Digital Medias Effect on the Brain
Selected Topic: Digital Media’s Effect on the Brain
Why the Topic is of Interest
Digital media plays an important role in our lives today, especially the youth. The younger generations grow up with smartphones and tablets. The time before the internet is an abstract concept, far-fetched even. The adolescents of the current generation live in a world that is saturated with the media. Media is used in a variety of ways, for instance, for entertainment when listening to music or watching movies, with increasing use in communication with peers via Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Snapchat, among others. These media-related activities taken together, excluding school and homework, comprise a significant amount of time for most of the youth. It is, therefore, imperative that we understand the way people, particularly adolescents, process the content of the media and their peers’ feedback on the same platforms.
The social lives of adolescents seem to occur through smartphones for a large part. Smartphones are filled with friends with whom they constantly connect. Through their smartphones, they can monitor the status of their peers and their feedback and encounter rejection and acceptance messages. It is undeniable how gadgets coupled with digital media play an essential role in the development of adolescents, and it is important to understand how their use affects their brains (Wartella et al., Lauricella, 2016).
The internet is a wild place with great things and a matching number of not-so-good things. While people spend time surfing the web, a lot of others only utilize it for social media. Since most people spend a significant amount of time on social media, experts are starting to understand how social media changes the brain. A lot of research is being carried out in that field although it is likely that the long term effects will not be known for decades since the virtual world is still in its infancy.
SECTION II
Summary from Class Resources
Today, it is not just the kids and youth, but everyone is immersed in technology all the time, from multitasking and work to the military, at play, and at the virtual frontier. The video by Frontline looks at the wired world. The video starts by surveying MIT students and how they use technology. The producer and correspondent note that in every part of the institution students are looking at screens or multiple screens for that matter. The students say they can be out for dinner and everybody is on their phone. It is a common occurrence there; no one gets upset about it. One student notes that the same is true for classes; they can be attending a class and emailing another professor.
One MIT professor observed that the present day students need to be stimulated in ways that were not required before. Since the university allows students to enter the classroom with laptops at the professor’s discretion, students utilize the opportunity to do different things. Most stop paying attention and open Facebook tabs or start googling. Professor Sherry Turkle, a director at MIT, says that although the students are smart, they have done themselves a disservice by believing that a multitasking learning environment will serve their best purposes.
Professor Clifford Nass from Stanford University wanted to study what happens to the brain of the self-proclaimed multi-taskers. This was the first research of its kind. These were students who seemed to be able to do multiple things at a time. They can study and reply to emails and Facebook while watching a video on YouTube. The study featured the brain imaging of multi-taskers and non-multi-taskers. Classic psychology says that our brains cannot do two things at a time. Professor Clifford wanted to see how these students could do defy this principle. One test showed that the multitaskers were slow at switching tasks compared to when they were doing one task. As it turned out, multi-taskers were poor at every aspect of multitasking, they get distracted constantly and have disorganized memory. Some prior studies by the same professor showed that they are poor at analytical reasoning.
According to the latest data, kids spend more than 50 hours a week on digital media; this is more than a full work week. Due to the amount of time they spend online, questions remain about what the media does to their brain. Only one neuroscientist, Dr. Garry Small has examined the impact of the internet on the human brain. He took MRI scans of people doing an internet search and reading a book. The scans showed more brain activity (almost twofold) when they were doing an internet search compared to reading. One would think that internet use is making us smarter, as most headlines read on the first release of the research. This should not be the case since more activity does not mean better. The research was also not a confirmation of the beneficial effect of internet use; it was more of a call for more studies. Most researchers suggest that social media use is addictive. In Asia, for example, people are addicted to gaming.
There have been cases of people dying while playing games, mostly because they went for more than 50 hours of play with minimal food or water. One psychiatrist was commissioned by the Korean government to conduct a three-year study on the question of internet addiction. The findings helped Korea be among the first countries to treat it as a psychiatric disorder. One 15-year-old boy, Yung El, plays computer games eight hours a day, and on the weekends, he plays overnight. His mother says when he starts, he does not know when to stop. He has even lost his ability to communicate with his mother. Internet addiction is so rampant in Korea that there are rescue camps for children to help them control their use of the Internet.
One documentary named Growing Up Online was filed at a High School in New Jersey. The documentary looked at the impact of the internet on adolescents. The school embraced the idea that the classrooms needed to meet kids where they were living: online. At some point, the use of technology creates diminishing returns. One student says he does not remember the last time he read a book because nowadays, you can find a summary of it online. Most professors of English agree that they cannot assign readings more than 200 pages. Mark Bareline, a professor at MRA University, wrote a book called The Dumbest Generation. The book is filled with data which suggests that kids are not as academically capable as they used to be before the digital distractions. The professor claims that reading and writing skills have deteriorated. Professor Clifford Nass from Stanford University notes that teachers are already reporting changes in how students write. They write in paragraphs rather than essays, for instance, they write one paragraph and decide to look at Facebook or play a game.
