We live in a culture and climate of constant distractions.
This is how our children’s brains, and beings, are being wired.
As well as how adults are being rewired.
What are the implications?
Children under a certain age, no no different. This is the only way they have ever known.
Balance is more important now more than ever in this age of technology and constant information input. A time when it just takes a click to reach out to the world.
I am very concerned that this climate of technology, and all that it encompasses, is a large contributor to the explosion of diagnoses being handed out to our children.
Through today’s technology people are provided with instant gratification. They are easily conditioned to desire near constant entertainment, as well as the desire to always be connected- to a device and to other people through technological means. The conditioning to always be checking for something new, a new text, that next e-mail, a post, a story, an update, the newest model, etc…. What is often missing is the subtle body language of another person, and the absence of the use of senses, such as touch, or even smell. These things give us a lot of information, and are a large part of what it means to interact socially as humans. I realize, now there are new ways to interact, but I’m afraid there may be a cost due to what seems to be an imbalance.
Technology is not an evil entity, it is just grossly overused by the masses. I am attempting to explore the possible social and psychological ramifications.
I would love to start a discussion on the topic. What do you think about technology -how the daily magnitude of usage is affecting our species, especially the younger generation?
Copyright Suzanne Norton 2015
I am not immune to the lure of technology, blogging is one of my passions. It has allowed me to connect with people all over the world and I love that. I have also recently joined an online dating service which I will extract myself from soon due to some of the reasons mentioned above (and to the fact it is not reliable). So I am definitely not trying to paint the picture as black and white. It’s very grey! That’s all for now, I have to go check my e-mail! Ha ha! Please chime in! : )
learningtocry.wordpress.com 
Don’t sweat it Suzanne. In every generation back to Plato you can find people claiming that modern children are being ruined by [insert recent trend or technology here]. It’s been said of television, records, movies and even books.
When a neuroscientist says a brain is being ‘rewired’ she is just indulging in trendy psychobabble apropos of nothing. Up until the 90s ‘neuroplasticity’ referred exclusively to the capacity of dedicated regions of the brain to alter their functioning in response to injury or disability (e.g. when part of a stroke victim’s brain takes over the functions of a damaged part or when a blind person’s visual cortex re-orients itself to processing auditory input). Now it means things like learning and memory formation too. So just reading this para is ‘rewiring’ your brain according to contemporary pop-neuroscience, as does everything else you do. But that gives psychologists like Norman Doidge the chance to sell self-help books full of neurobabble buzz words that give him bogus credibility and lets media neuroscientists like Susan Greenfield frame the same old moral panics in a new jargon. It’s not science. It’s marketing.
And that’s where the real social and cultural damage is being done. In the atomisation of society promoted by individualist consumerism and the isolation of the individual due to fear and mistrust.
Kids aren’t spending so much time in front of screens because they’re a ‘distraction’. It’s because the more traditional distractions of climbing trees and playing in the streets with other kids are being denied them by over-protectiveness. And because they’re taught to value themselves according to what they own rather than by their social connections. At least identifying with Facebook friends you’ll never meet in person is a cut above identifying with TV or book characters who don’t respond to you at all and don’t really exist.
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