Tag Archives: Digital literacies

Students brains ‘rewired’ by the internet

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BBC2’s The Virtual Revolution on Saturday, February 20th 1 will claim that young people’s brains are being rewired by the Internet in such a way that they are:

  • unable to concentrate on reading an academic book for study
  • incapable of ‘linear’ disciplines like reading and writing at length

The article also states that psychologists claim that ‘within three years, hundreds of thousands of British teenagers will require medication or hospital treatment for mental illnesses caused by excessive web use.’ Sounds a bit like the old arguments about violent video games turning every teenager into a mad-axe killer, TV-watching resulting in square eyes, or masturbation resulting in blindness.

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  1. Telegraph (2011) ‘Students brains ‘rewired’ by the internet’, The Telegraph, (online) Available from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7205852/Students-brains-rewired-by-the-internet.html (Accessed 12 February 2011). ↩

Google Generation and Myths

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There are a number of statements bandied around the Internet about the Google Generation. Some of these include:

  1. ‘They [the Google Generation] need to feel constantly connected to the web’
  2. ‘They are the “cut-and-paste” generation’
  3. ‘They pick up computer skills by trial and error’
  4. ‘They are expert searchers’

Research has shed some light onto these statements. A report from UCL  1  p19 suggests that of these statements:

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  1. UCL (2008) Information behaviour of the researcher of the future, University College London, (online) Available from: http://learn.open.ac.uk/file.php/7325/block1/UCL_Reading_research.pdf (Accessed 6 February 2011). ↩