Study Finds Growing Up WIth Gadgets Has a Downside: Social Skill Impairment

PolygamousRanchKid writes with this excerpt from a CNN story:"Tween girls who spend much of their waking hours switching frantically between YouTube, Facebook, television and text messaging are more likely to develop social problems, says a Stanford University study published in a scientific journal on Wednesday. Young girls who spend the most time multitasking between various digital devices, communicating online or watching video are the least likely to develop normal social tendencies, according to the survey of 3,461 American girls aged 8 to 12 who volunteered responses. The study only included girls who responded to a survey in Discovery Girls magazine, but results should apply to boys, too, Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor of communications who worked on the study, said in a phone interview. Boys' emotional development is more difficult to analyze because male social development varies widely and over a longer time period, he said."

Study finds surveys bad science..

[tbird81]

Seriously?

n: 3461 - pretty good
Inclusion criteria: Girls 8-12 who replied to a magazine survey - pretty bad
Measurement: Self-reporting of multitasking, self-reporting on social ability - reliable?
Interpretation: Can also be applied to boys - where the fuck did this come from??
Author: Clifford Nass a "self-described technologist of 25 years".

The author seems to be one of those self-promoting weirdos who picks a topic he knows will be controversial, does some easy "science" with it, and comes up with a controversial conclusion. He says he finds the results "disturbing".

Well Clifford, I find the fact that Stanford employs someone like you quite disturbing. I find you job title "technologist" disturbing. And I find your name dropping of Google and Microsoft disturbing. Most of all, I find the complete lack of scientific method in this study incredibly sad - it's just made for pop-science articles. Shame on you.

Re:that's the truth

[Samantha Wright]

Look at all the social network users without resistance to ostracism! Who's going to run civilization now? Zoidberg! That's who!

Re:Seriously

[rrohbeck]

For the same reason we have TV aimed at children.

Re:that's the truth

[Ethanol-fueled]

Plenty of Fish, like most other dating sites is a scam. The profiles are fake and compiled by the company's employees. The details may change from profile to profile, but the writing styles do not. Once in a while you will get a message from a chick you want to know more about, but the messages say something brief and do not answer any questions or provide a response.

I know this unfortunate truth because each of the 3 women I was seeing(in real life) gave me an ultimatum to get serious with them or they would stop putting out. One was neurotic and was in a hurry to get knocked up, the other was retardedly dumb and incapable of two-way conversation, and the other had a boyfriend while we were boning -- yeah.

I've never relied on online dating, but I tried to give it a shot. I went to OKCupid first, but got banned permanently on my first day because I became drunk and asked a masculine-looking woman if she had a penis between her legs. Then I tried Plenty of Fish, and determined that the site was more fake than Pamela Lee's tits. E-harmony is now charging just to see others' profile pics. No thanks.

Work dating wasn't much better - I went on dates with 2 people. The first lived in a 2-bedroom apartment with her 11 siblings and said that any man she gets with would have to have a relationship with the lord. She whines and complains how she has bad luck with men, but never goes more than a week without a new boyfriend. The other just used me for attention, and even though I got a few good meals out of it, shaking hands with her son was awkward because he was only a few years younger than I was. But more to the point of the article - Today's youth are in a sad state. I'm back in junior college and in a class with a lot of young adults, and they are so overstimulated but utterly incapable of carrying on conversation about other than what is immediately happening around them. One young woman said with a straight face that she wanted to find a rich man and be a trophy wife. Others had dumb lottery-ticket fantasies about becoming rich and powerful. They have spent their entire lives watching MTV and think that is what life is actually like. They rock in place, geek, twitch, whine, tic, grunt in such an annoying fashion that I want to smack them in their mouths with a rolled-up newspaper.