This from The Tech Herald: “Lady Susan Greenfield, a professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford, claims that social networking could lead to users characterised by ‘short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise, and a shaky sense of identity.’. There’s also a longer article in the Daily Mail that allows for discussion.

While I don’t know much about the study beyond these two articles, it does seem to be a bit of stretch to me to link online social networking to the rise of specific disorders — but the discussion about social networking changing the way in which people think is an interesting one.

I also wonder about the ‘immediacy’ factor of online social interaction that Professor Greenfield brings up — is it actually possible to interact online any more ‘immediately’ than offline? While you can multitask online (having several conversations at once), you really can only focus on one conversation at a time.

To me, this seems like an increase in the fragmentation of interaction, not the immediacy of interaction (since the person you want to talk to is not responding immediately, you move on and talk to someone else). I talked about this fragmentation (and Richard Senett, who’s an expert on the subject) before. I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts on this subject — do you think Facebook is actually making you stupid?