Entry 5: Is technology ruining children?

John Cornwell relates his interview with Professor Susan Greenfield, a specialist in neural degeneration and researcher for Alzhemier’s.  Dr Greenfield predicts “that our teen generation is headed for a sort of mass loss of personal identity.” p.1 which she alludes to as the Nobody Scenerio. Dr Greenfield feels that the brains of our youth are being altered as a result of the amount of time they spend in the virtual, 2D world of cyberspace.

Nobody Scenerio “individuality could be obliterated in favour of a passive state …  one where personalized brain connectivity is either not functional or absent altogether.” p6

Repercussions to this brain alterations include:

1) a substitution of virtual and real encounters;

2) spoon-fed menu options versus free-ranging inquiry

3) decline in linguistic and visual imagination

4) atrophy of creativity

5) contracted, brutalized text messaging lacking verbs and conditional structures

Dr Greenfield emphasizes a concern that youth  understand ‘process’ (the method) over ‘content’ (the meaning).  and ” the more time we play games, the less time there is for learning specific facts and working out how the facts relate ….  this results in a failure to build highly personalized individual conceptual frameworks… [which is ] the basis of individual identity.” p4

She continues to explain how the process becomes addictive and , in turn, alters the mind.  Dr Greenfield further elaborates on the process, using scientific jargon, referencing dopamine, nucleus accumbers, and the prefrontal cortex.  She makes the connection between youth playing a video game (ex: Kill Bill) and a recent teenage beating and murder of a goth girl.

Dr Greenfield believes slaughtering endless hordes of villains in a game seperates the process of the action to the meaning and consequences.  When teens brutally kicked  the girl to death, they acted on a process like in a video game, with no thought of the girl’s feelings or the family or consequence to themselves (the content).

Dr Greenfield asserts that ” unique and enriched identities [are attained] through the world of focused conversation, nursery rhyme repetition, recitation and rote learning, of reading and writing interspersed with bouts of physical activity in the real world, where there are first-hand and unique adventures to provide a personal narrative, personalised neuronal connections.  This is education as we have known it.” p5

http://rense.com/general81/techh.htm

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