or from a machine. I always, without exception, choose the machine. It's faster and more efficient, I tell myself, but the truth is that I prefer not having to wait with the other customers who are lined up alongside the conveyor belt: the hipster mom who disapproves of my high-carbon-footprint pineapple; the lady who tenses to the point of tears while she waits to see if the gods of the credit-card machine will accept or decline; the old man whose clumsy feebleness requires a patience that I don't possess. Much better to bypass the whole circus and just ring up the groceries myself.

Our omnipresent new technologies lure us toward increasingly superficial connections at exactly the same moment that they make avoiding the mess of human interaction easy. The beauty of Facebook, the source of its power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society-the accidental revelations we make at parties, the awkward pauses, the farting and the spilled drinks and the general gaucherie of face-to-face contact. Instead, we have the lovely smoothness of a seemingly social machine. Everything's so simple: status updates, pictures, your wall.

But the price of this smooth sociability is a constant compulsion to assert one's own happiness, one's own fulfillment. Not only must we contend with the social bounty of others; we must foster the appearance of our own social bounty. Being happy all the time, pretending to be happy, actually attempting to be happy-it's exhausting. Last year a team of researchers led by Iris Mauss at the University of Denver published a study looking into "the paradoxical effects of valuing happiness." Most goals in life show a direct correlation between valuation and achievement. Studies have found, for example, that students who value good grades tend to have higher grades than those who don't value them. Happiness is an exception. The study came to a disturbing conclusion:

Valuing happiness is not necessarily linked to greater happiness. In fact, under certain conditions, the opposite is true. Under conditions of low (but not high) life stress, the more people valued happiness, the lower were their hedonic balance, psychological well-being, and life satisfaction, and the higher their depression symptoms.

The more you try to be happy, the less happy you are. Sophocles made roughly the same point.

Facebook, of course, puts the pursuit of happiness front and center in our digital life. Its capacity to redefine our very concepts of identity and personal fulfillment is much more worrisome than the data-mining and privacy practices that have aroused anxieties about the company. Two of the most compelling critics of Facebook-neither of them a Luddite-concentrate on exactly this point. Jaron Lanier, the author of You Are Not a Gadget, was one of the inventors of virtual-reality technology. His view of where social media are taking us reads like dystopian science fiction: "I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process." Lanier argues that Facebook imprisons us in the business of self-presenting, and this, to his mind, is the site's crucial and fatally unacceptable downside.

Sherry Turkle, a professor of computer culture at MIT who in 1995 published the digital-positive analysis Life on the Screen, is much more skeptical about the effects of online society in her 2011 book, Alone Together: "These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time." The problem with digital intimacy is that it is ultimately incomplete: "The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy," she writes. "We don't want to intrude on each other, so instead we constantly intrude on each other, but not in 'real time.'"

Lanier and Turkle are right, at least in their diagnoses. Self-presentation on Facebook is continuous, intensely mediated, and possessed of a phony nonchalance that eliminates even the potential for spontaneity. ("Look how casually I threw up these three photos from the party at which I took 300 photos!") Curating the exhibition of the self has become a 24/7 occupation. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the Australian study "Who Uses Facebook?" found a significant correlation between Facebook use and narcissism: "Facebook users have higher levels of total narcissism, exhibitionism, and leadership than Facebook nonusers," the study's authors wrote. "In fact, it could be argued that Facebook specifically gratifies the narcissistic individual's need to engage in self-promoting and superficial behavior."

Rising narcissism isn't so much a trend as the trend behind all other trends. In preparation for the 2013 edition of its diagnostic manual, the psychiatric profession is currently struggling to update its definition of narcissistic personality disorder. Still, generally speaking, practitioners agree that narcissism manifests in patterns of fantastic grandiosity, craving for attention, and lack of empathy. In a 2008 survey, 35,000 American respondents were asked if they had ever had certain symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. Among people older than 65, 3 percent reported symptoms. Among people in their 20s, the proportion was nearly 10 percent. Across all age groups, one in 16 Americans has experienced some symptoms of NPD. And loneliness and narcissism are intimately connected: a longitudinal study of Swedish women demonstrated a strong link between levels of narcissism in youth and levels of loneliness in old age. The connection is fundamental. Narcissism is the flip side of loneliness, and either condition is a fighting retreat from the messy reality of other people.

A considerable part of Facebook's appeal stems from its miraculous fusion of distance with intimacy, or the illusion of distance with the illusion of intimacy. Our online communities become engines of self-image, and self-image becomes the engine of community. The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude. The new isolation is not of the kind that Americans once idealized, the lonesomeness of the proudly nonconformist, independent-minded, solitary stoic, or that of the astronaut who blasts into new worlds. Facebook's isolation is a grind. What's truly staggering about Facebook usage is not its volume-750 million photographs uploaded over a single weekend-but the constancy of the performance it demands. More than half its users-and one of every 13 people on Earth is a Facebook user-log on every day. Among 18-to-34-year-olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after waking up, and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed. The relentlessness is what is so new, so potentially transformative. Facebook never takes a break. We never take a break. Human beings have always created elaborate acts of self-presentation. But not all the time, not every morning, before we even pour a cup of coffee. Yvette Vickers's computer was on when she died.

