Quote:
Originally Posted by ardeegee
And yet, I will continue to do so.
Her kind have been around for as long as humanity-- those passing into their elder years without the benefit of being able to adapt to change, who spend their lives griping about how the youth today don't share the same interests as they did in their childhood, therefore leading to cultural decay. Here it is being said by Socrates:
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
The clueless elderly said that comic books would destroy young minds. They said TV would destroy young minds. They said that Jazz would destroy young minds. They said that rock and roll would destroy young minds. And now the clueless elderly are saying that video games and the internet will destroy young minds. The minds of my generation were not destroyed by Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers and the minds of the current young generation will not destroyed by Facebook and Grand Theft Auto-- and as another generation of the clueless elderly die off, their complaints about the young whiper-snappers and their video games destroying the world will be just as laughable as the claims made by the clueless elderly of the past. |
Glad to see you finally decided to enter the discussion.
What you say about the "X will destroy young mind" meme is true, but does that mean that she is necessarily wrong to ask questions? To paraphrase one of your quotes, just because this kind of claim has been wrong in the past doesn't mean that it couldn't be true this time.
However, although I don't think she's a crackpot, I feel there is something wrong about what she is saying. She is not making any pseudo-scientific claims, in the sense that she doesn't claim that there is scientific evidence for what she says, but she is clearly using her credibility as a scientist to give weight to non-scientific assertions, which is wrong. Especially given what some media will do with this kind of assertion.
I still think it's a subject worth scientific study, and I know there have been some. I remember for instance this
NYT article about multi-tasking.