Study Claims Using Twitter Erodes Your Intelligence (straitstimes.com) 142
Researchers at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan have discovered that Twitter-based classes actually hurts academic performance, according to the Washington Post:
The finding by a team of Italian researchers is not necessarily that the crush of hashtags, likes and retweets destroys brain cells; that's a question for neuroscientists, they said. Rather, Twitter not only fails to enhance intellectual attainment but substantially undermines it, the economists said in a working paper published this month by the economics and finance department at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan...
The investigation drew on a sample of roughly 1,500 students attending 70 Italian high schools during the 2016-17 academic year. Half of the students used Twitter to analyse The Late Mattia Pascal, the 1904 novel by Italian Nobel laureate Luigi Pirandello, which satirises issues of self-knowledge and self-destruction. They posted quotes and their own reflections, commenting on tweets written by their classmates. Teachers weighed in to stimulate the online discussion. The other half relied on traditional classroom teaching methods. Performance was assessed based on a test measuring understanding, comprehension and memorisation of the book. Using Twitter reduced performance on the test by about 25 to 40 per cent of a standard deviation from the average result, as the paper explains. Jeff Hancock, the founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, described these as "pretty big effects".
Notably, the decline was sharpest among higher-achieving students, including women, those born in Italy and those who had scored higher on a baseline test. This finding, the paper notes, bolsters the conclusion that blogs and social networking sites actively impair performance, rather than simply failing to augment learning... [Lead author Gian] Barbetta suggested that declining performance among students who had used the social networking site to study the novel was a result of two factors. The first was a mistaken belief on the part of students that they had absorbed the book by circulating tweets about its contents. The second was that time spent on social media simply replaced time spent actually poring over the book.
The study contributes to growing skepticism that human activities - and learning, specifically - can be transferred to cyberspace without a cost.
A spokesman for Twitter "declined to comment on the study."
The investigation drew on a sample of roughly 1,500 students attending 70 Italian high schools during the 2016-17 academic year. Half of the students used Twitter to analyse The Late Mattia Pascal, the 1904 novel by Italian Nobel laureate Luigi Pirandello, which satirises issues of self-knowledge and self-destruction. They posted quotes and their own reflections, commenting on tweets written by their classmates. Teachers weighed in to stimulate the online discussion. The other half relied on traditional classroom teaching methods. Performance was assessed based on a test measuring understanding, comprehension and memorisation of the book. Using Twitter reduced performance on the test by about 25 to 40 per cent of a standard deviation from the average result, as the paper explains. Jeff Hancock, the founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, described these as "pretty big effects".
Notably, the decline was sharpest among higher-achieving students, including women, those born in Italy and those who had scored higher on a baseline test. This finding, the paper notes, bolsters the conclusion that blogs and social networking sites actively impair performance, rather than simply failing to augment learning... [Lead author Gian] Barbetta suggested that declining performance among students who had used the social networking site to study the novel was a result of two factors. The first was a mistaken belief on the part of students that they had absorbed the book by circulating tweets about its contents. The second was that time spent on social media simply replaced time spent actually poring over the book.
The study contributes to growing skepticism that human activities - and learning, specifically - can be transferred to cyberspace without a cost.
A spokesman for Twitter "declined to comment on the study."
You don't need 1500 students. (Score:5, Insightful)
You only need one example to see what twitter does to intellectual ability.
Maybe we're all better off because he tweets so much. Imagine the damage he could do if he really was a stable genius.
Re: You don't need 1500 students. (Score:2, Funny)
Twitter do not cause drain bramage. I've been using long time.
Re:You don't need 1500 students. (Score:5, Interesting)
Twitter does not destroy or even harm intellectual ability. What Twitter does is reduce the filter-bubble most people sit in and you get to see how stupid the average person actually is. Nothing to do with their use of Twitter, it just makes this more obvious.
Re: You don't need 1500 students. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Depends, are they called partisan because they're reporting the truth, are are they called partisan because they're confusing news with editorials? Remember, the truth these days has an anti-Trump bias.
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It's partisan because only ~10% of journalists are conservatives...you can google the Washington Post article on that. Until journalists get out of their echo chamber (Twitter), they won't be reporting unbiased news.
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Don't count the Fox people as conservatives though, I don't think they really are and instead are more populists (rile up the audience, engage in us-versus-them rhetoric).
