A landscape of risk and potential

The Daily Mail has today picked up a scare story initially given (rather more nuanced) prominence by the Guardian’s ever-more influential Jackie Ashley. Speaking in a debate about social networking sites, Baroness Greenfield, Oxford neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution, argued that the new digital technologies may actually be changing the brains of a generation as well as the means of communication that they have at their disposal. Web 2.0., in other words, may have neuroscientific consequences of immense importance. “My fear,” said Professor Greenfield, “is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment.” She also wondered whether “real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitised and easier screen dialogues.”