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If you’re a Twitter or YouTube addict, BEWARE! At the British Science Festival, Dr Tracey Alloway, Director of the Centre for Memory and Learning in the Lifespan at the University of Stirling revealed that short form communication used in media like Twitter and YouTube is harming our memory capacity.
She went on to explain that Twitter’s fast moving and bite size nature is reducing its users’ ability to “process and manipulate”. She also thinks that Twitter is not conducive for proper dialogue with the community.
Most of us wouldn’t deem Twitter and YouTube to be harmful to our brains but on hindsight, it’s pretty intuitive. Even though 140 characters can pretty much bring our point across, it leaves no room for elaboration and build up.
The same judgment fell onto YouTube as she claimed that children who watch too much TV are more likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder.
“A TV programme may be 30 minutes long but a YouTube clip is only a minute or so – your attention span is being reduced and you’re not really engaging your brain and developing your neural connections to engage on a longer basis.”
Facebook trains our brains
Thankfully, not all social media platforms are gunned down. In fact, the largest online social networking site, Facebook is mentioned for its benefits.
“Social networking sites like Facebook might help working memory, because when we use them we feel more part of a larger community,” she claimed.
Dr Alloway is set to run a web-study on social networking sites for the Edinburgh Science Festival.
Facebook is more engaging than the rest
Being part of the community is not the only factor affecting our memory. Just look at the number of addictive quizzes and brain racking applications that are available for us to play on Facebook. Most of them are not only entertaining, but intellectually challenging.
It appears that the more engaging the social site, the more likely it is to engage our brains. With more blabber than proper conversations, it seems like Twitter should be used in moderation or else you might start forgetting what you want to tweet about.
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