One blog features an 83-year-old grandmother and her grandson who teach people how to cook. She says she worked for a bank until she was 70 and did not know that online activity could give her so much satisfaction. The grandson feels that the internet is adding her years. Other people argue that games also give people a powerful vicarious life. The games give people a whole new world that they can be anyone they want, it is a world of fantasy, an immersive world. Gaming enthusiasts in the United States organize yearly Warcraft matches where gamers come together and interact. They seem to be connected to each other at a deeper level, and some even manage to find love, date and marry. Some of the virtual couples in the games make it a reality. It would seem from this that the virtual world enables humans to do new things. The technology is not isolating people in this case but giving them new ways to be intimate. Organizations, including IBM, are now implementing virtual reality technology in their organizations. This way employees can attend meetings in virtual offices without leaving their spots. Virtual technology has enabled IBM to save millions of dollars just by not travelling.
SECTION 3
Additional Sources
Crone, E.A., & Konijn, E.A. (2018). Media use and brain development during adolescence. Nature Communications. 9(1), 588
Meshi, D., Tamir, D. I., & Heekeren, H. R. (2015). The emerging neuroscience of social media. Trends in cognitive sciences, 19(12), 771-782.
Why the Sources are Credible
The article Media Use and Brain Development during Adolescence is relevant because it addresses how social media affects the brains of adolescent children. It is credible because it is published in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. The source is accurate because it is published by respected and well-known authors in the field. Finally, it is unbiased because the research has a holistic viewpoint.
The article The emerging neuroscience of social media is relevant because it examines the neurological impacts of the use of social media. It is credible because it is published in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. The source is accurate because it is published by respected and well-known authors in the field. Finally, it is unbiased because it uses a scientific approach which has known limitations and is not biased.
Information from the Sources
Crone and Konijn bring together research on media use among adolescents regarding and the associated neural development. The article focuses on three aspects of media exposure that are of interest to adolescent development: social rejection or acceptance, the influence peers have on self-perception and self-image, and the role emotions play when using media. Experiencing rejection or acceptance when communicating through digital media has a significant impact. Research has shown that rejection in a computerized environment is similar to face-to-face rejection. Neuroscience has made some discoveries on the neural responses to online acceptance and rejection.
Research involving the Cyberball Paradigm has captured the neural effects of social exclusion by others. The results showed that there are negative effects on a person’s self-esteem, feeling of belonging and sense of control (Williams & Jarvis, 2006). From functional MRI, there have been observations of an increase in the activity in the insula and orbitofrontal cortex after rejection. This is a possible signal of increased arousal and negative effects. Adolescents and young adults who have a history of being socially excluded, insecure or maltreated showed strong activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) (Crone & Konijn, 2018). Reductions in ACC were observed if adolescents spent more time with friends. Spending time with friends is, therefore, a viable strategy to protect adolescents from cyberbullying. When participants experience inclusion, insula and ACC activity also increase. Studies have also observed that when adolescents are excluded, there are specific activities in the subgenual ACC and ventral striatum. Depression is often associated with activity in subgenual ACC. Therefore there is an association between rejection and brain activity in areas that are active when experiencing salient emotions.
The positive feeling of online social acceptance mostly occurs when one has a lot of likes, popularity, followers, positive hashtags and comments among others. Research by neuropsychologists shows that similar brain regions are activated during acceptance and when receiving rewards such as money (Lieberman & Eisenberger, 2009). The ventral striatum has the most pronounced activity. The ventral tegmental area and ventromedial frontal cortex were also reported to be activated. These are the regions which are subject to reward and pleasure. The study also observed that there was an increase in the ventral striatum in adults, children, and adolescents when they were socially accepted through likes. This, however, was not the case for adolescents who had a history of negative maternal affect or who experienced depression (Crone & Konijn, 2018). Therefore to understand adolescents who are more sensitive to social media impacts, parental relations and prior social experiences must be considered.
Peer groups also have a strong influence on decision-making and opinions. Through user-generated content on social media, peers can have a strong influence on adolescents. It is a common practice among adolescents to share and discuss content. Some recent studies used neuroimaging to examine the way an adolescent’s brain responds to comments from peers about them, and others showed that peer feedback can affect how individuals view themselves to a great extent. Girls, in particular, are more sensitive to pressure for the ideal thin body from the media. Feedback from peers who support this ideal is linked to more body dissatisfaction (Veldhuis, Konijn & Seidell, 2014). Recently, studies showed that feedback that deviated from the norm of ideal body images resulted in ACC-insula network activities in young females. For females with lower self-esteem, the activities were stronger. The findings suggested that peer feedback that comes from social media is able to influence the way adolescents view themselves and others.
