I guess I need to stop believing the media can cover a topic such as humanity’s interaction with technology without bias. Newsweek provides one of the most biased, non-neutral pieces that I’ve seen ever written about technology, psychology and human interaction in last week’s paper issue (also available online).
Cherry-picking from only the research that supports his hypothesis — that technology is evil and making us all crazy — writer Tony Dokoupil doesn’t provide a nuanced, complex review of what researchers have discovered. Instead, he provides a sledgehammer-to-the-gut hit piece meant to infuse fear and continued ignorance into the complex findings in this area of psychological research.
And in an accompanying video piece, Dokoupil feels perfectly free to dispense mental health advice — as though by writing about the topic, he’s suddenly become a psychology or mental health expert.
So let’s dive in.
Throughout the piece, Dokoupil suggests both himself and Newsweek are serious about this topic, and that brand-spanking new research will help guide us in an objective review of “What the New Research Says” about “Is the Internet Making Us Crazy?” In suggesting over and over that Newsweek and the reporter spent time “analyzing” the research, Newsweek is leading its readers to believe they’ve actually conducted an objective, unbiased review:
The first good, peer-reviewed research is emerging, and the picture is much gloomier than the trumpet blasts of Web utopians have allowed. […] Does the Internet make us crazy? Not the technology itself or the content, no. But a Newsweek review of findings from more than a dozen countries finds the answers pointing in a similar direction.
So there’s the answer — “No.” But then the rest of the piece is spent telling you how the answer is actually, “Yes,” and here’s why. Don’t be confused by Dokoupil’s rhetoric here. There’s no search criteria for what studies they looked at, and there’s no claim they took an unbiased look at the research. They simply looked at what helps them sell a story and magazines, and found enough “new” research (apparently this is the new, more liberal meaning of the word “new,” since the author quotes research going back to 2006 and earlier) to write a story from.
Most of the research quoted in the article is the worst and weakest kind of psychological research — small case studies about one or two people, or small pilot studies the researchers themselves suggest should not be generalized to the population as a whole. Since Dokoupil is not a researcher, he apparently doesn’t care (or isn’t aware of the differences). To add insult to injury, he never lets the reader know that this is the kind of crappy research he’s mainly talking about in the article. In Dokoupil and Newsweek’s worldview, apparently all research is created equal.
But it gets worse…
His 2006 study of problematic Web habits (the one that was puckishly rejected) was later published, forming the basis for his recent book Virtually You, about the fallout expected from the Web’s irresistible allure.
Yes, I expect authors who publish — and make money off of — books saying the sky is falling due to our interactions with technology to give us a totally objective viewpoint. Larry Rosen, another book author quoted, is a colleague and I respect his opinion. But again, it’s just an opinion. Drawing broad sweeping conclusions about the real-world impact of technology from surveys you administer to a group of people and other research you cherry-pick from the literature isn’t exactly the equivalent of a randomized controlled trial — the type of study methodology we require in order for a new prescription drug to be approved. ((The problems with surveys are numerous, but primarily, if you haven’t conducted a pilot study to ensure your questions are worded in an unbiased manner, how your questions are worded will usually determine the kinds of results you will get.))
Hey, Let’s Scare You, Then Present Only One Side of the Story
Dokoupil also talks about a study demonstrating how technology “rewires the brain.” Nowhere in his description does he mention that a whole host of activities “rewire the brain,” from learning to drive a car or learning a new foreign language, to all sorts of childhood activities that mold us into young adults. Every action we take changes our brain chemistry. Instead, he just leaves it to the reader to understand that when “Web users displaying fundamentally altered prefrontal cortexes,” it is somehow bad — rather than just being different.
Dokoupil brings up the flawed Pediatrics Facebook study, which we thoroughly analyzed and discredited shortly after its publication. And although his piece was published after this study became available, a followup study also clearly demonstrated Facebook activity does not lead to depression after all.
As I wrote in the earlier article:
Other research has shown that college students’ — who are often older teens — Internet use was directly and indirectly related to less depression (Morgan & Cotten, 2003; LaRose, Eastin, & Gregg, 2001).
Furthermore, studies have revealed that Internet use can lead to online relationship formation, and thereby to more social support ([Nie and Erbring, 2000], [Wellman et al., 2001] and [Wolak et al., 2003]) — which may subsequently lead to less internalizing problems.
Dokoupil doesn’t just dismiss evidence contrary to his hypothesis — he completely ignores it, simply leaving it out of his story completely.
4 comments
Finally. Someone has noticed the biased reporting in our “conservative” media. For years the so-called neo-cons have screamed about media excesses–and that these excesses are part of a larger “liberal” agenda.
From CNN to Time, our media is indeed conservative, not liberal. Sorry, Rush you NEED to read this article. Very well done John. Nice to know someone is out there really reading.
I had one comment to this post, but wow, reading the above comment, anyone who thinks the mainstream media is conservative based, I honestly have no idea how to reply without being rude. With all the hypocrisy and ignorance coming out of the Obama camp that is either plainly ignored or just deflected or projected onto the Romney/Republican base by the three alleged major networks or what are considered still major newspaper publications is just obscene. Oh, and so is Rush Limbaugh and his ilk too. Here’s a tip for voters in November: either vote for the party that has abandoned the middle class, or, the party that wants to enslave it with entitlements that just solidify dependency. Such good choices!
Anyway, how many Americans practice moderation with “technology” these days? You want to pick a percentage, Dr Grohol? What, 50%, or 33%, even as low as 20%? We could debate the definition of “moderation” for the next week or so, but I think responsible and attentive people know what the term means, and we watch people every day in our lives who are just plain addicted, dependent, or hopelessly “attached and committed” to hours of internet interaction and screen focus that is disruptive to healthy and appropriate lifestyle. So, maybe the article quoted above is extreme or one sided, but is the topic to be dismissed because one source was too one sided?
When you interact with someone who bases a choice or principle solely on what they read on the internet, and tells you in so many words “I read it on the internet at a site that was reliable”, well, good luck with that for what gets “published” in this medium the past 10 or so years.
Have many of you just taken a walk for 20 minutes or so every day or two and absorbed nature in the past week? Or, spent a couple of hours talking with someone in person for just social contact? Read a book?
Yeah, whatever.
I’m not sure we’re looking at technology in the same way. Would we look at a group of war veterans who lost their legs and complain that too many of them are using technology — wheelchairs and crutches — and are “dependent” upon this technology?
Mobile & Internet technologies are tools that are used, by and large, to enhance our lives. Since we’re at the beginning of this latest technology phase (where mobile merges with desktop computing power), there is going to be the inevitable adoption pains.
Just as there were similar pains with the adoption of the automobile, the telephone, and the television. Go back and read some of the magazine articles of the day surrounding each of these events in history and it will be eye-opening.
We’ve done this before. We’ll do it again. Humanity is surprisingly adaptable.
Nicely written article. I find that the Internet is a tremendous tool that increases productivity and information availability. Before you decry the quality of information available online and the people that make decisions based on it, please remember that several decades worth of scientific articles are available… some publicay available.
For myself, I find that as the Internet and technology matures, I spend less aimless time online or on a computer. This is because I can more quickly find the information that I need at the time that I need it. Just try finding a store in the old printed yellow pages or before Google maps.
I firmly doubt the hypothesis that technology makes us crazy. I doubt that such a correlation could ever be demonstrated. It seems much more likely that people get ill independent of technology. Otherwise computer science departments all over the world would be having illness rates that exceed the population average. This does not seem to be the case.