The real problem is not the politics of journalists, but instead the journalists who confuse reporting the news with delivering editorials! If you stick to reporting facts, or what you think the facts are, then 90% of the problem is solved. The bias problem is more about what to report and what to ignore possibly, but I don't think that'
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Okay, I got it wrong...not conservatives...republicans. These are self identified, and as a correction to my earlier number it was 7%
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
It becomes a herd mentality when you don't get the views of anyone who disagrees with you. And without representation of what is essentially half the population, ~90% of what you read is going to be slanted to the left. You pick on Fox (I do as well), but CNN, MSNBC are nearly just as guilty. I'd give some of the other ones a bit more credi
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If you only need one example it might not even matter what it is an example of.
#shocking (Score:5, Insightful)
This finding, the paper notes, bolsters the conclusion that blogs and social networking sites actively impair performance, rather than simply failing to augment learning
Gee, who would've thought that trying to compress every single idea/concept/argument into 150 characters or less might actually result in some oversimplifications and misunderstandings? #shocking
Newspeak (Score:5, Insightful)
Twitter is newspeak.
While not a controlled vocabulary, the effect is identical. Complex ideas require time and space to express, and the limits of twitter collapse expression down to essentially slogans.
Slogans, buzzwords, dog-whistles, baiting, sweeping generalities, big-lies, whataboutism. Nothing good fits in 280 characters.
Even if twitter grew the limit, it wouldn't make any difference because the algorithmic, non-linear nature of social media forcibly collapses attention spans. I'm sure they did focus groups before upping the 280 character limit, and found most people bailing the fuck out after 15 words or less.
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Re:Newspeak (Score:5, Interesting)
The other thing twitter managed to destroy is links.
By making URLs part of the character count, that led to URL shorters and all the problems directly caused by them (Linkrot, 3rd party tracking, malicious redirects etc).
But links should be the escape hatch. You can build on or challenge longer form text by linking to it, even in a relatively short forum post.
Twitter hardly gives you room to explain why you're linking to something. That must affect people's choices, and I would guess a bias towards self-contained click-bait style articles.
Twitter has about as much communication bandwidth as a semaphore, so is perfect for people who already agree 100%. It's perfect for digital tribalism.
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URL shorteners, emojis (Score:2)
URL shorteners are one thing. The other is that for the brief time that I used Twitter (I quit after most of the people I followed and who followed me were banned), I was forced to resort to emojis to meet the character limit. Usually, it was flags of countries I was referencing, but a lot of times, depending on the platform, many of those simply wouldn't show up!
But yeah, the URL shorteners are really horrible. There is no reason hyperlinks can't be exempt from the character count, especially if conta
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I refuse to directly click a redirect.
I refuse. To directly. Click a redirect.
If it's important I'll feed it into one of the parser sites that will spit out the destination (or loop if re-redirected), then go there directly. Twatter contributed to this cancer, but mostly it was built by the greed for more detailed tracking (which an apple logo will do fuckall about) or even outright click revenue, for some bouncers.
But the sites are mildly tedious to be assed with. If anyone is aware of a browser mod that w
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The converse is likely to be happening. If you just have 150 chars, you actually need to think about what is important and what is not and how to express yourself clearly. That makes it more obvious that many people have a problem with this, but it is not the cause of that problem. Sure, communication novice-level people think longer is better, but all it does is that they can put in everything and the kitchen sink and others of the same low skill level are then impressed by the quantity, completely missin
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You are clearly stupid. There is a bit of a difference between a fire in a spent fuel-rod pool and a nuclear waste dump leaking. Like there is several orders of magnitude more crap in that fuel dump and the stuff is much more dangerous because nuclear waste gets processed and concentrated.
So, no, I did not say what you claim I said. Read the postings I made and that you helpfully reference. That is, unless you are functionally illiterate, which seems to be pretty much a certainty to me at this point.
Well, I
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"a single, average-sized nuclear fuel dump that leaks its contents into the atmosphere is quite enough to sterilize the planet with regards to higher life-forms"
Because I can find no non-hyperbolic, non-hysterical-propagandistic reading of it.
I've engaged in lazy thinking or lazy fact checking a couple times in my life, but I always own up to it. That is my definition of honor.
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It means exactly what I said. Do the numbers or read up in them. Even the nuclear apologists admit things like this, they just claim it cannot happen. And that claim has merit as long as civilization is alive, because heaven and earth would be moved to fix such a leak and, baring a chemical explosion of unprecedented scale, such a leak is slow and usually does not go into the atmosphere. The problem here is that you did not understand what I was saying, because you are incompetent.
