Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Magpie Guy and Social Networking

Scientists are so unreliable. I put Nature Network in The Sunday Times list of 100 Best Blogs on the basis of some very good, lucid material I'd come across. Unfortunately, since then I seem to have been reading nothing but lumpen humour and fey, self-involved whimsy. Contrary to rumour, I'm all for science, I really am, but I may have to cut his particular feed. I'm also all for Ben Goldacre on The Guardian, who spends his days pointing out that most of what passes as science in the media is just junk. Go, Ben. I was, however, taken aback to see him on Newsnight. It turns out he looks and dresses like that fuzzy-haired guy from Magpie. This, Ben, is bad science. He was there to pour cold water, and, I fear, dandruff, on the idea of Susan Greenfield and Aric Sigman, who was also in the studio, that social networking is rotting our children's brains. Goldacre rightly pointed out the research did not stand up this idea. But the debate was wrongly framed. I don't know what these things are doing to children's brains but I know what connectivity in general is doing too mine - shortening my attention span, distracting me etc.. What they should have been discussing was me, not that nebulous, guilt laden entity we call 'kids'. Sigman, in particular, seems to be trying to launch a moral panic and Goldcare plainly hates moral panics unless they are peer-reviewed. This was, as a result, an arid confrontation. The truth is that hyper-connectivity has done something to me, something not altogether to my liking. Not to be able to discuss this in terms other than moral panics or learned papers is absurd.

12 comments:

  1. i'm about to put myself beyond humanity for a while, and quite looking forward to it. i wonder if there's a way to lock your internet or computer so even if you want to you can't access it except for a couple of hours a day? - i guess you could have some kind of emergency override if need be, but you'd have to submit to minor electric shock to do this, or Paypal would automatically send a tenner to Jeffrey Archer every time you went for the "oh but this is an emergency" button.

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  2. Do keep us informed about your technological isolation, Elberry. Perhaps a daily blog?

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  3. i can probably provide hourly updates on the situation, Brit. i might take some kind of camera crew with me.

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  4. Oh well. Flicking a newspaper or a magazine, channel zapping, flicking the messages on your mobile, fiddling with a satnav, walking around iPodding with headphones clamped on, constant intrusions of advertising everywhere - I don't think these are so very different from the notion that computers shorten our attention span. Computers may well do this - I'd guess the jury is still out, though, on the long-term effects - but one can argue that most of modern life is one long episode of restlessness, zapping around and general distraction. Reducing computer use might help (or not) but will only dial it down, not stop it. Perhaps it's time to start firming up the right to be let alone.

    As for locking yourself out of a computer. Well, you could ask your local internet cafe to do something for you. Slip the maitre d' a twenty and explain that if he sees you in there more than once a day he should indicate that he is about to throw you out most roughly, even flamboyantly. At that moment, of course, you get up and go quietly.

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  5. Elb, Give channel 4 a call, they specialise in this sort of tatty telly.

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  6. My favourite blogger, EM Forster, once posted:

    'Only connect. Only connect the boundless information and discovery at your fingertips with the images of women having sex with goats, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height!'

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  7. " i wonder if there's a way to lock your internet or computer so even if you want to you can't access it except for a couple of hours a day?"

    Just take a sledge hammer to it and use your local library for Emails etc.

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  8. Where i'm going there won't be any internet - just lots of goats.

    i'll have to make my own internet, just like my parents did, and their parents before them, using shoelace and goatskull.

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  9. I can picture it though it were yesterday elberry, a Lancastrian Emmanuel Beart dances naked in the glistening pool, set in dazzling Provencale limestone under a hot morning sun, the smell of lavender fills the air, the sound of goats bleating, bells jingling, overhead buzzards endlessly circle. A lovesick oaf, looking remarkably like Daniel Auteuil gazes from behind a bush, his hot eyes caressing your naked, undulating body.
    Later a gruff Soubeyran farmer known as Le Papet and looking remarkably like Yves Montand growls at you "quell eau". Oh, the sun, the hot, merciless sun, they kept coming, coming, they wouldn't leave him , Sebastian, Sebastian, Sebastian.

    Just thought that I would connect elberry, an erstwhile class act with two classic movies Bryan, it being a bit of a dog day afternoon, oops, three movies

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  10. Ha, you've reminded me of that cartoon from a long while back, the caption under a drawing of two dogs, one using a pc, reads ''on the web, no one knows you're a dog''. so, Ben Goldacre is Mick Robertson and you're the old boy from the Werther's Originals ad - who'd a thunk it.

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  11. That's what i'm talking about, Malty, wholesome rustic life. No nonsense, no frills, no internet, just lots of goats, goat-products, and goat-related rampage.

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  12. Is Ben Goldacre perhaps a member of LFHCfS?

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