It seems like more than a language issue to me, but yes, the main question would be, are the changes technology effects on our brain today bigger and, more importantly, more dangerous than, say, the effects by learning to read and write, or to cross the street at a busy intersection without getting run over by a car.
After all, technology has been rewiring our brain at least since the invention of writing.
But the more I think about this, the more uneasy I get about her methods. As I said, she uses a lot of analogy in her arguments, and a lot of these analogies have a strong emotional content but not much logical strength.
For example, in the video she insisted a lot on the role of the pre-frontal lobe area of the brain as a sort of processor where we take immediate feelings and sensations and make sense of them, and also evaluate them in a long-term perspective (ice cream would be delicious right now, but I already had one yesterday and I know that if I eat ice cream every day I'm going to gain weight, so I choose to renounce the immediate reward of ice cream now in favor or the long term reward of not gaining weight - well, that's what I'm supposed to do anyway
)
Fine, I'm sure what she says is true, if simplified. But what is the connection with Internet and video games? She doesn't have a shred of evidence for her implicit hypothesis that these technologies have an impact on the development or activity of the pre-frontal lobe. I don't think she even said that she thinks there is an effect. She just piles up a bunch of unrelated scientific facts together with statistics on the use of technology by children, in a way that is sure to scare us by association.
If I remember correctly (the video is too long to watch it a second time), her argument sounded something like this:
- people with damage to their pre-frontal lobe become reckless
- people with schizophrenia (or was it another mental illness, I'm not sure) have an under-developed pre-frontal lobe area
- overweight people tend to have under-developed pre-frontal lobe areas
- between the age of 10 and 11, a (British) child will spend more hours in front of a screen than with his parents or her teacher
- and we are suppose to deduct from this... what?
And yet, if she really thinks that the use of technology can have a significant impact on the development of the pre-frontal lobe, it would seem to me that such a hypothesis would be relatively easy to test, for a scientist like her. It might be a bit harder to fund than research on Alzheimer's, but it does seem feasible. So why doesn't she do it?