Is Facebook infantilizing your mind?

Professor Greenfield of Oxford University: Facebook creating a generation hungry for constant attention

At last, I heard someone echoing my thought! Yes, FB serves some people’s purposes, but it certainly doesn’t serve mine. So, I didn’t have an FB account until 2009, and that was only because I needed to contact someone who is only accessible via FB! These days, I peek into my FB page occasionally, and do not have over 200 friends like the average Malaysian is said to have. I simply do not have the time to deal with such a big volume of almost constant exchanges….

According to a recent report by Reuters (London), Professor Greenfield of Oxford University has warned that Facebook is creating a generation of vain people with short attention span, who are self-obsessed, and behave almost like young children vying for constant attention and response from others. In fact, this was what she told Daily Mail way back in 2009: “My fear is that these technologies are infantilizing the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment.” Although I think she was then not referring to Facebook specifically.

She went on to say that obsessed users of such social networking sites crave for approval from others, about everything big and small (trivial) happening in their daily lives. They suffer from a kind of "identity crisis", in that they are like toddlers and small children constantly vying for attention. It’s almost like they are crying out all the time: "Mom, look at me, I can do this…. I did this" etc. They want immediate gratification, and generally do not possess good oral communication skills, because they only need eyes or sight to “communicate” via keyboarding in the social networking sites on the Internet.

Greenfield said this is like living in a virtual world, where what is important is what other people think of you, or if they can “click”on you, or in Facebook lingo, “add” you or “like” you.

Currently, more than 7.5 billion people worldwide use Facebook, to share photos and videos, and regularly update ideas or information about themselves.