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Karpinski says she isn't surprised by her findings but clarifies that the study does not suggest that Facebook directly causes lower grades, merely that there's some relationship between the two factors. "Maybe [Facebook users] are just prone to distraction. Maybe they are just procrastinators," Karpinski told TIME.com in a phone interview on Monday, April...
John Kamin, 23, a student at Hofstra University in New York who uses Facebook, says it's "absurd" to associate the social network with poor grades or lack of aptitude. "It's a networking tool for people," says Kamin, who adds that he spends about an hour a day on Facebook, far less time than he spends playing the addictive game Brick Breaker on his BlackBerry - there's that question of users' distractability and tendency to procrastinate. But, Kamin says, "I don't think someone is more or less intelligent because they sign up for it." (See pictures...
Karpinski and Duberstein's study isn't the first to associate Facebook with diminished mental abilities. In February, Oxford University neuroscientist Susan Greenfield cautioned Britain's House of Lords that social networks like Facebook and Bebo were "infantilizing the brain into the state of small children" by shortening the attention span and providing constant instant gratification. And in his new book, iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small warns of a decreased ability among devotees of social networks and other modern technology to read real-life facial expressions and understand the emotional context...
Some experts dismiss all studies of Internet use as flawed, since there is no reasonable way to control for the myriad variables that may affect such research. For its part, Facebook declined to address the specific findings of the new study but issued a statement on Monday, April 13, saying that Facebook isn't the only diversion around; TV and video games can be just as distracting as online social networks. The company also pointed to a study released earlier this month by researchers at the University of Melbourne showing that personal Internet use at work can help focus workers...
...most accounts, students spend a heck of a lot of time logged onto Facebook, a circumstance that irks educators, who complain of students messaging friends or posting snarky status updates from their laptops instead of paying attention to lectures. It was this habit that first got Karpinski interested in the topic while she was earning her master's degree in developmental psychology at West Virginia University. "When I became a teacher's assistant, I started noticing my students' using [Facebook] and becoming obsessed with it," says Karpinski - who is not on Facebook, despite her fellow classmates' badgering efforts...