Last week an article by Ellen Barry for
The New York Times
pointed to a study by the American University of North Carolina that argued that the use of social networks is related to brain changes in adolescents.
One of the teachers who spoke about the study concluded by pointing out the importance of “understanding how this new digital world influences adolescents.
It can be associated with changes in the brain, but that can be for better or worse.
We don't necessarily know the long-term implications yet."
The timelines of science are not those of social networks, so it is not easy to point out the future implications of digital alterations, but it is possible that if they occur in a developing brain, they will modify it for the future.
Just a year ago, at the beginning of 2022, another interesting article talked about how digital changes affect behavior.
It had a provocative title and was signed by Johann Hari in
The Guardian
:
Your attention has not been broken.
they have stolen it from you
.
The article cited several studies that pointed out how the attention of young people (though not only young people) had fallen dramatically.
And he proposed the thesis that, in the same way that obesity (something very rare half a century ago) is common today, the same thing happens with a lack of attention: it is not so much a medical problem as a social problem.
A structural problem.
The truth is that everything seems to conspire against attention in this century.
You just need to take a look at Tik Tok, the now ubiquitous Chinese application whose short vertical video model has already copied YouTube.
By the way, one day it would be worth talking about the suspicious difference between the videos that users see in China —competitions among teenagers to see who gets the best grade, young people helping old people to do their homework, institutional messages that encourage them to make an effort— and the West. —You know, silly dances, silly voice filters.
Tik Tok is the most eclectic of applications, but who says Tik Tok says the vast majority of social networks.
When you have this conversation, it is very common to pull the bottomless digital sack.
You know, also talk about video games.
But it is not convenient to mix games with other forms of technology use (online gambling, social networks, pornography...).
These areas share a digital substrate with videogames and, as such, there are areas that they can share, as if they were neighbors of the same urbanization.
And, in fact, there are moments in which it is difficult to distinguish them.
Two examples: during the pandemic (in which the WHO recommended playing video games for mental hygiene), the
Animal Crossing
game served as a social network for meetings, just as
Fortnite
did as a social network with its digital concerts.
But churras should not be mixed with Merinos: as much as video games carry negative stigmas, there are no serious studies that link them to, for example, violence.
On the contrary, there are studies that talk about how playing video games can help promote various cognitive abilities.
Among them, precisely, attention.
If one stops to think about it, it is not something so crazy in the middle of a world in which people watch episodes of series in the background while ironing, checking their mail in the subway or in which the desacralization of the movie theater has fact that you can stop the movies you watch at home whenever you want to go to the bathroom or make popcorn.
Games, on the other hand, need full attention in order to be played.
That is, one can fall asleep watching TV or listening to music,
but not playing a video game.
The battle for attention will be crucial in this century.
And science tells us that video games are more friends than enemies in this fight.
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