And now I am done catering
Terseness. (Score:2)
Re:#shocking (Score:5, Informative)
I agree that short message formats aren't particularly well suited to complex, nuanced discussions. However, the problems with using social media in educational contexts run much deeper than that:
The learning-related results of the studies in the Special Issue, thus, appear to show that there is a long road to travel down before SNSs like Facebook can be effectively and efficiently used as tools for knowledge construction and knowledge creation. The primary reason is possibly that the tools themselves are not really fit for doing what is wanted/expected and the ‘add-ons’ that the researchers used to increase and/or allow Facebook to fulfil this function do not appear to be effective. Going back to the original screwdriver/chisel analogy, the results show that even the improved screwdriver is not really a very good chisel. Second, the users themselves, though often very experienced in using SNSs, are not fluent or accomplished in using them as tools to build on existing knowledge and create new knowledge. Thus, even if the makers of the screwdriver were to sharpen and hone the blade, the users really only know how to use it as a screwdriver and not as a chisel.
From: Kirschner, P. A. (2015). Facebook as learning platform: Argumentation superhighway or dead-end street? Computers in Human Behavior, 53, 621–625. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.... [doi.org]
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You're missing the point. It's not the specific functionality of a given site; the key point can be found in this quote: " (There was) a mistaken belief on the part of students that they had absorbed the book by circulating tweets about its contents."
Social mechanisms can never be the sole means of understanding material, and should be the last resource used. In a classroom setting it would be as if the students milled about outside of the classroom without cracking the book, and then gleaned whatever t
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Oh noes... (Score:2)
...here comes the Trump Jokes.
Twitters no#1 fan.
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It's oky-doky. Just toss out the Cher jokes. That way you can argue whether or not her insanity is due to an untreated STD, or if twitter has eroded her brain.
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It sounds like Twitter eroded your brain, and Cher moved in.
Strange choice, but you're not the first to make it!
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It sounds like Twitter eroded your brain, and Cher moved in.
Strange choice, but you're not the first to make it!
Well you've obviously never seen her screeching being used as a news source have you. Go hit WAPO, USA Today, or the NYT. Those are the last three that I remember, no twitter even required.
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He is a valid example.
So is all the journalism that keeps using twitter as a news source.
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I'm currently upsetting the BBC by continually complaining to them about not only their use of Twitter as a news source but also embedding things from Twitter on BBC web pages.
I have to pay for this incompetence, and my browser wont even display the embedded tweets, so it's utterly pointless anyway.
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Come on, 280 characters is more than enough to deliver any sort of complex news.
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...here comes the Trump Jokes.
Twitters no#1 fan.
Or, "...here comes the joke Trump."
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Garbage headline (Score:5, Interesting)
TFA does not mention intelligence outside of the headline.
The actual finding is that only using twitter to discuss the book leads to lower learning than traditional classroom teaching methods.
So, twitter is probably not that great for learning, but there is nothing that indicates it erodes intelligence.
Re:Garbage headline (Score:5, Interesting)
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I don't think it is actually possible to "erode intelligence". But you can prevent people from learning to use it better. And the reporting on this study, the study itself and the "learning" situation the study describes as "superior" seem to be guilty of that.
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When you remember something, the act of remembering re-encodes the memory.
How can you read slashdot and not know that you can erode knowledge by continually reciting it in false contexts? And that doing so does not leave a clue to you that you altered the memory, and so you become and idiot who believes false shit and also believes that they learned it a long time ago?
Wait, wait... are you a twitter user?
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Exactly. There is a strong, completely unfounded conservative bias in this study.
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There is a strong, completely unfounded conservative bias in this study.
If you mean "conservative" in the traditional sense (don't discard time-proven methods just for the sake of change), then yes there''s bias, but it isn't unfounded. If you mean "conservative" in the right-wing nut job vs left-wing loony sense, then you're just fearful that there might be monsters in your bedroom closet.
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Obviously I mean "conservative" as "classifying old approaches as inherently good without actually evaluating their merit".
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Obviously I mean "conservative" as "classifying old approaches as inherently good without actually evaluating their merit".
Of course. That being the case, you should go back and read TFA, which explains just how the evaluation you seem to have missed, was conducted. Or are you dismissing the evaluation out of hand because it doesn't support your point of view? I have known a few people like that; they tend to be under the age of 12.
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It wouldn't surprise me if the twitter students learned something different rather than didn't learn.
Yes, yes, they "learned" the exact same "things" they would have "learned" if they had spent the evening hanging out with their friends at a bar.
Just because the arrow of time moves forwards in both cases does not imply that learning happened. I'm sure it is possible to learn something on twitter, just like it is possible to learn something at the bar. But it is a lot less likely to learn something at the bar than at the library.
Re:Garbage headline (Score:5, Funny)
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What's clearest is that those writing them don't understand English.
