Are Twitter and Facebook Bad for You?

For those of us who suddenly find ourselves far from home near no one we know, and who can't afford to pay for a social life (and this is the reality--if you don't have money you don't go to movies, don't go out to restaurants, don't go to theater, etc.--most people find parks boring anymore, and libraries want you quiet), the Internet is a godsend. And I never would have found so many like-minded people had I not had the assistance of social networking and search engines. For that matter it makes it very, very easy to find friends with whom I've fallen out of touch, long-lost family, people I went to high school with and liked back then but lost touch with, etc. Any time a new communication technology comes up we see a change in brain processing. I'm sure illiterate indigenous people from rich oral traditions believe that literate people are morons. Why? Because we can write down important information, so we don't have to remember it anymore. You take an indigenous person still in their traditional culture who learns from oral tradition, remove them from their immediate tribal environment and drop them in wild surroundings with familiar plants and animals and they will probably survive long enough to get back to their village or camp. Try that with an average American, no matter what grade their reading level. So... there are trade-offs. The key is to hold on to your humanity no matter what. Someone who uses social networking to have positive social interaction experiences rather than, say, to bully a teen girl into suicide has got the right idea.