Is Technology Ruining Children

In the Sunday Times on 27 April 2008 there was an interview with top brain scientist Susan Greenfield, by John Cornwell, where she talks about the affects of computers on the minds of child, turning them into amoral nobodies who can’t think for themselves.

A quote from the article goes as follows.

Professor Greenfield, promoter extraordinaire of science, has written a book that makes routine auguries – global warming, economic downturns – look like mere gloomy hand-wringing. A specialist in brain degeneration, Greenfield is predicting that our teen generation is headed for a sort of mass loss of personal identity. She calls it the Nobody Scenario. By spending inordinate quantities of time in the interactive, virtual, two-dimensional, cyberspace realms of the screen, she believes that the brains of the youth of today are headed for a drastic alteration. It’s as if all that young grey cortical matter is being scalded and defoliated by a kind of cognitive Agent Orange, depriving them of moral agency, imagination and awareness of consequences.

Then later on it also says the following.

Greenfield has elaborated a theory about the influence of IT on young brains. Given the time young people spend gazing into screens, small and large – reckoned to be from six to nine hours daily – she believes the minds of the younger generation are developing differently from those of previous generations. “The brain,” she says, “has plasticity: it is exquisitely malleable, and a significant alteration in our environment and behaviour has consequences.”

So we now have a generation of mindless killer children growing up to track us down and slaughter us, as if it were all part of some computer game. “Do you want to Kill or Save, use your mouse and click on the option you desire?”

More of this is detailed in Susan Greenfield’s book “ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century”.