Nostalgia for the good old days of disconnection would not just be pointless, it would be hypocritical and ungrateful. But the very magic of the new machines, the efficiency and elegance with which they serve us, obscures what isn't being served: everything that matters. What Facebook has revealed about human nature-and this is not a minor revelation-is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.

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Social media-from Facebook to Twitter-have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)-and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill. A report on what the epidemic of loneliness is doing to our souls and our society.

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NY Times

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SAN FRANCISCO - Last weekend, I was watching television with a few friends, browsing the week's most popular YouTube videos, when a piece in the comedy section called "I Forgot My Phone" caught my eye. As I was about to click play, however, a friend warned, "Oh, don't watch that. I saw it yesterday, and it's really sad."

The two-minute video, which has been viewed more than 15 million times, begins with a couple in bed. The woman, played by the comedian and actress Charlene deGuzman, stares silently while her boyfriend pays no mind and checks his smartphone.

The subsequent scenes follow Ms. deGuzman through a day that is downright dystopian: people ignore her as they stare at their phones during lunch, at a concert, while bowling and at a birthday party. (Even the birthday boy is recording the party on his phone.) The clip ends with Ms. deGuzman back in bed with her boyfriend at the end of the day; he is still using his phone.

Ms. deGuzman's video makes for some discomfiting viewing. It's a direct hit on our smartphone-obsessed culture, needling us about our addiction to that little screen and suggesting that maybe life is just better led when it is lived rather than viewed. While the clip has funny scenes - a man proposing on a beach while trying to record the special moment on his phone - it is mostly ... sad.

"I came up with the idea for the video when I started to realize how ridiculous we are all being, myself included, when I was at a concert and people around me were recording the show with their phones, not actually watching the concert," Ms. deGuzman said in an interview.

"It makes me sad that there are moments in our lives where we're not present because we're looking at a phone," said Ms. deGuzman, who also wrote the piece, which was directed by Miles Crawford. She mused that, like it or not, experiencing life through a four-inch screen could be the new norm.

Or not. Ms. deGuzman's video may have landed at one of those cultural moments when people start questioning if something has gone too far and start doing something about it.

Last week, the Unsound music festival in Poland banned fans from recording the event, saying it did not want "instant documentation" and distractions that might take away from the performances. In April, during a show in New York City, Karen O, the lead singer of the rock band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, told audience members to put away their phones (using an expletive to emphasize her point).

A number of New York restaurants, including Momofuku Ko and Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare, have prohibited people from photographing their food. (Note to foodies: Your quinoa does not need to be artfully posted with an old-timey look on Instagram.) And, of course, many mothers and fathers who fought to keep the television out of the kitchen may see smartphones as the next threat to dinnertime civility.

In the late 1950s, televisions started to move into the kitchen from the living room, often wheeled up to the dinner table to join the family for supper. And then, TV at the dinner table suddenly became bad manners. Back to the living room the TV went.

"It never really caught on in most U.S. homes," said Lynn Spigel, a professor at the Northwestern University School of Communication and author of the book, " Make Room for TV." "At one point, a company even tried to invent a contraption called the TV Stove, which was both a TV and a stove," she said.

So are smartphones having their TV-in-the-kitchen moment?

"Every experience is being mediated and conceived around how it can be captured and augmented by our devices," said Mathias Crawford, a researcher in human-computer interactions and communications at Stanford University. "No place is this more apparent than our meals, where every portion leading up to, during and after a dining experience is being carved out by particular apps."

People make dinner reservations on OpenTable; check in on Foursquare when they arrive at the restaurant; take a picture of their food to share on Instagram; post on Twitter a joke they hear during the meal; review the restaurant on Yelp; then, finally, coordinate a ride home using Uber.

"If you're wondering when people are going to reject the phone, that will mean they need to reject Silicon Valley's entire concept of how you ought to be dining," Mr. Crawford said. But, he added, it was possible. "Yes, society is changing, but the iPhone is only really six years old, and those changes aren't set in place." Given the overwhelming response to Ms. deGuzman's video, people are at least thinking about those changes.

"It wasn't until this year that I've had these revelations about living in the moment without my phone," Ms. deGuzman said. "I still have my phone with me, but I try to leave it in my purse. Now I find myself just taking in a moment, and I don't have to post a picture about it."
E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

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Disruptions: More Connected, Yet More Alone

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SAN FRANCISCO - Last weekend, I was watching television with a few friends, browsing the week's most popular YouTube videos, when a piece in the comedy section called "I Forgot My Phone" caught my eye. As I was about to click play, however, a friend warned, "Oh, don't watch that.

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IBT

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Photo: Reuters

We've all had that experience in which instead of taking a moment and using our brains to try to come up with an answer to a question, we quickly turn to Google or another search engine on our smartphones to do the thinking for us. A new study is looking at how this behavior makes us lazy thinkers, but the jury is still out on whether our smartphones actually make us dumber. Let's look at the arguments for and against our reliance on smartphones.

Researchers from the University of Waterloo conducted three studies involving 660 participants. The individuals' thinking styles -- whether they were instinctual thinkers who trust their "gut feeling" or analytical thinkers who need to logically break down an answer -- and smartphone habits were analyzed. The studies concluded that more analytical thinkers with "stronger cognitive skills" used search engines less than their counterparts.

