Linkbaiting Science: Twitter and Fast-Twitch Ethics

I love it. Just as Twitter’s Ev Williams appears on Oprah and flow apps seem positioned to become as ubiquitous as cell phones, researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang extrapolates from a brain study to suggest apps like Twitter can confuse our moral compass:

[Tweet this: Rapid-fire media may confuse your moral compass]

The study’s authors used compelling, real-life stories to induce admiration for virtue or skill, or compassion for physical or social pain, in 13 volunteers (the emotion felt was verified through a careful protocol of pre- and post-imaging interviews).

Brain imaging showed that the volunteers needed six to eight seconds to fully respond to stories of virtue or social pain.

However, once awakened, the responses lasted far longer than the volunteers’ reactions to stories focused on physical pain.

The study raises questions about the emotional cost—particularly for the developing brain—of heavy reliance on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter.

“If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality,” Immordino-Yang said.

So the sound bite becomes ‘Twitter is blocks compassion,” although that is not what was studied. It’s simply an extrapolation, and it’s based on a falsehood. The unexamined premise if that if you use Twitter (or other streaming apps) then you never pause for six or eight seconds to reflect on what is going by. That’s not true for me, and I am sure that others stop and think about what they are reading. Twitter is not a game of Quake; we aren’t running from zombies or throwing bombs.

It’s a conversational milieu, like a cocktail party, not a battlefield.

But as I have predicted, the convention media and other arbiters of popular culture will attack Twitter and flow apps as illegitimate — the Oprah episode to one side — and the nature of the changes that web-based connection will introduce to society will be demonized for years to come.

The hype about Twitter will lead to a backlash about its dark side: we will hear more about the negatives of ‘fast-twitch ethics’, I am sure.

[update - Discovered a post by my pal, Jamais Cascio on this same research: Social Networking and the Brain: Continuous Partial Empathy?]