Social networks such as facebook, myspace and twitter promote loneliness and depression.

When neuroscientist and Oxford Professor Susan Greenfield warned the British House of Lords about the alleged dangers of social networking, she touched off a firestorm that is still smoldering. 

Greenfield made several points, some that have been misrepresented in subsequent news, and others that are clearly debatable – but it’s beyond dispute that she hit a nerve, and her words are likely a foretelling of a larger debate still to come. 

At issue is whether Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Twitter and all other social networking sites, gadgets and tools are adversely affecting our brains–more specifically, children’s brains–and infantilizing our relationships by diminishing our ability to interact in meaningful ways. Additional arguments tagging along with these include whether social networking is promoting loneliness, which is in turn negatively affecting our health. 

To further explore the arguments for and against Greenfield’s position, I asked four authors who have addressed this topic from different angles to respond to the controversy. 

Does Facebook Make Us Lonely?

In this month’s Atlantic, Stephen Marche offers a detailed examination of the current state of social life in America. Encompassing where we live to how we live and who we live with while taking a backward glance at history along with a critical eye toward the present, Marche aims to show how American society is breaking down. According to Marche, loneliness is the result of that breakdown.

Marche asks a lot of great questions about Facebook’s role in creating, or at least contributing to, the loneliness epidemic in America.

Pointing out that our “web of connections” has “grown broader but shallower,” Marche notes that we are more isolated than ever before, and also more accessible than ever imagined.

At the same time, “loneliness and being alone are not the same thing, but both are on the rise. We meet fewer people. We gather less. And when we gather, our bonds are less meaningful and less easy.”

What are some of the thought-provoking questions Marche is asking?

•                Is Facebook part of the separating or part of the congregating; is it a huddling-together for warmth or a shuffling-away in pain?

•                Does the Internet make people lonely, or are lonely people more attracted to the Internet?

•                Is social networking spreading the very isolation it seemed designed to conquer?

Anxiety about how social media is affecting our social skills is topic I’ve talked about on this blog: how Facebook affects our friendships, if we’re able to be authentic as friends through a virtual medium, and how to use Facebook as a tool to enhance existing, “real” friendships.

Ultimately, I care about the questions and ideas Marche presents because I see implications for individual and collective well-being. If there is a loneliness epidemic, and if that epidemic is contributing to suicide risk rather than resilience, Facebook’s role in creating that epidemic is worth serious consideration.

If you’d like to read the whole article (which I’d encourage!), you can find here. What do you think? Has Facebook increased loneliness or isolation? Are other factors at work? What implications do you see for mental health promotion or suicide prevention?

Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?

FACEBOOK ARRIVED IN THE MIDDLE of a dramatic increase in the quantity and intensity of human loneliness, a rise that initially made the site’s promise of greater connection seem deeply attractive. Americans are more solitary than ever before. In 1950, less than 10 percent of American households contained only one person. By 2010, nearly 27 percent of households had just one person. Solitary living does not guarantee a life of unhappiness, of course. In his recent book about the trend toward living alone, Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, writes: “Reams of published research show that it’s the quality, not the quantity of social interaction, that best predicts loneliness.” True. But before we begin the fantasies of happily eccentric singledom, of divorcées dropping by their knitting circles after work for glasses of Drew Barrymore pinot grigio, or recent college graduates with perfectly articulated, Steampunk-themed, 300-square-foot apartments organizing croquet matches with their book clubs, we should recognize that it is not just isolation that is rising sharply. It’s loneliness, too. And loneliness makes us miserable.

Final Topic Chosen:

Possible Titles: Society Lives In A Figment Of Their Imagination
Possible Titles: An Anti-Social Civilization Is Right Beneath Our Feet

Intro: Our society is becoming narcissistic due to the excessive amount of time spent by people on social networks. Social networks provide people with entertainment but it is inevitable that it also endorses people to become excessively preoccupied with matters of no importance. 