"Our research provides support for an association between heavy smartphone use and lowered intelligence," co-lead author Gordon Pennycook, Ph.D. candidate for the University of Waterloo, said in a statement. "Whether smartphones actually decrease intelligence is still an open question that requires future research." The researchers note that our reliance on smartphones will likely increase and understanding the implications of heavy usage is important.

Dr. Jonathan Wai, a psychologist and researcher from Duke University, has written extensively on the topic and believes there are many possible advantages to smartphone usage. "I think new technology probably has the most power to amplify the intelligence we already have. It can also broaden our skill sets and our ability to deal with the ever-increasing complexity in our lives -- which is, perhaps ironically, in part, created by new technologies," Wai said.

Technology and smartphones, similar to anything else, can be used for good and bad. In many ways, it's about figuring out the best way of using a smartphone to augment your abilities and improve your life. "One way of thinking about being 'smart' today is whether you can amplify the power of the intelligence you do have in a positive way through the use of new technology," Wai said.

Even Bill Nye does not think smartphones are causing us to be dumber. Instead, smartphones are just the latest example of what humans do -- and do well. "That's what makes a human a human, if we store information outside our bodies. If you put a blaze on a trail, a stripe of paint or ax chop on a tree, it shows other humans where the trail is," Nye said in an interview with Gizmodo.

As for the long-term effects, Wai says this concern remains unanswered but that smartphones have already affected our daily lives. "There's a great piece in the Onion titled ' Man Who Drinks 5 Diet Cokes Per Day Hoping Doctors Working On Cure For Whatever He's Getting,' which, of course, is partly meant as a joke but also holds some truth. In this case, the truth is that many of the technologies we are using today have already changed us, for better or worse, but we can't be sure about the aggregate long-term effects," Wai said.

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Are Smartphones Making Us Dumber? New Study Says They Are Making Us Lazy, But Other Experts Say Maybe Not

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We've all had that experience in which instead of taking a moment and using our brains to try to come up with an answer to a question, we quickly turn to Google or another search engine on our smartphones to do the thinking for us.

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The Wire

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Search engines are rerouting our memory. According to Science, we're not necessarily losing our ability to remember things. Rather, the internet is changing how we remember. Ars Technica sums up the results nicely, "People are recalling information less, and instead can remember where to find the information they have forgotten." This is pretty similar to a 2008 report in The New York Times on reading online versus reading in print. Guinevere F. Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown, told The Times, "The brain is malleable and adapts to its environment," she said. "Whatever the pressures are on us to succeed, our brain will try and deal with it. The question is, does it change your brain in some beneficial way?"

Certain types of memory are improving. When the brain reroutes how we recall information, it develops different types of memory capabilities. Science offers this example: If somebody asks you how many national flags have just one color, do you think first about the actual flags? Or does your brain jump right to how you would find it? If you're an active Google user, you probably already started thinking of keywords. And the more you do it, the better you get at it. "The brain is very specialized in its circuitry and if you repeat mental tasks over and over it will strengthen certain neural circuits and ignore others," says Gary Small, a neuroscience professor at UCLA.

Multitasking makes memory worse. This one seems obvious, but scientists are learning more about what exactly happens when you're flooded with the many distractions available online and try to engage. Comparing how well 60- to 80-year-olds could retain memories after a distraction versus 20- to 30-year-olds, a 2011 study linked attention and memory. Scientists found that our short-term memories while multitasking deteriorates over time. In other words, as we get older, we have a harder time with distractions. And the Internet will only make it worse. "This issue is growing in scope and societal relevance as multitasking is being fed by a dramatic increase in the accessibility and variety of electronic media," said Dr. Adam Gassaley, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco.

Not using Google makes you stupid, too. A 2008 study at UCLA's Memory and Aging Center looked at how Internet-usage affected not only memory but also cognition. Led by Dr. Small, the scientists split a group of subjects between 55 and 76 years of age into a group of experienced and inexperienced Internet users, then used MRI scans to see how their brains worked when reading books or searching the web. Experienced Internet users actually showed increased brain activity, with more advanced decision-making skills and complex reasoning. In simple terms, the inexperienced Internet users lagged behind. Check out the brain on the right (with Google practice) versus the one on the left (without Google practice):

In a way, this is an age-old argument. Hieronimo Squarciafico, a 15th-century Venetian editor and critic of the printing press, once said, "Abundance of books makes men less studious." That may be true, but that doesn't necessarily mean they make us dumber.
This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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Google Is Making Us Stupid and Smart at the Same Time?

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Search engines are rerouting our memory. According to Science, we're not necessarily losing our ability to remember things. Rather, the internet is changing how we remember. Ars Technica sums up the results nicely, "People are recalling information less, and instead can remember where to find the information they have forgotten."

