Social networking is 'devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance'.
Or at least that’s what Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln college, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution thinks.
According to this leading Neuroscientist, Facebook, Twitter and any other networking site you may be getting your ‘fix’ from, infantilises our minds, gives us a shortened attention span, and makes us all ravingly egotistical and self-centred.
I rather suspect I was all of these things to begin with, but that, perhaps, is a whole other blog.
The theory goes that by encouraging instant gratification, one becomes unable to bear anything which may take any amount of time.
That by setting up a profile page dedicated to you, with pictures of you, information of you, with blogs you wrote, and videos you made featuring you sitting in your home going about your daily life might just give us the feeling that we are the most important thing in the universe.
I beg to differ. Too long did we wait for a medium with which to connect to friends, (equally as important as ourselves), the ability to message them (while patiently waiting for a reply), poke them (while patiently waiting to be poked back), and generally have everything we ever needed to know at our fingertips.
Sure, it throws up problems like the diminishing need for libraries, and our inability to remember the alphabet the few times we’ll ever need to go to our dictionaries again.
Looking for something to blame for short attention spans and a lack of real-time face-to-face contact with others? I hope she took a good hard look at the effects of excessive gaming.
But leave our networking sites alone, lady. Thou who does not accept web 2.0 simply doesn’t understand it. And probably has too few friends to make it worthwhile.
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