Body:

I will state the situation and then give my perspective on it 

• It is proven every day that media inevitably affects our society excessively. Modern society is blinded by what they see on the media and subconsciously they are being affected not only mentally but also physically. Without even realizing it, people go through psychological changes due to media and that is exactly what I will be giving my opinion on throughout the written task.
• I will testify what I decided to revolve my written task on (social networks)

              -they are the blame for psychological alters in the brain 

                         -depression

                         -loneliness

                         -the state of being narcissistic 

-Opinions and anecdotes presented throughout written task, as well as pictures and statistics
-It will be designed as if it was a real op-ed

Conclusion: Give my last strong opinion and advice towards the social networking issue

-Do you want to end up lonely? Depressed? 

Video games, toys sold online and virtual games (action) are slowly but surely alluring violence in the long run

"The younger generation is becoming more influenced by negative ideas rather than innocent tactics."

The video game 'Grand Theft Auto' was the cause of many murders

Imagine if the entertainment industry created a video game in which you could decapitate police officers, kill them with a sniper rifle, massacre them with a chainsaw, and set them on fire.

Think anyone would buy such a violent game?

They would, and they have. The game Grand Theft Auto has sold more than 35 million copies, with worldwide sales approaching $2 billion.

Two weeks ago, a multi-million dollar lawsuit was filed in Alabama against the makers and marketers of Grand Theft Auto, claiming that months of playing the game led a teenager to go on a rampage and kill three men, two of them police officers.

Can a video game train someone to kill? Correspondent Ed Bradley reports.

---

Grand Theft Auto is a world governed by the laws of depravity. See a car you like? Steal it. Someone you don't like? Stomp her. A cop in your way? Blow him away.

There are police at every turn, and endless opportunities to take them down. It is 360 degrees of murder and mayhem: slickly produced, technologically brilliant, and exceedingly violent.

And now, the game is at the center of a civil lawsuit involving the murders of three men in the small town of Fayette, Ala. They were gunned down by 18-year-old Devin Moore, who had played Grand Theft Auto day and night for months.

Attorney Jack Thompson, a long-time crusader against video-game violence, is bringing the suit. "What we're saying is that Devin Moore was, in effect, trained to do what he did. He was given a murder simulator," says Thompson.

"He bought it as a minor. He played it hundreds of hours, which is primarily a cop-killing game. It's our theory, which we think we can prove to a jury in Alabama, that, but for the video-game training, he would not have done what he did."

Moore's victims were Ace Mealer, a 911 dispatcher; James Crump, a police officer; and Arnold Strickland, another officer who was on patrol in the early morning hours of June 7, 2003, when he brought in Moore on suspicion of stealing a car.

Moore had no criminal history, and was cooperative as Strickland booked him inside the Fayette police station. Then suddenly, inexplicably, Moore snapped.

According to Moore's own statement, he lunged at Officer Arnold Strickland, grabbing his .40-caliber Glock automatic and shot Strickland twice, once in the head. Officer James Crump heard the shots and came running. Moore met him in the hallway, and fired three shots into Crump, one of them in the head.

Moore kept walking down the hallway towards the door of the emergency dispatcher. There, he turned and fired five shots into Ace Mealer. Again, one of those shots was in the head. Along the way, Moore had grabbed a set of car keys. He went out the door to the parking lot, jumped into a police cruiser, and took off. It all took less than a minute, and three men were dead.

"The video game industry gave him a cranial menu that popped up in the blink of an eye, in that police station," says Thompson. "And that menu offered him the split-second decision to kill the officers, shoot them in the head, flee in a police car, just as the game itself trained them to do."

After his capture, Moore is reported to have told police, "Life is like a video game. Everybody's got to die sometime." Moore is awaiting trial in criminal court. A suit filed by the families of two of his victims claims that Moore acted out a scenario found in Grand Theft Auto: The player is a street thug trying to take over the city. In one scenario, the player can enter a police precinct, steal a uniform, free a convict from jail, escape by shooting police, and flee in a squad car.

"I've now got the entire police force after me. So you have to eliminate all resistance," says Nicholas Hamner, a law student at the University of Alabama, who demonstrated Grand Theft Auto for 60 Minutes. Like millions of gamers, the overwhelming majority, he says he plays it simply for fun.

David Walsh, a child psychologist who's co-authored a study connecting violent video games to physical aggression, says the link can be explained in part by pioneering brain research recently done at the National Institutes of Health -- which shows that the teenage brain is not fully developed.

Does repeated exposure to violent video games have more of an impact on a teenager than it does on an adult?

