Friday, April 17, 2009

Just sayin, guys

TIME says Facebook is bad for you. A new study shows that Facebook users have worse grades overall than non-users.

"The study, which will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association on April 16, surveyed 219 undergraduate and graduate students and found that GPAs of Facebook users typically ranged a full grade point lower than those of nonusers — 3.0 to 3.5 for users versus 3.5 to 4.0 for their non-networking peers. It also found that 79% of Facebook members did not believe there was any link between their GPA and their networking habits."

"Karpinski and Duberstein's study isn't the first to associate Facebook with diminished mental abilities. In February, Oxford University neuroscientist Susan Greenfield cautioned Britain's House of Lords that social networks like Facebook and Bebo were "infantilizing the brain into the state of small children" by shortening the attention span and providing constant instant gratification. And in his new book, UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small warns of a decreased ability among devotees of social networks and other modern technology to read real-life facial expressions and understand the emotional context of subtle gestures. Young people are particularly at risk for these problems, he writes, because "young minds tend to be the most sensitive, as well as the most exposed, to digital technology."

3 comments:

  1. my finger hovered over the delete button.
    i swear.
    p.s. i am in your links thingamajig!!!! woo!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I totally believe this. Sometimes I'm disgusted by the amount of time I spend on that site.

    ReplyDelete