An article on The Telegraph website discusses how the internet is affecting the way we think – and in particular, the minds of young people. Some argue that the internet provides us with a whole host of tempting distractions that render us unable to complete a whole task properly.

For example, critics say that the virtual lives we now lead have shortened children’s attention spans, taking away their the ability to read a whole book, or finish learning a piece of music.

Researchers Jake Vigdor and Helen Lad at Duke University, North Carolina, conducted a study spanning five years and involving more than 100,000 children. They discovered a correlation between declining test scores in both mathematics and reading and the spread of home computers and broadband. The cut-off year for the study was 2005, when socialising was more primitive. Since then, Facebook and Twitter have become enormously powerful consumers of young people’s time. Vigdor and Ladd concluded that the educational value of home computing was best realised when youngsters were actively supervised by parents.

This tendency to skim is compounded by the temptation of new media users to “multi-task”. Watch a youngster on a computer and he could be Facebook‑ing while burning a CD and Tweeting on his mobile phone. Modern management tends to laud multi‑tasking as an expression of increased efficiency. Science, on the other hand, does not. The human brain is, it seems, not at all good at multi‑tasking – unless it involves a highly developed skill like driving.

The net is also supposed to consume the lives of young people; yet the only reliable studies about the time spent online, collated by the World Health Organization, suggest children spend between two and four hours in front of screens, including television screens, and not six or seven, as often suggested. Moreover, there is evidence that youngsters who use sites like Facebook and MySpace have more rewarding offline social lives than those who do not.

The Byron Review on children and new technology, commissioned by the last government, included a “study of studies” by Prof David Buckingham of the University of London’s Institute of Education. He concluded: “Broadly speaking, the evidence about effects [of new media] is weak and inconclusive – and this applies both to positive and negative effects.

“Of course, this does not in itself mean that such effects do not exist. However, it is fair to conclude that directly harmful effects are significantly less powerful and less frequent than they are often assumed to be, at least by some of the most vocal participants in the public debate.”

Certainly, the tired old media do not seem to be doing that badly. An annual survey conducted by Nielsen BookScan shows that sales of children’s books in 2009 were 4.9 per cent greater than in 2008, with more than 60 million sold. The damage, if any, done by excessive computer time may not be so much to do with what is being done online as what is being missed – time spent with family or playing in trees with friends.

Access the original article online at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/7858189/Are-Twitter-and-Facebook-affecting-how-we-think.html