Facebook: a warped generation?

First it was rock ‘n roll. Then it was TV and video games. Now Facebook.

Every age seems to have certain spoilsports who get their panties in a twist over some cultural development that threatens to turn the next generation’s brains to gruel, leaving them blubbering, incapable slobs.

These days the knickers are riding pretty high on Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution.

Baroness Greenfield

Lady Greenfield told the House of Lords that children’s experiences on social networking sites “are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to emphathise and a shaky sense of identity.”

Lady Greenfield, if you might indulge my infantilized sentiments: You’re a poopy head.

I’m not questioning the professor’s scholarly credentials (though some have). If she’s teaching at Oxford, she must know much that I do not.

Neither do I question that social media could change the way we think. They have.

But whether that change has been for good or for evil remains to be seen. In fact, the research hasn’t been done. Baroness Greenfield (she is also a Baroness) merely supposes.

Social media, for all the overhype, have actually increased human interaction. And however fleeting many of those encounters may be, some of them matter.

The Internet has collapsed space and time in a way that allowed my Ohio-based daughter to make the online acquaintance of two young women living in Lady Greenfield’s home country. When Erin spent last year at University of Kent, she had two friends waiting for her.

One showed her London. The other put her up in her northern England home for two days. That is neither an “infantilised” view of human relationship nor evidence of an inability to empathize. It is evidence of an amazing opportunity young people have today to learn how other humans live and move and have their being.

I’ve used social media to reconnect with friends I hadn’t spoken to in 30 years. My wife has resumed a friendship with a dear friend from high school that has resulted in new friendships for me.

Yes, Facebook’s “25-Things About Me” seems mindless. But I did it, and found out some things about my friends that helped me know them better.

Yes, Mob Wars is mindless. But I have over 1,600 kills now, and not a drop of human blood was shed.

How about social media in general? Will we rely on them for the bulk of our information in the coming years?

Who knows? If we do, I pray that we find a way to separate fact from fantasy, truth from fiction, the credible from the incredible. But that’s another conversation.

What we know for a fact is that the human brain is a remarkable instrument that adjusts to its environment and to the situations it encounters. What it doesn’t need, it throws away. Maybe we will find ourselves overwhelmed by information in lasting, negative ways. But I have my doubts.

That’s because the youth of every generation have survived whatever the devil may throw at them.  In spite of Benny Goodman, Lenny Bruce, Mario Brothers, Marilyn Manson, and Twitter, most of us are doing just fine.