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How Social Media is Connecting Us Offline

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How Social Media is Connecting Us Offline

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ABC News

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Plenty of groan-eliciting jokes have been made about how "social media" breeds anti-social behavior. Of course, people who make such jokes are one, terrible and have no friends, and two, tend to forget that people have always gone to great lengths to avoid one another, from cavemen frantically blowing out their cave fires so that their cave neighbors will think they're not home, to present day twenty-somethings who spend their weekends lurking, invisible, on Gchat while pretending to be out. Also, this charge simply isn't true. If anything, social media -- which has the name it does for a reason -- makes it harder to avoid people than ever before. On a more optimistic note, it also allows us to better connect with people who share their interests and enrich their lives.

Here, then, are examples of how social media sites like Facebook, Twitter or other online platforms with social capabilities, have helped people around the world connect to one another offline.

When Tom and Nicole Lamb shared a Facebook post about spontaneously deciding to pay for the meal of the person behind them at the drive-thru window, they had no idea that they'd be setting off a chain of events that'd result in thousands of people "paying it forward" across the U.S. The couple was still reeling from the death of their eight-year-old son, Jayden, who had succumbed to cancer, when they decided to perform a kind act as a 'thank you' to the community that had supported them and their son.

In the weeks following their post, people shared their own stories of being inspired to pay it forward, "Jayden Style," with kind acts ranging from paying for a stranger's cup of coffee to donating a diamond engagement ring to a local Salvation Army. Facebook helped both launch and draw attention to the campaign, as well as offer a simple and well-organized means of spreading people's stories about paying it forward.

Samantha Futerman, an American actress, was surprised to find a Facebook message from a French stranger who happened to have her exact same face. The young woman was an aspiring fashion designer named Anaïs, and she had written to tell Samantha that a friend of hers had seen the actress in a YouTube video and thought the two girls shared an uncanny resemblance. "I then checked your name on the case," Anaïs wrote, "stalked you A BIT, and found out that you were born on the 19th of November, 1987." Not to be "too Lindsay Lohan," she continued, but "I was wondering where you were born?" The two soon discovered that they'd been born in South Korea on the same day, later adopted by two different families -- one in the U.S. and the other in France. The two then worked together on a Kickstarter campaign to fund a documentary about meeting for the first time in person and taking DNA tests to prove for sure that they are, in fact, twin sisters separated at birth.

As Samantha explains, this "ever-expanding, social media-obsessed world we live in has given me the chance to reconnect with a person whom I knew only from a nine-month extravaganza inside my biological mother's womb."

Facebook seems like a pretty good place to find a long-lost sister, actually. It worked for two Bosnian sisters, 88-year-old Tanija Delic and 82-year-old Hedija Talic, who had been separated in 1941 at the start of World War II. Talic ended up in an orphanage, unsure of what had become of her family members. Years later, her son found his cousin through Facebook, and the two sisters -- having discovered that they now lived about 120 miles apart from one another -- were finally reunited.

After Luo Gang was abducted from his family at age five, he would envision his childhood home in his mind before bed so that he wouldn't forget the place he'd been taken from. One specific image that had been etched into his memory was of two bridges that crossed his hometown.

Twenty-three years later, he decided to use what he had remembered of his home to draw a map, which he shared online. Soon, someone reached out to him, telling him about a couple who had lost their son 23 years prior. Luo looked up the couple's town on Google Maps and, sure enough, saw the bridges he had remembered since childhood. He eventually reunited with his birth family, proving that Google Maps can be used for so much more than stalking or scaring the living crap out of people.

You might recognize the name Matthew Keys, particularly if you follow Reuters or are in some way ensconced within the online media bubble. Much of Keys' career has unfolded online, and his personal life has in a big way as well. One day, as he was prepping for bed, Keys checked Twitter and saw a message from someone named Adam Smith asking whether his mother's name was Jackie. The two, who had crossed paths online before, got to talking and began to realize that they were brothers.

"After telling our story on Facebook, we were flooded with people e-mailing and posting to our wall about similar lost and found stories involving biological and adopted siblings and relatives," Keys said about the online reunion. "It was extremely touching."

You know Joseph Gordon Levitt, right? Handsome actor, rocker of suits? Well, he's launched an "open-collaborative production company" called hitRECord that allows writers, videographers, illustrators, musicians, and other creative people to collaborate on all sorts of projects. You can browse the site and check out both finished video, audio, image, and text "records," as well as projects in the process of being made. Artists can also search for projects that require their unique vision and skill sets to be completed. It's great! The company will also exist on TV as a collaborative, user-generated variety show showcasing all the great art people create together.

At the risk of sounding incredibly cheesy, this is the entire point of social media -- connecting people and ideas online.

The devastating tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma on May 20 left death and destruction in its wake. Families felt broken, belongings were destroyed, and homes and business were completely decimated. The massive storm also resulted in pet owners losing track of their animals, including a woman whose dog happened to be located right in the middle of her TV news interview.

Now, there's a Facebook page designed to help people locate lost pets by posting pictures and descriptions of animals they have either lost or found. The page notes that it is manned by volunteers who "utilize social media and other offline resources to help reunite lost pets with their owners in the aftermath of disasters."

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Plenty of groan-eliciting jokes have been made about how "social media" breeds anti-social behavior. Of course, people who make such jokes are one, terrible and have no friends, and two, tend to forget that people have always gone to great lengths to avoid one another, from cavemen frantically blowing out their cave fires so that their cave neighbors will think they're not home, to present day twenty-somethings who spend their weekends lurking, invisible, on Gchat while pretending to be out.

