Adbusters: Panting for Breath on a Virtual Shore
It took millions of years of evolution for life on earth to move out of the oceans onto land, where our phylogenetic ancestors gasped for their first breaths on a pebbled beach. Now, some 590,000,000 years later, we find ourselves panting for air on a virtual shore. We’re embarking on the second greatest migration in the history of life of earth, from the physical world into virtuality. In the span of just one generation, we’ve been completely wooed over by the entirely-cerebral and entirely-virtual adventures accessed when our fingertips apply light pressure to a plastic “mouse.” Today, teenagers in America spend seven hours on a screen each day, 11 if you include multitasking hours: this is more time than human beings spend doing anything else, including sleeping .. Gary Small, head of UCLA’s Memory and Aging Research Center, documented that even just five hours of internet use, for web-virgins, substantially rewired the prefrontal cortex of the brain. So we can infer what happens as we spend more and more hours online. The amount of time one spends online is directly correlated to depression, obesity, ADD, ADHD, OCD, and anxiety
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One Response to “Adbusters: Panting for Breath on a Virtual Shore”
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Not to sound too much like a Cassandra (LOL), but, as with my decades-long “shouting from the rooftops” about water being the ultimate commodity (not oil or food), I have been saying stuff like this since the advent of the Internet – and being equally alarmed as the article is at each new “layer” (Facebook, iPhones, Twitter, etc.).
One cannot stop and smell the virtual roses. (Though I suppose they’ll find a way to do that via computers, too!)
Posted on 03-Mar-13 at 6:00 pm | Permalink