Everybody is trying to figure out the impact of Web 2.0 on human behaviour.
With the little that we know, at the moment anything goes.
However, I read an article in The New Yorker the other day that made me scream…
More and more college kids are using cognitive enhancers like Adderall and Ritalin, “drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted”.
College chat sites are full of messages about them.
And the habit is spilling over to professionals. In Wired magazine, a reader writes about having to compete with a colleague able to work crazy hours on modafinil who is being help up as an example by his boss.
There are people out there who try to blame this new development on Web 2.0 pressures and our increasingly interconnected world, where a fifty-five-year-old guy in Atlanta finds himself in the position of having to compete with a twenty-five-year-old kid in Bangalore.
I refuse to believe this is what social media is about.
This new technology is much more likely to create connections for a better understanding between human beings. Using it as an excuse for getting hooked on cognitive steroids is an aberration.
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I think the traditional media likes to create bogeymen to scare people and all this looks like the latest fashionable scapegoat that the press have decided to pick on. Awhile back it was “mobile phones give you cancer”/ “computers give you RSI”/ “automation will create robots that will take over the world” …!
BTW, congrats on your new blog/ website design. It looks great and reflects your professionalism online.
Many thanks, YM. Looking fwd to the launch of our book!