Can Facebook Be Bad For Your Brain?

In this article from the Townsend Letters by Jule Klotter it talks about how social media can have adverse effects on your health. People are seeing that social media sites can have negative effects on both your brain and on your relationships with friends and family. In the article neurosurgeons are asked if social media is bad for your brain. Their answer, yes. They do beleive that prolonged use of social media sites can lead to stress and poor brain circuitry. It can lead to poor health like stress, depression and fatigue.

On another side social media can take away from your relationships. It can ruin how we communicate and how we interact with our family and friends. The human body requires stimulas and meaningful human contact. Interaction with others through social media does not fill this human necessity and therefore it can lead to bad things for society and even your health. All of these things combined show the negative affects of social media and how eventualy prolonged use of social media can affect society greatly.

I Blame Twitter

One interesting article that caught my eye came from the Advertising Age Magazine and this article really bashed social media like Twitter. It is by Simon Dumenco and is called "I blame twitter for reason I hate kittens." This title alone caught my attnetion because it is a funny way to describe social media and why it may be negative towards society.

In the article the author talks about how as an author and a writer he notices that with social media people in the world can take comments and articles the wrong way than they were intended. He mentions a couple of examples that in an article he wrote he had some of his own opinions, but they slanted it against who he was writing about or took the comment for face value and didnt apply the context around the statement. He claims that poeple nowadays have short bursts of thought that do not have any substance to them and because of this people who blog on topics or tweet on different subjects do not have substance or credibility. He says many writers like himself are worried people are now just writing to write and are not critically reading anything anymore.

He does mention that on occasion social media can be okay though. He mentioned that certain information is learned through social media. For instance in the Iranian election there was an assination and the way the world learned of it was through Youtube and Twitter.

Are social networks harmful to society

I have found a lot of information that claims social media are bad. I am in the beleif that although I use social media (alot) social media is a distraction and can have adverse effects. In an article by Ryan Dube it asks the question, are social networks harmful to society. One problem is that many teens are using these sites to maintain relationships. Relationships that they have contact with that person frequently, yet they still try and maintain them through social media. It can lead to poor interpersonal communication between people. Also when people become obsessed with social media or are on them for hours at a time this leads to poor health and lack of exercise, which in turn can lead to obesity, which is something America has a problem with. It also describes positive sides to social media. It shows how social media can help researches collaborate world wide and it can help families that live a distance apart they can stay in touch. The main point of the article is to show how social media can be a detriment to society and negative on your health.

Three Tweets For the Web

I found this article that came from the Wilson Quarterly, which is a pretty legitimate source that talks about the good of social media. It praises social media because it is the new age of communication. People do not sit down and read books as much or write letters to each other. People tweet or communicate through facebook. Info can be found easier and quicker with the web and with social media you can find information and relay it to your friends and family quickly.

The article talks about blogs. It talks about blogs and how blogs are misunderstood because they cover many different topics and can cause an individual to think more about different subjects than they would just reading them. People claim that having all this information streaming at you diminishes your attention span, but according to this article by Tyler Cowen actually having multiple windows open we use multi-tasking more and more in our lives. An example of this is finding a song on Youtube and then sharing it with your friends on facebook. The author does a pretty good job of showing the good of social media when a lot of sites I've seen show the bad.

College Kids and thier facebooks

In a book I found on google books it talks about how students on college campuses are using social newtorking more and more. The book is by Ana Martinez Aleman and also by Katherine Lynk Wartman and it talks a lot about the influence of social networks like facebook in college campuses. With social media on college campuses students are able to network with kids in thier classes and also they can develop thier relationships.

One thing the book talks about is that students use these social networks to change thier personas. They can be a totally different person on Facebook than they are in the classroom. For instance we all know somebody that is a good student and is respected by peers and professors. But with social media people can find out that this person is also a crazy partier that does keg stands on the weekends with the frat boys. It just goes to show you how social media is an outlet for people to let other people see more of who they really are.

But people have to be careful now adays. Many students and professors are becoming friends on these social networks. College faculty are trying to involve the social media more and more and because of this they are not immune to student profiles anymore. Becuase of this the book warns that students need to be careful when they are on these networks because we have all heard stories of people putting up status' or photos and getting fired over them. Playing this risky game with professors could lead to poor grades or maybe not as good of reference letters.

