Is Social Media Making Us Stupid?

We all know that spending endless hours doing any activity can be bad for us. Whether watching TV, eating chocolate, playing video games, texting, even simply surfing the internet — doing all of it at once for the majority of our day cannot be a good thing. We all know that Facebook and Twitter can make us unproductive at work and that Pinterest is where creativity really goes to die – days later with only a glazed look in our eyes…

Technology allows us to do many different tasks at one time but is it also making us less productive and maybe even stupid? It’s certainly making us more anxious.

Today most of us multitask. We talk on the phone while cooking dinner, we chat with a client while designing an invitation for our upcoming wedding, we play video games while studying for a test. For most of us we’re not doing any of these tasks well according to a 2009 study by Dr. Clifford Nass on multitasking.

 “’We all bet high mulitaskers were going to be stars at something,’ Nass said in an interview with the PBS program ‘Frontline.’ ‘We were absolutely shocked. We all lost our bets. It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They’re terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they’re terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they’re terrible at switching from one task to another… One would think if people were bad at multitasking, they would stop. However, when we talk with the multitaskers, they seem to think they’re great at it and seem totally unfazed and totally able to do more and more and more.’

We know this, we know that it’s difficult to help a child with homework when we’re writing a letter to the editor or finishing a report for work. Most of us know that in order to do our best we need to focus on the task at hand and yet we still check in to Facebook over lunch while working on that report.

Worse is that when we are using social media such as Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr it’s easy to get wrapped up in the daily drama that social media seems to encourage and enflame. One quick response on social media can have a huge impact and yet most of us don’t think twice about leaving a snarky or mean comment.

We need face time. Social media can be a great stand in when getting together is impossible but we should all try to connect with each other in real life settings. We need to unplug more often and let the fog clear from so much technology. Turn off so you can hear yourself thing and learn to focus on only one activity at a time.