Social networking under fresh attack as tide of cyber-scepticism sweeps US
Twitter and Facebook don’t connect people – they isolate them from reality, say a rising number of academics. Paul Harris reports in the Guardian:
“The way in which people frantically communicate online via Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging can be seen as a form of modern madness, according to a leading American sociologist.
“A behaviour that has become typical may still express the problems that once caused us to see it as pathological,” MIT professor Sherry Turkle writes in her new book, Alone Together, which is leading an attack on the information age.”
The article also covers other critical contributions, including The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, The Net Delusion by Evgeny Morozov, The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein, We Have Met The Enemy by Daniel Akst, and Cyburbia by James Harkin.
Alone Together has also been reviewed in The New York Times and the New Scientist (see also this previous blog post).
