It appears that a majority of parents may believe that social media sites like Twitter and FaceBook is making their kids less intelligent. Evidence for this comes for a recent piece of research carried out by the Australian telecommunications company Telstra. This study found that 65% of parents believed that children’s intellectual potential was being threatened by social media sites. The reason being that they were now spending a lot less time focused on homework, and they were also becoming a lot less motivated to learn. Parents were also worried about the health consequences of all that time on the web.
If you were to look back thirty years ago you would probably have found that parents said much the same thing about television. If you were to go back forty years before this then you would likely hear the same complaints about radio. One hundred years ago you may have even had parents fretting over the possible negative influence of story books on their children’s education. When you look back in history it makes the current concerns expressed by parents appear in context; it has always been this way. Most people will believe that their education was somehow superior to what comes afterwards; and that any new technology is a threat to learning. The real surprise would be if this research had shown that parents felt that social media was making them more intelligent.
Personally I feel that social media has come with good and bad. Some children will use it to learn more about the world, and increase their love of learning. Other children will use it as a means to escape school and anything to do with learning things. Nothing has really changed except the technology that children are using to achieve this aims.
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