Much like the article regarding the use of google, I have to slightly disagree with the tone of this article. Yes, there is a connection between mediums such as television watching and the development for children. If I remember from my developmental courses, children who watch television at a very early age often do not hit social or communicative milestones at the same time as their non-television watching peers. It's theorized that this is due to a lack of social time with the parents or other humans. However, claiming that Facebook or Twitter is causing Austism is a bit much. (I am not too surprised that the paper is claiming this, it is not known for it's fact checking and it often called a rag in the UK.)
The biggest problem I have with this claim is the following:
"She pointed out that autistic people, who usually find it hard to communicate, were particularly comfortable using computers.
'Of course, we do not know whether the current increase in autism is due more to increased awareness and diagnosis of autism, or whether it can - if there is a true increase - be in any way linked to an increased prevalence among people of spending time in screen relationships. Surely it is a point worth considering,' she added."
There are many reasons why children and adults with spectrum disorders find it easier to communicate with computers. Often, text is easier to interrupt than face-to-face communication, especially if the person has problems with facial-emotion recognition. Furthermore, if a person has communicative disorders as a result of his or her spectrum disorder, computers massively facilitate communication where expression one's wants and needs was previously impossible. Instead, this "cause-and-effect" sort of observational data seems to be just correlations.
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This page contains a single entry by maclink published on February 24, 2009 5:24 AM.
Much like the article regarding the use of google, I have to slightly disagree with the tone of this article. Yes, there is a connection between mediums such as television watching and the development for children. If I remember from my developmental courses, children who watch television at a very early age often do not hit social or communicative milestones at the same time as their non-television watching peers. It's theorized that this is due to a lack of social time with the parents or other humans. However, claiming that Facebook or Twitter is causing Austism is a bit much. (I am not too surprised that the paper is claiming this, it is not known for it's fact checking and it often called a rag in the UK.)
The biggest problem I have with this claim is the following:
"She pointed out that autistic people, who usually find it hard to communicate, were particularly comfortable using computers.
'Of course, we do not know whether the current increase in autism is due more to increased awareness and diagnosis of autism, or whether it can - if there is a true increase - be in any way linked to an increased prevalence among people of spending time in screen relationships. Surely it is a point worth considering,' she added."
There are many reasons why children and adults with spectrum disorders find it easier to communicate with computers. Often, text is easier to interrupt than face-to-face communication, especially if the person has problems with facial-emotion recognition. Furthermore, if a person has communicative disorders as a result of his or her spectrum disorder, computers massively facilitate communication where expression one's wants and needs was previously impossible. Instead, this "cause-and-effect" sort of observational data seems to be just correlations.