Social networking under fresh attack as tide of cyber-scepticism sweeps US | Media | The Observer
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/22/social-networking-cyber-scepticism-twitter
The way in which people frantically communicate online via #Twitter, #Facebook and instant messaging can be seen as a form of modern #madness, according to a leading American sociologist.
“A behaviour that has become typical may still express the problems that once caused us to see it as pathological,” MIT professor Sherry Turkle writes in her new book, Alone Together, which is leading an attack on the information age.
(…)The list of attacks on social media is a long one and comes from all corners of academia and popular culture. A recent bestseller in the US, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, suggested that use of the #internet was altering the way we think to make us less capable of digesting large and complex amounts of information, such as books and magazine articles. The book was based on an essay that Carr wrote in the Atlantic magazine. It was just as emphatic and was headlined: Is Google Making Us Stupid?