Photograph by: jeremy glyn

The Internet will position the tech savvy at the top of a new social order

Parents are increasingly concerned that use of cellphones and computers exposes children to a digital world of hidden dangers, such as cyber bullying and sexual predators.

New evidence suggests that the amount of time children spend on-line, thumb-wrestling with a phone or on gaming consoles erodes literacy skills and general knowledge, wrecks attention spans and lessens healthy social interaction. The question is: are we raising the most socially inept and dumbest generation yet?

Identity and social interaction

As the first generation to grow up technologically fluent, today's tweens and teens are flocking to be part of social networks as a way to establish their social identity. Californian neuroscientist Gary Small, who specialises in brain functioning, explains that young minds are more susceptible to on-screen influences.

The teenage years are an important but turbulent period of identity formation and role development in which adolescents are intensely focused on social life. During these years, empathy skills (situated in the temporal lobe) and complex reasoning skills (in the frontal lobe) are not fully developed.

This explains why teens are predisposed to being self-centred and sometimes display an inability to put themselves in someone else's shoes.

Brain scientists now believe that overexposure to interactive technologies while young might suppress frontal-lobe executive skills, stifle the ability to communicate face-to-face and consequently stunt maturation - eventually freezing the brain in a teen-brain state.

Being able to share photographs instantly and post regular updates of their every thought or action is believed to induce an addiction to instant gratification and sensationalism, potentially creating a generation of self-centred young people with an unstable sense of their identity.

Moreover, it makes it easier to reveal themselves in a way that they might not have been comfortable with in a face-to-face situation.

People become less inhibited: it's like an alcohol-induced self-confidence. British professor Susan Greenfield recently warned that children raised on virtual interactions may well start to see that as normal.

Kids need real-life human interaction to teach them fundamental social skills, such as interpreting facial expressions and other nonverbal messages during a conversation.

Constant distractions

A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation in the US found that young people absorb an average of eight-and-half hours of digital and video sensory stimulation a day, and some are sending and receiving as many as 80 text messages during that time.

Attention spans and concentration are being stretched thin by the many competing interactive technologies and children have come to expect constant stimulation to ward off boredom.

Neuroscientist Small reports that web-surfing, multitasking and information overload can accelerate learning and creativity, but warns that they might also worsen attention deficit disorder .

But what is unique to this generation is that, because they grow up being constantly bombarded with information, their young brains are more adroit at filtering information and making quick decisions.

Canadian professor Don Tapscott, author of Grown up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, explains that, from eight to 18, when the brain is still developing, children's brains are being hard-wired to live in a digital culture. In other words, technology is rewiring their brains to adapt to a new multitasking culture.

Rewiring the brain

Neurological studies show that learning to read changes the brain's circuitry by forging new connections. Scientists hypothesise that reading on the Internet is also affecting the brain's hard-wiring in a different way to book reading.

On paper, text has a fixed beginning, middle and end. Online readers jump from one link to the next, often forgetting where they started.

In a digital world, readers compose their own beginnings, middles and endings, and seldom read only one author's opinion but consider comments and input from lots of contributors. This shifts thinking from being linear to being non-linear and networked.

New forms of reading are emerging as users "power browse" horizontally through numerous websites, going for quick wins instead of perusing material vertically.

Small also did research on how technology has altered the way young minds develop, function and interpret information.

Magnetic-resonance imaging results showed that both book reading and Internet searching stimulate the regions of the brain that control language, memory and vision in both tech-savvy and tech-disabled brains.

But the Internet search lit up more areas of the net-savvy brain, additionally activating the regions controlling complex reasoning and decision making.

The increased brain activity suggests that the subjects experienced a richer sensory experience and heightened attention.

Small's findings are provocative because they indicate that routine on-line searching helps stimulate, and possibly improve, brain functioning, debunking the myth that children are becoming less intelligent.

History is riddled with examples of how each significant communications revolution brought with it fears and sceptics. More than 2000 years ago, both Socrates and Plato warned about a different kind of information development - the rise of the written word. They feared that, as people came to rely on writing as a substitute for knowledge, it would limit human thinking and memory would be damaged.

Similar opinions were voiced with the arrival of the printing press in the 15th century. In both cases, the arguments made by the doomsayers were spot on - both printing and the written word necessitated that people learn how to read and brought about remarkable change.

But, at that time, the sceptics couldn't foresee how writing, printing and reading would serve to spread information and ideas across the world, spark innovation and expand human knowledge.

The difference is the unprecedented pace of change. Digital communication is creating what Small calls a "brain gap" between young and old.

Instead of the traditional generation gap, we are seeing the beginning of a brain gap that separates digital natives, born into 24/7 technology, and the older generation, their parents, who came to digital technology as adults.

The Internet is not simply changing the way people live but altering the way minds work. Small calls it an "evolutionary change" that will position the technologically fluent at the top of a new social order.

• This is an edited extract from "The State We're In", appearing in The 2010 Flux Trend Review, edited by Dion Chang