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Young human brains are so uniquely adaptable that they may easily get bent out of shape by frenetic virtual stimulation: ‘What human beings do better than any other species is to learn. But it also means that whatever happens in the environment will leave its mark on your brain, she argues. Greenfield and her fellow campaigners fear that we are creating generations of square-eyed youths who are dangerously dumb compared with their book-reading forebears. ‘When you are reading a book, you read it and digest it. You can find yourself staring at a blank wall, thinking about the story and its implications,” she says. “On-screen stories can militate against that. Children are likely to go for the most easily available stimulating things, such as speed,noise and so on, rather than digesting the text.”
The result, she fears, will be a nation of gullible Googlers who won’t even know how to vote responsibly. “I’m concerned about the effect of all this on attention spans and on our ability to reflect, to absorb information and use it to create abstract ideas independently. How would you put democracy on a screen?” she asks. “Such abstract ideas develop quite late in children. On-screen, with search engines, the information is limitless and its apparent truth or falsehood is often hard to discern. And then there is the great fear that has always haunted techno-sceptics… the prospect of computerised mass mind-control, Greenfield says we are on the threshold of a new era of ‘invasive technologies’, high-tech games that children can play by using direct links between their brains and computers, but which might ultimately end up being misused in wicked si-fi ways. “There is already something called the Play Attention helmet, which kids can use to manipulate a screen icon by thinking, she cautions. “In future, manufacturers may be able to use similar technology to manipulate what is happening in the mind.”
Not everyone is so worried. Fans of screen culture point out that, historically, new technologies often get scapegoated for society’s ills. When for example that diabolic contrivance, the railway train, first appeared in Britain, it was blamed for an epidemic of new lifestyle diseases, including some- thing called ‘railway spine”. Steven Johnson, the American author of Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Popular Culture Is Making Us Smarter, argues that mass culture is in fact increasingly intellectually demanding. TV programmes have complex narratives, postmodern ambiguity and plot- lines that are far more challenging than the Terry and June sitcoms of old. “Video games are a great teacher of fluid intelligence,” says Johnson. “The second most popular PC game in the US in 2003 was Civilization. IV. where you re-create human economic and technological history. Here you have 12-year-olds trying to figure out whether they should go for an agrarian capitalist society or a monarchy. Indeed, screens may even be partly responsible for the Flynn Effect, discovered in the early 1980s by James Flynn, a professor at Otago University in New Zealand. He found that IQ scores around the world are rising at a rate of about three points a decade. One possible factor is that we have filled our greatly expanded leisure time with cognitively demanding amusements, such as games that force you to think on your feet.
Well, maybe, but who can ever know which side of the argument should hold sway? Perhaps they both contain truths. It is impossible to assess virtual life’s precise effect on our children, because liberal ethics bar us from capturing large numbers of babies for use as lab rats, then spend decades subjecting them to the controlled-enviro experiments that could provide an accurate scientific picture. In the real world the results of tests of screen-time on children are messed up by crucial variables such as the children’s social class, environment, home life and schools.
Excerpted from pages 40 to 42 of Enough: breaking free from the world of excess by John Naish