Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Friends on the net, and on the brain

Am very interested in the psychology  behind modern technolgoy, and the developments, adaptations (or lack of) that will go with it. As part of the cross over generation, who can remember a time BC (Before always Connected) probably my age group is best placed to analyze it, since even if in the box now, we were once outside.
So will try to accumulate (and then comment on) articles such as the following :

From the Guardian today :
"A quarter of a century ago, before Facebook, back in the day when you had to be indoors to phone somebody, we had an average of three friends each. The study – by Time Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS for short, and I'd definitely like to be her friend, she sounds fun) defined friends as close confidantes, people to whom you can tell anything. And now, when we're Facebooked and Twittered up to our eyebrows, when we feel as if we've spent 40 days and nights in the desert after a half hour on the underground, how many friends do we have (expectant drumroll…)? Two. Not 857, after all. (And while we're here, "friended" is not really a verb.)"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/nov/08/social-networking-close-friends


From Scientific American recently (although the link to social networking is really just correlative currently, not causative) :
 "A recent study showed that certain brain areas expand in people who have greater numbers of friends on Facebook. This was welcome news for online social network addicts, particularly teenagers : "Mom, I'm not just on Facebook; I'm doing my temporal lobe calisthenics."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=your-brain-on-facebook&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_SP_20111108

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