C.G. Prado - Social Media and Your Brain: Web-Based Communication Is Changing How We Think and Express Ourselves

C. G. Prado, PhD, FRSC, Editor

Copyright 2017 by ABC-CLIO, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Prado, C. G., editor.

Title: Social media and your brain : Web-based communication is changing how we think and express ourselves / C. G. Prado, PhD, FRSC, editor.

Description: Santa Barbara, California : Praeger, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016031137 (print) | LCCN 2016045498 (ebook) | ISBN 9781440854538 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781440854545 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: InternetSocial aspects. | Social media. | Interpersonal communication. | CommunicationSocial aspects. | Thought and thinking.

Classification: LCC HM851 .S644 2017 (print) | LCC HM851 (ebook) | DDC 302.23/1dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031137

ISBN: 978-1-4408-5453-8
EISBN: 978-1-4408-5454-5

212019181712345

This book is also available as an eBook.

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For Wallace I. Matson and Edward J. Bond
Teachers, Supervisors, Friends

C. G. Prado

C. G. Prado

Mark Kingwell

Khadija Coxon

Juan Pablo Bermdez

Chris Beeman

Alex Leitch

Paul Fairfield

Lawrie McFarlane

Bruce MacNaughton

In The Role of Habit, C. G. Prado provides a context for the chapters that follow by discussing how the use of social media and the Internet instills habits in users: habits that to one degree or another change them as persons by altering their thinking, attitudes, and ways of expressing their thoughts.

Mark Kingwell in Bored, Addicted, or Both: How We Use Social Media Now details that there are many intellectual accounts of the condition of boredom, including a philosophical mini tradition running from Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard through Heidegger to Adorno, and a psychological literature about the creative possibilities of boredom. There is, likewise, a recurrent concern within contemporary culture and technology discourse with respect to the perils of boredom. What is missing is a critical assessment of the interface: the facet of a technological relationship that is neither platform nor content, but rather the manner in which the user engages with both. The presuppositions of the subject-interface relationship are the true issue prompted into philosophical significance by the mundane experience of boredom or what I call neoliberal boredom.

In Attention, Emotion, and Desire in the Age of Social Media, Khadija Coxon explores answers to the question: What are the particular modes of attention, expression, and attachment that members of the social media generation find most basically meaningful? This chapter discusses some digital technology and social media activities: communicating with emojis, updating statuses, following, liking, sharing, and personal branding. It also discusses whether the attachments related to these activities had nondigital precursors that cast doubt on the idea there is such a thing as a social media generation, as well as a less considered attachment peculiar to social media users: a tendency to orient to themselves and others as recursive auto/biographers.

In Social Media and Self-Control: The Vices and Virtues of Attention, Juan Pablo Bermdez presents an analysis of the nature of attention, its vices and virtues, and what currently available evidence has to say about the effects of social media on attention and self-control. The pattern that seems to be emerging is that while there is an association between greater use of social media and lower attentional control, we do not know whether it is social media use that makes people more distracted, or whether those who use social media the most do so because they are more easily distracted. Either way, questions arise about whether the virtues of attention will change in the future and whether this will bring with it a transformation in the way we shape our selves.

Chris Beeman in Does Social Media Interfere with the Capacity to Make Reasoned Arguments? asks and answers the question: Do social media interfere with the capacity to make rational arguments? Students are writing progressively less well-reasoned essays. The information required to make an argument is there, but the argument itself is not made. Essays have the feel not of being rushed, but that ability for clear argumentation has been lost. Is the predominant locus of knowledge acquisition among young adultsthe webleading to different conceptions of argument making? How might this contribute to a different sort of identity? Might linear argumentation no longer be necessary, except for certain limited tasks?

In Exclusive Spaces, Alex Leitch defines exclusivity as a form of privacy used to establish value. To be exclusive is to promise hidden secrets: a challenge. Challenges, correctly constructed, offer agency. To be cool, a message or service must be illegible enough to incite an exploration, a sense of legitimate risk, while minimizing the sense of threat. The sense of discovery offered by services like YikYak or Snapchat allows more agency, and thus more loyalty, than other more public services. This chapter amplifies on the point made in the Introduction, The Role of Habit, and by the Pew Research Center people about how young texters and social media posters learn to doctor their communications with exaggeration, selective omission, and other means to enhance their images.

Paul Fairfield in Social Media and Communicative Unlearning: Learning to Forget in Communicating details how digital media and electronic technology are becoming less tools than a way of life, of thinking, appearing, and preferring. The growing preference for electronic over in-person communication ought to worry observers for reasons that bear primarily on what such communication omits, including the realm of nonverbal expression, nuance, and embodiment. As the preference for e-communication increases, what decreases is not only communicative competence, but also the place in human experience for the unconventional, imaginative, intangible, unpredictable, indirect, incalculable, and non-preordained. The forms of social and cognitive unlearning that accompany the digital age demand our attention.

Lawrie McFarlane in Prices Paid for Social Media Use explains that since the TV era began, parents have feared their children might be negatively influenced by violent and sexually explicit material, and we are now well past that point. The chapter discusses how the advent of social media has proven devastating, desexualizing young men and robbing young people of basic understanding of human relationships. There is also discussion of the historical role of electronic media and how it enables and invites distortion.