HURT, not HURTS. A better world would have been "impede". Maybe someone dropped a "taking" between "that" and "Twitter"? Tried to edit, but failed? As per usual?
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Yes, "impede" would be a better choice. So would "reduced", "hampered", or any number of words, but the laziness and simplistic word choices we see in reporting these days is endemic.
I'm even starting to see the decline of language in some well-respected news outlets and periodicals (the Washington Post, Time, the New Yorker, U.S. News and World Report, etc).
I can already hear people chiming in to say "it doesn't matter" or that we shouldn't be pedantic about this sort of thing, but I disagree. Clear, accur
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It must be "Continental English." There are no tenses.
Because Europeans speak all the languages. Honest, just ask them.
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And clicking slashvertisements is evidence of substantial decline.
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And even the claim of "lower learning" is tenuous at best. The only thing they can really say is that the perspective of the learners on the material is different. That they claim it is worse just shows intellectual bias and a non-justified preference for a specific learning effect. In the end, all this study demonstrates is the mental limitations of the authors.
Well, my experience from school with book analysis is that understanding is detrimental to your grades and the worst thing you can do is question t
Re:Garbage headline (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA does not mention intelligence outside of the headline.
The actual finding is that only using twitter to discuss the book leads to lower learning than traditional classroom teaching methods.
So, twitter is probably not that great for learning, but there is nothing that indicates it erodes intelligence.
I tend to agree. I think what it does is allow people of lesser smarts to really engage in the celebration of the tragedy of the commons that is Twitter.
Looking at it a few times, I quickly came to the conclusion that the very format promotes the unthinking angry response, discourages introspection, and encourages short attention span.
None of those things lowers a person's intelligence. But they surely can attract people who are stupid and/or low IQ.
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The first group would tend towards more of an angry mob demanding their fair share (even if they already have it). Sure it makes sense to try for their votes, but also to try not to rely on them. The second either believes their vote doesn't matter, don't care, or can't easily take the time off. Interestingly enough, two out of three of those categories are possibly solvable.
Perhaps the answer to all the noise and poison being spewed in little sound bytes lately it not to complain about how people voted, but rather to complain about all those who did not.
Pretty well done post.
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A better test would be whether the headline writer uses twitter or not.
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Is passive tweeting as harmful as active tweeting? (Score:1)
And is slashdot an approrpiate placebo?
The same article, but not as good (Score:5, Insightful)
I wanted to see if the treatment group had also received classroom instruction, or if the twitter thing was used as an alternative to classroom instruction. As it turns out, there's a non-profit organization in Italy called TwLetteratura, who advocates for a particular method [twletteratura.org] of teaching which involves using twiiter. This experiment is really a test of that method, not some random test of using twitter in general.
Re:The same article, but not as good (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you miss the fact that TFA says that the spawn of the test and the result are economists, in a finance and economics department, rather than actual psychologists, neuroscientists, practiced educators, and those one might expect should be doing this sort of research.
Subsequently, the methodology is bad, and the results are pink paisley giraffes, e.g. nonsensical. As you cite, should "the medium be the message" the study fails not only in its entirety, but is equally laughable in its "results".
The overall effort is therefore, useless. Nothing to see here, move along.
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I think you miss the fact that TFA says that the spawn of the test and the result are economists, in a finance and economics department, rather than actual psychologists, neuroscientists, practiced educators, and those one might expect should be doing this sort of research.
Subsequently, the methodology is bad, and the results are pink paisley giraffes, e.g. nonsensical.
Quite likely. OTOH, had the authors been psychologists, educators, and so on, the methodology would have been worse and the results likely decomposing pink giraffes.
Empirical evidence so far shows that, while economists are not rigorous enough w.r.t. statistical methodology of studies, they at least have a modicum of knowledge of statistics. As opposed to the overwhelming majority of "social sciences" practitioners. Statistical analysis is a voodoo art for psychologists - enter data, perform a SPSS magical
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GIGO is my echo.
Where context is everything, context here is nothing. It's like a million monkeys scooping data into hadoop. Ten thousand construction workers in matlab. Or my cousin Stinko in CERN, looking for baryons.
This all said, should you consider the entire effort, research, results, article as PR and blather, it's also an ineffective hatchet job of twitter/social media, in a correlation==causation sort of way. This portends someone wants to clobber social media for its mind-numbing.
I took the time (
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Universally, an empty hand held in a holding-a-cup motion, tilting back and fort, bridges the gap between spoken language and thirsty intention.
