Tuesday 14 April 2009

Social Networking User? Yes?...Then you're a bad person!

Facebook bad person

Just as my feelings towards social networking are beginning to mellow slightly, I'm told that it's making me a 'bad person'.  Great.

From the Metro 14.04.09:

Using Facebook or Twitter may make you a bad person because it ruins your moral compass, it has been claimed.

Fast-paced modern media, such as Facebook updates and news feeds on Twitter, do not give us time to reflect and could make us indifferent to human suffering, according to a group of researchers.

Children could be particularly vulnerable because their brains are still developing, it was claimed.

'If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states and that would have implications for your morality,' said researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, from the University of Southern California.

6 comments:

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  2. I think my moral compass was ruined long ago during criminal law lectures, where their Professorships told the most gruesome of facts in the most comical way.. I will never view a boy who had just been buggered by his boss, who then went on to kill his boss by hitting him in the head with a chipata pan in the same way ever again...

    Besides facebook is the only way of contacting people for me at the moment as I am hibernating in revision time..

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  3. I think law degrees inevitably have that effect on people, Lost. There's certainly a fair chunk of unsavoury content packed in. Goes with the territory I guess.

    As for Facebook, I don't see myself capitulating any time soon. Twitter is more than enough for me to cope with at the moment.

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  4. Noooo you must join Facebook...it's so much better than Twitter :P

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  5. I never had a moral compass either. Don't know if it's the legal thing (R v Collins anyone?) or the dark sense of humour required for the 'other job', but facebook definitely isn't to blame.

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  6. Yeah, I agree. There are many things which have butchered the concept of a moral compass into virtual extinction nowadays and social networking as part of that plays a pretty minor role.

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