"It does. And that's largely because the teenage brain is different from the adult brain. The impulse control center of the brain, the part of the brain that enables us to think ahead, consider consequences, manage urges -- that's the part of the brain right behind our forehead called the prefrontal cortex," says Walsh. "That's under construction during the teenage years. In fact, the wiring of that is not completed until the early 20s."

Walsh says this diminished impulse control becomes heightened in a person who has additional risk factors for criminal behavior. Moore had a profoundly troubled upbringing, bouncing back and forth between a broken home and a handful of foster families.

"And so when a young man with a developing brain, already angry, spends hours and hours and hours rehearsing violent acts, and then, and he's put in this situation of emotional stress, there's a likelihood that he will literally go to that familiar pattern that's been wired repeatedly, perhaps thousands and thousands of times," says Walsh.

"You've got probably millions of kids out there playing violent games like Grand Theft Auto and other violent games, who never hurt a fly," says Bradley. "So what does that do to your theory?"

"You know, not every kid that plays a violent video game is gonna turn to violence. And that's because they don't have all of those other risk factors going on," says Walsh. "It's a combination of risk factors, which come together in a tragic outcome."

Arnold Strickland had been a police officer for 25 years when he was murdered. His brother Steve, a Methodist minister, wants the video game industry to pay.

"Why does it have to come to a point to where somebody's life has to be taken before they realize that these games have repercussions to them? Why does it have to be to where my brother's not here anymore," says Steve Strickland. "There's not a day that goes by that I don't think about him."

Strickland, along with Mealer's parents, are suing Moore, as well as Wal-Mart and GameStop, which sold Moore two versions of Grand Theft Auto. Both companies sent us letters insisting they bear no responsibility for Moore's actions, and that the game is played by millions of law-abiding citizens.

Take-Two Interactive, the creator of Grand Theft Auto, and Sony, which makes the device that runs the game, are also being sued. Both declined to talk to 60 Minutes on camera. Instead, they referred it to Doug Lowenstein, who represents the video game industry.

Lowenstein is not named in the lawsuit, and says he can't comment on it directly. "It's not my job to defend individual titles," says Lowenstein. "My job is to defend the right of people in this industry to create the products that they want to create. That's free expression."

"A police officer we spoke to said, 'Our job is dangerous enough as it is without having our kids growing up playing those games and having the preconceived notions of "let's kill an officer." It's almost like putting a target on us.' Can you see his point?" asks Bradley.

"Look, I have great respect for the law enforcement officers of this country.... I don't think video games inspire people to commit crimes," says Lowenstein. "If people have a criminal mind, it's not because they're getting their ideas from the video games. There's something much more deeply wrong with the individual. And it's not the game that's the problem."

But shouldn't Moore, alone, face the consequences of his decision to kill three men?

"There's plenty of blame to go around. The fact is we think Devin Moore is responsible for what he did," says Thompson. "But we think that the adults who created these games and in effect programmed Devon Moore and assisted him to kill are responsible at least civilly.

Thompson says video game companies had reason to foresee that some of their products would trigger violence, and bolsters his case with claims that the murders in Fayette were not the first thought to be inspired by Grand Theft Auto.

In Oakland, Calif., detectives said the game provoked a street gang accused of robbing and killing six people. In Newport, Tenn., two teenagers told police the game was an influence when they shot at passing cars with a .22 caliber rifle, killing one person. But to date, not a single court case has acknowledged a link between virtual violence and the real thing.

Paul Smith is a First Amendment lawyer who has represented video game companies. "What you have in almost every generation is the new medium that comes along. And it's subject of almost a hysterical attack," says Smith. "If you went back to the 1950s, it's hard to believe now, but comic books were blamed for juvenile delinquency. And I think what you really have here is very much the same phenomenon playing itself out again with a new medium."

Why does he think the courts have ruled against these kinds of lawsuits?

"If you start saying that we're going to sue people because one individual out there read their book or played their game and decided to become a criminal, there is no stopping point," says Smith. "It's a huge new swath of censorship that will be imposed on the media."

Despite its violence, or because of it, the fact is that millions of people like playing Grand Theft Auto. Steve Strickland can't understand why.