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NPR

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Kids are spending more time than ever in front of screens, and it may be inhibiting their ability to recognize emotions, according to new research out of the University of California, Los Angeles.

The study, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, found that sixth-graders who went five days without exposure to technology were significantly better at reading human emotions than kids who had regular access to phones, televisions and computers.

The UCLA researchers studied two groups of sixth-graders from a Southern California public school. One group was sent to the Pali Institute, an outdoor education camp in Running Springs, Calif., where the kids had no access to electronic devices. For the other group, it was life as usual.

At the beginning and end of the five-day study period, both groups of kids were shown images of nearly 50 faces and asked to identify the feelings being modeled. Researchers found that the students who went to camp scored significantly higher when it came to reading facial emotions or other nonverbal cues than the students who continued to have access to their media devices.

"We were pleased to get an effect after five days," says Patricia Greenfield, a senior author of the study and a distinguished professor of psychology at UCLA. "We found that the kids who had been to camp without any screens but with lots of those opportunities and necessities for interacting with other people in person improved significantly more."

If the study were to be expanded, Greenfield says, she'd like to test the students at camp a third time - when they've been back at home with smartphones and tablets in their hands for five days.

"It might mean they would lose those skills if they weren't maintaining continual face-to-face interaction," she says.
A Wake-Up Call For Educators
There's a big takeaway for schools, Greenfield says.

"A lot of school systems are rushing to put iPads into the hands of students individually, and I don't think they've thought about the [social] cost," she explains. "This study should be, and we want it to be, a wake-up call to schools. They have to make sure their students are getting enough face-to-face social interaction. That might mean reducing screen time."

The results of the UCLA study seem to line up with prior research, says Marjorie Hogan, a pediatrician at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis and a spokeswoman for the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

"Common sense tells me that if a child's laying on his or her bed and texting friends instead of getting together and saying, 'Hey, what's up,' that there's a problem there," she says. "I want people interacting ... on a common-sense level, and an experiential level. It does concern [me]."

Hogan relates the UCLA study's findings back to research on infants.

"When babies are babies, they're learning about human interaction with face-to-face time and with speaking to parents and having things they say modeled back to them," she says. "That need doesn't go away."
How Much Screen Time Is Too Much?
For decades the AAP has warned that children need to cut back on their screen time. The group's latest prescription: Entertainment "screen time" should be limited to two hours a day for children ages 3-18. And, for 2-year-olds and younger, none at all.

The sixth-graders who made up the sample in the UCLA study self-reported that they spent an average of more than four hours on a typical school day texting, watching television and playing video games.

The San Francisco nonprofit Common Sense Media studies screen time from birth and, in 2013, found that children under 8 (a younger sample than the kids in the UCLA study) were spending roughly two hours a day in front of a screen.

"If used appropriately, it's wonderful," Hogan says of digital media. "We don't want to demonize media, because it's going to be a part of everybody's lives increasingly, and we have to teach children how to make good choices around it, how to limit it and how to make sure it's not going to take the place of all the other good stuff out there."

Some research suggests that screen time can have lots of negative effects on kids, ranging from childhood obesity and irregular sleep patterns to social and/or behavioral issues.

"We really need to be sure that children, and probably older people, are getting enough face-to-face interaction to be competent social beings," Greenfield says. "Our species evolved in an environment where there was only face-to face-interaction. Since we were adapted to that environment, it's likely that our skills depend on that environment. If we reduce face-to-face interaction drastically, it's not surprising that the social skills would also get reduced."
What About 'Educational Screen Time'?
Research out of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, a nonprofit research and production institute affiliated with the Sesame Workshop, suggests that less than half the time kids between the ages of 2 and 10 spend in front of screens is spent consuming "educational" material.

The center also looked at family income as a determining factor of screen time. Lower-income families reported that their children spent more time engaging with educational screen activities than higher-income families did. Fifty-seven percent of screen time for families earning less than $25,000 was education-focused, compared with 38 percent for families earning between $50,000 to $99,000.
How To Limit Kids' Screen Time?
Of course, as media multiplies, it's increasingly difficult to manage kids' screen time. Where several decades ago, television was the only tech distraction, kids now have smartphones, tablets and laptops - not to mention electronic games.

"We need to make media a part of our lives, but in a planned, sensible way," Hogan says.

Her suggestion: Families should encourage a "healthy media diet" for their children. Parents and kids should work together to decide how much time to spend with media every day, and to make sure good choices are being made about what media to take in.

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Kids And Screen Time: What Does The Research Say?

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Kids are spending more time than ever in front of screens, and it may be inhibiting their ability to recognize emotions, according to new research out of the University of California, Los Angeles.

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NY Times

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Five scientists spent a week in the wilderness to understand how heavy use of technology changes how we think and behave.

"We're paying a price in terms of our cognitive life because of this virtual lifestyle," one expert says.

Polls show that a number of Americans, particularly younger ones, are feeling negative effects from heavy computer and smartphone use.

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Five scientists spent a week in the wilderness to understand how heavy use of technology changes how we think and behave. "We're paying a price in terms of our cognitive life because of this virtual lifestyle," one expert says. Polls show that a number of Americans, particularly younger ones, are feeling negative effects from heavy computer and smartphone use.

