The Message Still Matters
“‘We like to speculate about technology in general’, but the content of the message matters more than medium we receive it through, says The Frontal Cortex Blog.
“It’s very difficult to generalize about ‘technology’ in the abstract. We squander a lot of oxygen and ink worrying about the effects of ‘television’ and the ‘internet,’ but the data quickly demonstrates that these broad categories are mostly meaningless. When it comes to changing the brain, content is king. Here are the scientists: ‘In the same way that there is no single effect of ‘eating food,’ there is also no single effect of ‘watching television’ or ‘playing video games.’ Different foods contain different chemical components and thus lead to different physiological effects; different kinds of media have different content, task requirements,and attentional demands and thus lead to different behavioral effects.'”
