Trust Us Online

“Is the web driving us mad?” asked Newsweek magazine, in a cover story that fuelled some frantic global debate on technology and mental health. “Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts,” it noted, in terms likely to have most concerned parents rushing to rip plug sockets out of their walls. “Normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways,” it added.

As sites like Mindhacks (co-written by BBC Future columnist Tom Stafford) have already argued in response, the evidence behind such claims is rather more tenuous than the article might have you believe. One of the pieces of research cited, for example, linking web use to “blue moods, loneliness, and the loss of real-world friends”, was later accompanied by a follow-up study involving 208 of the original study’s respondents (which the article doesn’t mention) that showed these negative effects dissipated with time. Similarly – as has been noted on BBC Future, among other places – the notion that the internet is uniquely perilous in its ability to “rewire our brains” is not nearly as alarming as its sounds, not least because pretty much every other sustained mental activity we undertake also has a “rewiring” effect.

More generally, though, there’s a profound problem encoded in questions like “is the web driving us mad?”. For beneath a sporadic veneer of neuroscience and behavioural research, they represent an attempt to conjure a definitive moral perspective on an entire communications medium. Which is a little like asking someone “are books good or bad?”, and then basing the entire future of your society (should you be burning these things or giving them out free in schools?) on a definitive response to something that can never meaningfully be answered in binary terms.

View full article »