"The question I have to ask the manufacturers of them is, 'Why do you make games that target people that are to protect us, police officers, people that we look up to -- people that I respect -- with high admiration,'" says Strickland.

"'Why do you want to market a game that gives people the thoughts, even the thoughts of thinking it's OK to shoot police officers? Why do you wanna do that?'"

Both Wal-Mart and GameStop, where Moore purchased Grand Theft Auto, say they voluntarily card teenagers in an effort to keep violent games from underage kids. But several states are considering laws that would ban the sale of violent games to those under 17.

Disney Channel patronizes the idea of happy endings

Disney Channel promotes kids to believe that in the end there is always a happy ending. Is this a good or a bad thing? Of course, we don't want to scare young children but at the same time is it right to give them false hope? Hard to believe but every disney story primarily was written with a disastrous ending.

"Someone should sue Disney for making every girl believe she has a prince..."

The knowledge of fairy tales is that it always has a "happy ending". "They lived happily ever after." However, were fairy tales always so cookie cutter clean? Many of our versions of fairy tales have a different version, with a very different ending. After Disney got a hold of it, they twisted the darker ending to appeal more to the viewing of children. I will take some of the more popular fairy tales and give you the originally written version on how the story is supposed to end.

1. Snow White
(Grimm)

In the Disney version, the prince awakens Snow White with a kiss. They live happily every after, but it was not a kiss that awakened the fair beauty. In the Grimm version, Snow White does eat the apple and does appear dead and the dwarfs do leave her in an above ground coffin, but the prince does not just come up and give her a kiss. He is given the coffin as a pity gift from the dwarfs and, as its being carried away, servants stumble and the apple is dislodged from her throat. The prince asks her to marry him. The queen shows up at their wedding and is forced to where shoes of hot iron. She dances around until she drops dead. A small detail that is different, Disney asked for Snow Whites heart from the huntsman. Grimm asked for the lungs and liver.

2. The Little Mermaid
(Hans Andersen's)

Ursula takes Ariel's voice and orders her that she has three days to get the princes love or she belongs to Ursula. Prince Eric kills Ursula and King Triton turns Ariel back into a human. They get married and live happily ever after. Andersen saw this differently. The mermaid sisters came to her, after giving their hair up their hair, and gave her a knife to kill the prince. If she kills him, she will become a mermaid again instead of die. She cannot kill the man she loves so she dives into the ocean and dies. She is allowed to win an immortal soul by doing good deed in the afterlife. The Disney version cut any reference that mermaids don't have immortal souls. Ariel was also quiet and well behaved in the book, where as, in the movie she is independent and defiant




3. Sleeping Beauty

(Grimm)

Three good fairies bestow upon the baby Aurora two gifts, leaving one more. Maleficent curses the child to prick her finger on a spinning wheel and die when she turns 16. The last fairy uses her wish to turn the curse into a sleep spell instead of a death spell. Aurora can be awakened with a kiss. She is taken into hiding, where she meets a man and falls in love. She doesn't know it's the prince that she is already betrothed to. The curse comes true and the prince saves her with, what else, a kiss after a nasty battle with a dragon. In the Grimm version, its twelve good fairies and it is the thirteenth fairy that puts the curse on the baby, which the twelfth fairy revises. The sleep would last a hundred years starting when she turned fifteen, not sixtee, and pricked her finger. Some random prince comes around and kisses her. There was no thorn hedge to cut down and no wicked dragon. They get married. No revenge on the evil fairy is taken.

4. Cinderella
(Grimm)

First off, the stepsisters in Grimm's version were pretty but considered ugly brats in the Disney movie. Cinderella picked lentil, planted a hazel branch at her mother's grave and birds gave her a dresses for the festivities, which lasted days with the Grimm version. There was not a fairy godmother or an order to be back by twelve. Cinderella simply ran away from the prince any time he tried to discovery where she lived. All and all, prince ordered the slippers to be tried on every girl. The girls in the Grimm version cut off pieces of their feet to fit the slipper on while Disney simply tried to squeeze the feet in the slipper, failing. The prince found the real girl which was Cinderella, of course, and married her. At Cinderella's wedding, the girls stood on each side of her. Pigeons picked out an eye from each girl and when they turned to walk back down the aisle, the pigeons poked out the other eyes on the opposite side.