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Scholastic Scope

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PBS

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NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien has our look.

MILES O'BRIEN: It's a school night, and the 16-year-old Jain twins, Rakhee and Anika, have a heavy load of homework ahead of them.So, where to begin?How 20th century of me to think that way.The correct answer is:Do everything all at once.

MILES O'BRIEN: Actually, everything and then some.

MILES O'BRIEN: So, you have got the Facebook, a couple of - you have some chats going?

RAKHEE JAIN: Yes.

RAKHEE JAIN: Kind of, yes.

It's kind of addictive.

MILES O'BRIEN: And all of this is likely affecting the Jains' brains at a crucial phase in their development, but how?

Neuroscientist Jay Giedd hopes to have an answer before too long.

Today, they are learning how to drink from a technological fire hose.

DR. JAY GIEDD: And, in fact, in their adult jobs, they may be doing a lot of multitasking.But the other side of that coin is, will they become less good at focusing on one task, of being able to do one thing really well?

MILES O'BRIEN: ... answering the call of duty with his pal Dylan (ph).

DYLAN: Murrough wins.

Are you doing homework, Connery?

(LAUGHTER)

MILES O'BRIEN: Not even close?

CONNERY O'BRIEN: No.

(LAUGHTER)

MILES O'BRIEN: What are you doing?

(LAUGHTER)

CONNERY O'BRIEN: I am looking at funny pictures on Facebook.

MILES O'BRIEN: Watch what happens when I try to interview her.

CONNERY O'BRIEN: I was just checking my texts.

MILES O'BRIEN: Just checking - what were you checking?

CONNERY O'BRIEN: I was checking my texts and the time.

MILES O'BRIEN: You just couldn't even - you couldn't even do the interview without doing a quick check, right, you know?

CONNERY O'BRIEN: Sorry, it was just a reflex.

MILES O'BRIEN: That's an addiction.

What have we wrought?Well, try this term on for size: digital natives.

MILES O'BRIEN: Gary Small is a psychiatry professor at UCLA and co-author of "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind."

Well, yes, with a caveat.

MILES O'BRIEN: Neuroscientist Marcel Just is doing some groundbreaking research on the human brain at Carnegie Mellon University.

So, we pay a big penalty for doing more, two things at once?

MILES O'BRIEN: Like driving and talking on the phone.A few years ago, Just did a study on this.His conclusion?Even an idle conversation takes a 40 percent bite out of your brainpower.You might as well be drunk.

So, multitasking is not a myth, but efficient multitasking might be?

MILES O'BRIEN: Oh, boy.A little nervous.

(LAUGHTER)

But some people are better multitaskers than others, and it is harder for us non-digital natives, which is what brought me to Carnegie Mellon for a multitasking challenge.

With headphones on, I tried to correctly answer a series of simultaneous questions like these.

MILES O'BRIEN: There was a lot on the line here.I consider myself a good multitasker.You really should be if you are going to fly airplanes, as I do.So, if I flunked this test, I would never hear the end of it.But only 40 percent of the students in the initial study passed.

MAN: So, 100 on left and right and a 93 on dual.

MILES O'BRIEN: Ninety-three on dual?

(LAUGHTER)

MAN: So, you got it.

And here are the results.This is my brain listening to just one question, and here I am trying to answer two at once.It ties up a lot more gray matter, and that matters a lot.

MILES O'BRIEN: So, can we train our brains to do better?

And it's not only the case for vision, but it's also the case for attention, for different aspects of cognition, like multitasking, visual short-term memory.

MILES O'BRIEN: And Bavelier says the games that are most beneficial are most beneficial are not the ones you might suspect.

MICHAEL CHAVES, "Flamesword":I think I think faster.I have more outcomes in my head.I'm always thinking, because, in the game, you are trying to accomplish certain tasks, and there's many different ways to accomplish these tasks.And if I could do it in the game, I feel I do it in person, too.And I am just always thinking of different ideas.

(LAUGHTER)

RAKHEE JAIN: Ah, yes.

MILES O'BRIEN: I suppose cavemen parents worried about their kids playing with that newfangled fire.

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Is Technology Wiring Teens to Have Better Brains?

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NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien has our look. MILES O'BRIEN: It's a school night, and the 16-year-old Jain twins, Rakhee and Anika, have a heavy load of homework ahead of them.So, where to begin?How 20th century of me to think that way.The correct answer is:Do everything all at once.

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A photographer edits out our smartphones to show our strange and lonely new world 

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A photographer edits out our smartphones to show our strange and lonely new world 

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Quartz

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Photographer removes our phones, exposing a lonely world

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In Eric Pickersgill’s “Removed” photos, people stare at their hands, or the empty space between them, ignoring opportunities for human connection.

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Scope Debate Kit

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Action Magazine

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It took the radio 38 years to reach 50 million people, but it took 20 for the phone and 13 for the television. In contrast, it took Facebook 3.6 years and Twitter didn't even need that much time - in fact, it took Google Plus 88 days.

Over the last 15 years, digital communication has ushered in more changes than the printing press did in 1570. And the stand-out early adopters in this world are teenagers, whose brains appear to have an extraordinary capacity to adapt to the world around them, according to Dr Jay Giedd, an adolescent brain expert.