The same study also found that social behaviour can be affected by peer feedback. According to neuroimaging studies, thinking about the feelings or intentions of other people leads to activity in different regions like the social brain network, which includes the temporal parietal junction, medial prefrontal cortex, and superior temporal sulcus. Since the adolescence stage is a sensitive period for social brain development, the results may be more pronounced in mid or early adolescence (Crone & Konijn, 2018).
The other factor that affects adolescents is the intense emotional experiences that come with that stage. Emotional needs may guide how they use the media; for instance, a lonely individual may rely on social media to interact with friends. Studies have examined the responses which were related to emotional regulation and retaliation. Adolescents seem to be guided by emotion in the ways they process and use media. Adolescence neuroscience research has shown prefrontal cortex development matures until early adulthood (Crone & Konijn, 2018). The studies have given a better understanding of the regions of the brain which regulate behaviour based on media-based interactions. The focus of most studies was on anger following rejection, which often leads to retaliatory actions. Multiple paradigms have suggested that after being rejected online, adolescents become more aggressive. There was an association between more activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) after rejection and more giving coupled with less aggression (Crone & Konijn, 2018). DLPFC is, therefore, important in controlling the emotional response to rejection.
Most people share a lot of information about themselves on social media. Social media, as a result, involves a lot of self-referential thought. Receiving feedback after sharing the information may be in terms of reflected self-appraisals. Neuroimaging studies have shown that self-referential thoughts involve the PCC and MPFC. Studies done recently have suggested that there is a link between MPFC activity and the self-referential component of information sharing (Meshi, Tamir & Heekeren, 2015). The use of social media, which involves self-referential thought, also utilizes this network of brain regions, which is active in the thought about the self.
There is a constant supply of social rewards when using social media, with each reputation enhancement or suggestion. Facebook, for instance, enables its users to receive positive feedback in the form of a friend request or a ‘like’. Even such minimal cues of social success are able to activate the reward system of the brain and keep us coming back for more (Meshi, Tamir & Heekeren, 2015). The rewards users get from digital media activate a connection of brain regions which include the ventral tegmental area, ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) (Meshi, Tamir & Heekeren, 2015). Receiving positive social feedback and sharing information with others activate the ventral striatum and VMPFC. Giving others the same social rewards may also be analogous to other prosocial behaviour, which activates the reward system. Since receiving information elicits curiosity, reading other people’s posts elicits reward activity.
When using social media, one must make decisions, attend to stimuli, and execute motor movements among others. This means that there is the use of other brain systems when using social media such as the motor system, frontoparietal attention network, and the execute function network. Another focus should be put on the cognitive processes which make social media a platform that is unique for human social interaction. Research into the neural activities of social cognitive processes will give an understanding of the processes which take place in the use of social media (Meshi, Tamir & Heekeren, 2015). Future neuroscientific research in the field should give answers to the neurocognitive processes that are actually involved. Further studies should also give answers to the extent to which behaviours in social media mirror those in the offline social world.
References
Crone, E.A., & Konijn, E.A. (2018). Media use and brain development during adolescence. Nature Communications. 9(1), 588
Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier – Chapter 2: What’s It Doing to Their Brains?
Lieberman, M. D., & Eisenberger, N. I. (2009). Pains and pleasures of social life. Science, 323(5916), 890-891.
Meshi, D., Tamir, D. I., & Heekeren, H. R. (2015). The emerging neuroscience of social media. Trends in cognitive sciences, 19(12), 771-782
Veldhuis, J., Konijn, E. A., & Seidell, J. C. (2014). Negotiated media effects. Peer feedback modifies effects of media’s thin-body ideal on adolescent girls. Appetite, 73, 172-182.
Wartella, E., Beaudoin-Ryan, L., Blackwell, C. K., Cingel, D. P., Hurwitz, L. B., & Lauricella, A. R. (2016). What kind of adults will our children become? The impact of growing up in a media-saturated world. Journal of Children and Media, 10(1), 13-20.
Williams, K. D., & Jarvis, B. (2006). Cyberball: A program for use in research on interpersonal ostracism and acceptance. Behavior research methods, 38(1), 174-180.References
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Question 
How companies, organizations, and individuals use digital or social media to effectively communicate ideas, information, arguments, and messages to achieve a specific goal.
Digital Media’s Effect on the Brain
How digital or social media has transformed the communication of ideas, information, and arguments in society.
Access, analyze, interpret, and evaluate digital media to foster learning and to guide decision-making.
Make responsible choices in the creation and consumption of digital media based on awareness of global, social, ethical, and legal contexts.