Newsweek reports on new research about how technology and our online activity contributes to loneliness, depression, and compulsive behavior.
"The first good, peer-reviewed research is emerging, and the picture is much gloomier than the trumpet blasts of Web utopians have allowed. The current incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive—may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways."
"People tell her that their phones and laptops are the 'place for hope' in their lives, the 'place where sweetness comes from.' Children describe mothers and fathers unavailable in profound ways, present and yet not there at all. 'Mothers are now breastfeeding and bottle-feeding their babies as they text,' she told the American Psychological Association last summer. 'A mother made tense by text messages is going to be experienced as tense by the child. And that child is vulnerable to interpreting that tension as coming from within the relationship with the mother. This is something that needs to be watched very closely.' She added, 'Technology can make us forget important things we know about life.'"
"The first good, peer-reviewed research is emerging, and the picture is much gloomier than the trumpet blasts of Web utopians have allowed. The current incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive—may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways."
"People tell her that their phones and laptops are the 'place for hope' in their lives, the 'place where sweetness comes from.' Children describe mothers and fathers unavailable in profound ways, present and yet not there at all. 'Mothers are now breastfeeding and bottle-feeding their babies as they text,' she told the American Psychological Association last summer. 'A mother made tense by text messages is going to be experienced as tense by the child. And that child is vulnerable to interpreting that tension as coming from within the relationship with the mother. This is something that needs to be watched very closely.' She added, 'Technology can make us forget important things we know about life.'"
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