Do you think it is a good idea to be facebook friends with a professor considering what you have on your facebook page?

How bad are social networks?

On a website about social networks I read that social networks are a growing problem that people should recognize. It seems teens are a using social networks to maintain relationships....that they have everyday. 82 % of teens are using facebook and twitter to maintain relationships with people that they see almost everyday.

They also think that because of this communication skills are going way down. People are losing the ability to communicate face to face and this is cause for huge concern. It is cause for concern because many comments made are less spontaneous and lack thought. Also people will say things over social media they normally would not in person.

It can also lead to excessive use of computers which in turn leads to poor health. You stop exercising your brain and your body because you are constantly in front of a computer. On the other hand social networks do help in their own ways. They can help people communicate around the world. Researches can collaborate and people can maintain long distance relationships easier.

Social Networks Are Good?

I found this article that finally voted in favor of social networks. Every article I have read so far have shown the negative effects of social networking. This article I found is from the BBC news website.

It talks about research findings from Cambridge, which I think we all know is a pretty prestigious school. Their findings show that Facebook actually helps relationships by enhancing storing biography and enhancing social memory. Many people try to use it to check up on ex patners or track people they like. They find that people can gain more info from Facebook than a phone call or something like that. Also they can keep in touch with people they have lost contact with wich can rekindle old relationships.

This is interesting because although I do see how you can gain more information from looking at someone through facebook, I also believe it is not the same as having a face to face conversation. Face to face convos are more personal and therefore I think are why social networks are not as good.

Laptop Addicts

Laptops are in every campus around the nation. Colleges require them or highly suggest students to have a laptop and use it for class. In an article from the Washington Post by Daniel de Vise, he tells about how many schools in this day and age are now banning laptops from the classroom. Some professors are seeing a common trend and this trend is not a good one. The professors are finding that laptops are doing more distracting in the classroom then learning.

Professors are not stupid and they realize with wireless Internet and laptops students are making these professors compete with their attention with sites like YouTube, facebook, blog sites, etc. Some professors have gone to drastic measures to prove their point that they do not want laptops in their classroom. One professor from Oklahoma took liquid nitrogen and poured it onto a students laptop and then threw it onto the floor where it broke into a thousand pieces. Professors also believe that students that do use laptops in class tend to score as low as kids that do not show up to class at all. One professor tracked the grades of 17 students who were "laptop addicts" and found that their average grade in the class was a 71% which was close to the average of students that do not show up.

Check out this YouTube clip. It is the actual clip of the professor destroying the laptop and has grossed over 1,000,000 hits. Its pretty funny.

Killing you Socially

Social networks have been vastly growing over the past 5 or so years. In a New York Times article I read about how some researchers fear that these social networking sites are having a negative affect on people. The article written, by Robert Mackey, describes how one researcher from Oxford fears that social networking is making people revert back to the state of being a baby.

This is described by researcher Susan Greenfield. She says that social networks are making people revert back to baby mentallity and need constant reassurance of who they are and that they exist. She says people are having smaller attention spans which is scary to think about. The article goes on to talk about how other researchers have found that actual face to face conversation may be biologically better for you than face to screen. For instance people with contact with actual people are healthier then loners.


Here is a interview with one of the researchers talking about the effects of social networking .

Social Networking Express

I was looking for social networking sites and how they affect our society and what I found was pretty interesting. The article I found described how social networks like facebook and twitter are the new way of communication. I was pretty amazed when the article said that facebook has 300 million active users and 40 million of those update their site each and every day. It was amazing that people that have gotten social networking sites have quadrupled over the past 4 years. The one interesting thing though, and the main point of the article is that social networking has made business much easier. People with similar interests or similar needs and wants are able to find each other in these social sites and thus can interact with a more diverse base of people. I was a little confused though in the article because it talked about this ASSE group and never really described what they are or what they do. For now I assume that they have something to do with business but I think I will do some more research to figure out what they are and what they do and how social networks have improved them.

If you know who they are or what they do let me know.

Being the ultimate lifter

Many people dont lift properly and because of it they suffer injury or pain. Also poor lifting techniques can result in not seeing the proper results you were going for. For instance you might be trying to do a exercise and by doing it poorly you notice that you are not increasing weight or strenght off of that lift. Check out you tube for more lifting examples so that you do not hurt yourself while exercising.