Lady Greenfield, an eminent British professor, has warned that new social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook risk “infantizing” the minds of its younger generations of users.
Her reaction reminds me of that of Aristole, who when asked about the value of books, warned that the then-new technology risked causing future generations to lose the “art of memory” and, thus, the art of story-telling.
My point is that so-called experts—even as brilliant as Aristole and Lady Greenfield—should be careful when making predictions about new technologies. Just because they are new doesn’t necessarily make them bad.