The term adolescent wasn't used much until the 1900s and many people refer to teenagers as a modern social invention. However, our brains are now proving otherwise: as a species, our brains are still flexible and adapting during this period. Having a more flexible brain means that other centres of it, such as impulse control and the ability to make long-term decisions, haven't developed yet - which may also explain why, unlike some of our Neanderthal ancestors, we spend an extended period living under the protection of our parents rather than leaving home at the age of 12 or 13. This also means that the adolescent brain can adapt to new technology, allowing teenagers to keep up with the accelerating pace of digital technology and giving them a multitasking advantage.

In the US, teenagers are spending 8.5 hours using computers, mobiles and other devices to learn, interact and play. This jumps to 11.5 if you take into account all of the multi-tasking that goes on, such as talking on the phone while you're watching TV. Australian teenagers were found to be spending an average of 7 hours, 38 minutes using these devices in 2009.

As they stare at these screens, they're taking in and sifting through an incredible amount of information; in the past, they would have been working out how to do maths or thinking about English literature. "The skills that the brain needs to be good at are shifting," says Geidd. "The skill has become how to deal with large amounts of information. More and more of our time is spent with 1s and 0s."

Socialising in a digital world
There are concerns as to how social media is affecting the way in which the brain learns to socialise, as one of the most important skills that we learn as children is how to make friends and interact with people around you. Geidd says that from a biology standpoint, a lot of what goes on inside our brains is social. "A lot of the brain changes are sort of set up to develop these social skills."

These interactions are now being changed by technology - you could have hundreds of friends, all of whom are real people that you interact with - and scientists aren't sure whether we'll be able to develop the same skills using Facebook.

Another concern comes from the online content that can be accessed, including violent video games, and how this will affect our responses to violence in real life. Surprisingly, Geid suggests that violence levels in the US are low at the moment, as are the rates of teenage pregnancy and sexual diseases - and this is not what the scientist were expecting. While he doesn't condone the violent video games, Geid says they could be giving teenagers a safer way to work through the various hormonal impulses that they're experiencing. It definitely needs more examination, anyway.

There is another possible advantage of the growing digital trend: Youtube indicates that teenagers all over the world are watching the same clips and laughing at the same jokes, indicating that they are more global minded than their predecessors. Sharing the same jokes could possibly go a long way to breaking down some of the prejudices out there.

"Almost everything that I read and hear about teens was mostly bad," Geid says. "Even though there are some aspects of that, it's mostly positive."

They may be obsessed with texting their friends and posting updates on Facebook, but teenagers today are probably going to have access to technology and hence social and educational opportunities that anyone with a less flexible brain might have trouble imagining. However, there is a cut off and by the age of 30, our brains become more set in their ways, making it harder for us to adapt and cope with new technologies.

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It took the radio 38 years to reach 50 million people, but it took 20 for the phone and 13 for the television. In contrast, it took Facebook 3.6 years and Twitter didn't even need that much time - in fact, it took Google Plus 88 days.

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David Bowden || "The Inner Net" || Spoken Word - YouTube

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David Bowden || "The Inner Net" || Spoken Word - YouTube

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David Bowden || "The Inner Net" || Spoken Word

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Texting is not talking - The Boston Globe

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Texting is not talking - The Boston Globe

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BY CONSERVATIVE estimates, American teenagers exchanged an average of 80 text messages a day in the fourth quarter of 2008, often to the tune of hundreds of dollars a month in cellphone charges. But research is starting to show that a teenager's texting may hurt more than the wallet.

Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, has spent the last three years researching texting habits of teens in the Boston area to determine how the practice affects their development.

Her findings suggest that teenagers' texting habit is slowing their emotional growth. "Years ago, if I saw a kid who talked to his mother 20 times a day, I would say he has an attachment problem," notes Turkle. "Now I interview hordes of college juniors and seniors who routinely text their moms while they're waiting at the bus." The lack of independence from parents means teens are not learning to make decisions on their own. The frequency of contact also plays into teen anxiety, she says. The insecurity of social questions - Who is there for me? Which clique am I in? - becomes constant.

Worse yet is the opportunity cost: Time teens spend texting is time that they don't socialize face-to-face. With more frequent electronic communication, teens give up real intimacy for the illusion of companionship. "The pressures of communicating at that velocity mean certain things aren't said," notes Turkle. "They need to have other places to have these important conversations."

Changing social norms cannot happen overnight, particularly for a generation so immersed in social technology that mere e-mail has become old school. But the most critical factor in changing teen social behavior can start in the home, with parents. In order for teens to act differently, parents have to be good role models. Turkle says the teens she interviews are complaining that parents do not look up from their own BlackBerrys when they get in the car. If parents excuse their own phone addiction, they cannot expect kids to be any better.

Turkle also suggests that parents put an emphasis on face time. Encouraging teens to bring friends home ensures they have social relationships that are not dependent on a phone. Even if teens surf the Internet in their time together, it is better than a teen alone in his room.

What is most important is to give teens a place to communicate in person and develop strong relationships. Prohibiting cellphones in the kitchen or dining room during dinner, for example, is a start. Creating a personal culture at home ensures that teens have somewhere to talk about important issues. There are many things that can't be said in 160 characters or less.

