Give yourself the gift of social media down-time!

Our ability to read and evaluate subtle facial muscle movements is a central part of interpersonal communication.

According to some British psychologists, the reduced time using these skills helps explain why more very young children, including those as young as five, are exhibiting autism-like symptoms. They haven’t learned how to read basic facial signals in other people, because they’re so often engaged with digital displays.

There is also the challenge posed by social media to our attention spans.

American studies have suggested that the average attention span for an internet user is around eight seconds. 

Relating this more specifically to social media, a group of Canadian researchers found that university students who use Facebook, even on a casual basis, tend to get lower average grades than those who don’t.

One reason for this is that the internet is essentially an ecosystem for distraction.

Sir Tim Berners Lee’s great contribution to the internet was the creation of a way to connect remote documents using inbuilt links. The World Wide Web was the result.

It is the foundation on which we’ve built the ubiquitous Cloud. Data is still accessed online through the use of Lee’s clickable links.

The beauty of this system is the speed with which we can skip from one piece of information to another, without leaving the screen before us.

The downside is that in doing so we may never rest in one place long enough to take in what we’re reading, viewing or hearing. Our brains won’t have time to assimilate what we’re learning or experiencing, building it into long-term memory.

As a result, we have no opportunity to turn our new-found knowledge into innovation. New ideas are always built out of connections between old, or stored, ideas.

As a further consequence of this, we are building transactional relationships with machines.

A number of studies reveal that we tend not to remember what we learn on the internet as much as where we found it. We rely on Pocket, Evernote or a similar Cloud-based programme to actually store the content we read. 

Again, the consequence is that there is little potential for connecting new date with old information inside the human brain. So there’s little room for creative or innovative thinking.