Think of this this way: a gaggle of economists want to test whether twitter is bad for your brain. A communications medium known for its shortness of messages, brevity, glibness, is used as the method of making impressions. The impressions measured seem to indicate that the medium stinks, and even implies that the twitter medium causes degradation in user retention
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I didn't read the paper carefully, I only skimmed it so it could certainly be that I missed something, but if you're going to make an accusation like that you really need to give a reason for it. A bunch of insults is not an argument.
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Take a look at the following;
1. Scope
2. Methods used to judge participants learning capabilities via practiced methods vs test methods.
3. S=, who they were, how they were recruited
4. Iterations, new users vs former users vs uses other social media
5. Test execution methodology (when it was done for the different recruits described/assayed.
Nope. No credulity.
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This was a pretty simple experiment in concept, so if you've got some big criticism it shouldn't take that much effort to just spit it out. Spit it out.
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They are comparing classical preparation for a classical examination with a non-classical preparation for the same examination and then call higher conformity "better". They never even begin to evaluate the merit of the classical examination approach. A complete fail science-wise. The results are grossly misleading and of negative worth. Now, it is possible that the Twitter-based method is worse by metrics that actually make sense, but the study does not show that at all, while implying that it does.
And whe
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Indeed. People comparing numbers without understanding and calling that "science". The MBA sickness at work.
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Subsequently, the methodology is bad, and the results are pink paisley giraffes, e.g. nonsensical.
Speaking of nonsensical, s/e.g./i.e./
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Just another hater who can't comprehend the post-modernist brilliance that is the pink paisley giraffe.
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I'm all for bashing economists on general principal, but your comment strikes me as going beyond the typical constructive economist critiques I'm used to seeing. Trying to make a favorable comparison to psychologists, neuroscientists, and education researchers doesn't help. I would not characterize those fields as having "good" methodologies either. I think there was an article here just a few days ago that pointed out neuroscientists are only a few decades behind everyone else in science in understanding
Bad science. (Score:5, Funny)
Sexually transmitted dementia, for example, which I offer as an an example for no particular reason.
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Agnorring yohr por tryping... I was raised a Catholic and went to a Catholic school until I was 10. That school was strongly pro-science and all of the priests made the point that the bible should not be taken literally. That it was more guidelines than rules. That it was written 2000 years ago by men of the time and should be treated as such. Maybe other Catholic schools are different or things have changed or become more strict since then but the idea of a Catholic university makes perfect sense to me.
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Hence the virulent opposition to Catholicism in Fundamentalism. Fundies insist that it's all specified exactly in the bible. Often, they claim it's specifically the King James Version of the bible that is to be taken literally (none of those new-fangled translations!)
twitter doesn't make you stupid (Score:1)
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Using twitter/facebook doesn't make you stupid. You are stupid for using twitter/facebook.
Are you sure that the construction "stupid for" means anything other than "I don't understand this word?"
Thank goodness for Slashdot comments (Score:5, Funny)
No doubt the intelligent and insightful postings counteract this Twitter effect.
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There isn't a text body size limit on Slashdot. Unfortunately, though, the biggest blocks of text posted tend to be crapflooding.
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I've had a social media addiction since long before the Internet existed. The first place I always used to turn in a newspaper was the Opinion Page, specifically to see what the social buzz was in the letters to the editor. I still gravitate to News Sites that have comment sections, though they are wildly out of control compared to the classic 'Letter to the Editor' pages.
Unintelligent headline... (Score:5, Informative)
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It did not even find that. If it found anything at all, then it found that the method used in this study is likely unsuitable for doing science. If you dig a bit deeper, you will probably find some conservative, anti-progress political agenda behind it.
Academic performance is not intelligence (Score:3)
Depends on the quality of the teaching, of course, but most teaching is somewhere between bad and abysmal and primarily focused on regurgitation. Anybody that tries to think for themselves, checks facts, consults alternate sources, etc. does _worse_ in mainstream teaching. Of course, searching for truth, mechanisms and facts on your own is what high-quality teaching wants to enable students to do, and these meta-skills are incredibly valuable because it promotes independent thinking. But in regular fact-based testing (another failure and a primary indicator of bad teaching) these people do worse, because first, they rightfully deprioritize rote memorization and second, because things are never simple. Hence this misunderstanding, which is a pretty bad one.
At the end, this is the old failure to mistake memorized data (not information) for intelligence. Nothing could be further from the truth.
If Twitter rots your brain (Score:3)
Imagine what Facebook does to it!
LOL, no kidding? (Score:2)
"Study Claims Using Twitter Erodes Your Intelligence"
Well duh.
Did my thesis on e-learning. (Score:2)
Scientific method (Score:2)
The thing is, it's not scientific until you test it. You really do have to evaluate a hypothesis with evidence. Not matter how obviously self-evident it is.