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BY CONSERVATIVE estimates, American teenagers exchanged an average of 80 text messages a day in the fourth quarter of 2008, often to the tune of hundreds of dollars a month in cellphone charges. But research is starting to show that a teenager's texting may hurt more than the wallet.

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Marshall Davis Jones : "Touchscreen" - YouTube

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Marshall Davis Jones : "Touchscreen" - YouTube

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Huffington Post

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I recently met a high school friend after decades. Education, career and family had split us across continents, but the age of communication helped us stay connected through the various milestones of our respective lives. When we met after nearly 25 years, it was as if we had never been apart. I returned home with a throat sore after non-stop chatting, much like we used to back in school.

A couple of years back, I met a person whom I had known through the net. I seemed to have more to talk about to her online than in person. After a couple of hours of labored conversation over coffee, we parted. While we continue our online tete-a-tete with as much verve as before, I doubt if we would meet in person again.

Another "online friend" suddenly disappeared from my online radar. While he appeared active on social networks and such like, he did not return calls, or reply to my emails. I am still raking my head over what I did wrong to have alienated him.

Are relationships more complicated in the digital era? Has the definition of relationships changed?

The net offers us an opportunity to know more number of people (without actually needing to "know them"), with very little effort. Sherry Turkle, Professor of Social Studies of Science and Technology at the MIT, believes that the Internet offers us the illusion of " friendship without the demands of companionship". This satisfies the momentary expediencies of modern life in that we get instant attention and are heard at all times, given the pervasiveness of the net over all time zones, and consequently, we are never alone. But is "not being alone" the same as "not being lonely"?

The perception of online friendships and in-real-life ("IRL") friendships seems to depend on the age of the user. While digital immigrants (such as I) subscribe to John Suler's belief that people "separate their online lives from their offline lives", the digital native, growing with Facebook and Instagram finds distinctions between on- and offline friendships more ambiguous. Social network sites have tied digital identity more firmly to the "In real life" iteration.

The Pew Research Center finds that 57% of American teens make new friends online. But, is making friends without seeing them really a digital phenomenon? In the pre-tech era, my high school assigned to each of us a "pen pal" from a different country, and we wrote letters ("snail mail" in digital parlance) to each other. These letters helped us become aware of each other's cultures and lives in times that predated the availability of information at the touch of a glowing screen. So, how is online friendships different from pen-pal friendships of yore?

Considering that I never met my Norwegian pen pal and stopped writing to her in a year, it is obvious that I did not consider her my friend, as against the high school friend mentioned above, with whom I have remained in touch through decades. Pew Research finds that most "digital friendships" stay in the digital space with only 20% of teens having met an online friend in person. Furthermore, it seems that real-time friendships are considered more valuable than digital friendships even among the natives - best friends (or "best friends forever", BFFs as they are referred) meet most often at school and homes, although online meetings come a close third.

So, is the Internet bad for relationships, as a digital immigrant commonly believes? Apparently not. But for the net, I could have never kept in touch or met my high school friend after a quarter of a century. But even if there is no physical separation, the digital native seems to find online interaction with real-life friends beneficial - 83% of teen social media users believe that social media makes them feel more connected to their friends' lives. 78% of online gaming teens (mostly boys) feel more connected to existing friends with whom they play games. There are people who have admittedly found BFFs or even life partners through the net.

So, is the Internet completely conducive to relationships? At the risk of repeating myself, apparently not. Relationships are largely based on spontaneity and more importantly, honesty - every stumble, hesitation or stutter in a face-to-face conversation reveals our nature in subtle ways, perhaps even without our volition. This honesty makes real-time relationships more trustworthy and hence more permanent. The Internet, on the other hand, affords us the opportunity to edit ourselves and hide behind a screen, so that what-you-see-is-what-you-get may not be a complete picture of ourselves.

Online interactions can also adversely affect existing relationships - 68% of teen social media users report to have experienced drama among their friends on social media and 26% of all teens have had a conflict with a friend over something that happened online or over text messages.

A final biochemical reason that places online friendships below IRL friendships is the absence of physical intimacy. The cuddle hormone, oxytoxin, released during a simple hug can never be released in a facebook "like" or a "{ }" during an online chat. A shoulder on which to cry can never become an equivalent metaphor in the online world, in terms of the comfort it can offer during troubled times.

The digital era is here to stay and pervade all aspects of life. Relationships are no exceptions. The Internet is undoubtedly an invaluable link between people separated by distance. But this link must be built on a stronger foundation of intimacy and familiarity and a balance of online and offline interactions will pave the way to better relationships in the world.
Co-authored by Lakshmi, a Mobicip blogger who occasionally tends to put herself on trial at the intersection of technology, education and parenting.
Mobicip helps parents and schools by way of powerful parental controls for the iPad, iPhone, and other mobile Internet-connected devices. Learn more at www.mobicip.com.

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I recently met a high school friend after decades. Education, career and family had split us across continents, but the age of communication helped us stay connected through the various milestones of our respective lives. When we met after nearly 25 years, it was as if we had never been apart.

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Are social networking sites good for society?