Susan Greenfield’s alarmist claims, which she admits are not based on any hard research, are reported by Peter Wilson in today’s Australian AND by John Cornwell in today’s Age – Good Weekend

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23858718-28737,00.html

Quoting from her new book, “ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century” – we find that “For the first time in human history, individuality
could be obliterated in favour of a passive state, reacting to a flood
of incoming sensations: – a yuck and wow mentality characterised by a
premium on momentary experience as the landscape of the brain shifts
into one where personalised brain connectivity is either not functional
or absent altogether.”

I guess I’ll need to read the book to find out what “personalised brain connectivity” is, and why it is to be valued over and above other sorts of brain connectivity.

But what I do find a bit hard to take is that her speculations are very much coming from a romantic idea about the past and past media forms, such as the book…

Older generations – she describes them as “the people of the book” -
she claims have developed powers of imagination, empathy, context and meaning
which she fears will be much reduced in “the people of the screen”.

“I think we are going to have the next generation with shorter
attention spans and being less risk-averse than other generations,
perhaps even reckless. They will be people who are more hedonistic and tend to live for
the moment, a life that is more sensory and less cognitive. People who
have a less robust sense of their own identity and are therefore more
easily persuaded or swayed by the wrong kind of things, as we see
already in the way people are easily persuaded into movements nowadays. People with less meaning to their lives, possibly, and less of a
strong life narrative, so they may be happy rather than fulfilled:
there is a difference.”

So if you play computer games, watch out ! – Chances are you will be UNFULFILLED!

She also labours under the misunderstanding that computer games lack sophisticated narratives, and that game players are not engaged in complex meaning-creation themselves as they play …

“It becomes a matter of process over content,” Greenfield says. “The
game player might be trying to save a princess from a dragon, and that
becomes the aim: simply the process of freeing the princess, rather
than any mental content. If, on the other hand, you were reading a book
about the princess, you would use your imagination and get to know and
care about her.”

Now I’m not so sure that my imagination is any more active when I read a novelist’s carefully chosen words than when I role-play as a princess in a computer game where I need to save her family and kingdom from external threats.

Seth Grant, an Australian neuroscientist at Cambridge University,
says the problem with scientifically confirming theories such as
Greenfield’s is that so little is known about the true workings of the
brain, a point that Greenfield makes herself. “At the moment all we can
do is observe correlations between things rather than establishing what
is the trigger and what is the cause,” Grant says.

“Professor Greenfield may be right that dopamine suppresses other
functions in the prefrontal cortex, but the question we can’t answer is
how big the effect will be and whether it will change executive
functions (more complex mental activities such as imagining). We would
have to develop all sorts of new diagnostic tools to be able to answer
the questions she is posing, and that is not going to happen for a long
time.”

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Enough on the negatives of using ICTs, lets turn to some positive claims spending time in “Virtual Reality”.

Matthew Ricketson in his excellent blog, “Media Matters”, reports on The Healing Properties of Virtual Reality.

http://blogs.theage.com.au/mediamatters/archives/2008/06/post_1.html

In a recent article published in ‘The New Yorker‘. Sue Halpern reported on a joint military-university program that is using virtual reality games to treat the nearly 20 per cent of American veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who, according to a recent study by the RAND Corporation, are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.

The idea of the therapy is to introduce a war veteran to the virtual reality environment, but only gradually and at a pace they can handle. The veteran re-lives the experience repeatedly; first they see a simulation of it, then hear battle noises, then feel their chair vibrating, and even smell the war.

The aim of the virtual reality therapy program is to isolate the actual traumatic memories, deal with them and restore neutrality to ordinary events in the person’s life.

Well, lots more research into the power of ICTs and their positive and negative effects on our brains is certainly required. For now, I think we need to be careful not to get too alarmist and sensational about the effects of the media, while looking to fully understand the implications of using new technologies as they arise.