Sep 08 2009
How Twitter can make you an idiot and why Retro Yakking is good for your health
Many people suspected it all along, but now Dr. Tracey Alloway, a brain expert from Stirling University, has confirmed our belief that social networking website Twitter really could damage your working brain.
I’m no expert myself, but I can tell you that I certainly feel all the more stupid for visiting the site, and now there is official evidence in the form of some scribblings on someone’s blog, I feel wholly justified.
Is Twitter the reason why Stephen Fry broke his arm in Brazil during that programme over the weekend? Fry is one of the site’s most active and prominent advocates, and he seems pretty intelligent to me — despite the fact he somehow continues to share a stage with Alan Davies, which, as any sensible person would attest, is a rather silly thing to do (guffaw guffaw).
Facebook, on the other hand, is good for our brains, as it is a much slower process that allows our working memory to digest and manipulate that information. I suppose by that token, reading a mildly humorous parody website would be a good idea. It’s official: Retro Yakking is good for your health!
But doctors (probably) won’t be prescribing a healthy dose of The Yak any time soon, as it’s unlikely any of this research is going to have the slightest bit of effect on anybody at all. The reason for this is simple: regular Twitterers will scan the article, go “hmm”, then return to their microblogging without having understood a single word of the post, mostly because it is not written in Twitspeak, or ‘Twtspk’.
Facebookers, with their slightly larger brain capacity, will most likely have digested the article, blogged about it and took a photograph of themselves doing so within an hour. It’s true, I just got a friend request from a person called TwitterSucks who enlightened me on this process, which is apparently not uncommon on the photo blogging site.
Supposedly, video sharing website YouTube is just as bad as Twitter. The Yak suggests it wouldn’t be if people actually bothered to create stimulating videos that educate and entertain at the same time, though if his YouTube account is anything to go by, he’s a fine one to talk.
I feel stupid for even having a Twitter account even though the main thing I do is post links. My most recent activity on Twitter was to block something called haveanaffair dot com that spam followed me and to send them a terse PM that went something like “thanks for the Spam follow. Infidelity happens often enough without there being a service promoting it. Buh-bye now.”
I have 2500 plus followers on Twitter, and I don’t even know why. None of them seem to have any interest in either my writing or my affiliate marketing. Who are these people???
I like Crackbook a little too much. But at least it allows one to form complete sentences and at least make a semblance of actually communicating with people.
I’m tempted to tweet the REcaptcha, which is “replace Uhlaorder,” just for the devil of it.