Facebook hurts grades, creates more narcissistic tendencies for teens

EUGENE, Ore. – Given the massive marketing of social networking sites such as Facebook with 550 million users, it’s no big surprise that kids are wired to the teeth these days with parents thinking more tech gadgets will “help their grades;” instead, Facebook and constant Internet use hurts grades, say experts, and creates “more narcissistic tendencies in teens.”

Simply put, too much Facebook time is bad for teens. According to Larry Rosen, a social media researcher at California State University, who presented a report on “digital natives” at the Aug. 6 American Psychological Association meeting in Washington D.C., teens are too wired to come up for air. In turn, MSNBC TV report Aug. 7 how Rosen thinks “today’s teens and college students are what researchers call ‘digital natives,’ or the ‘iGeneration,’ a generation constantly connected to the Internet and Facebook, texting and instant messaging. Now, a set of new studies reveals the psychological effects of constant Facebooking” is damaging to how young people think and act. In fact, many “wired” youth are unable to look people in the eye or present themselves while standing up and speaking.

Facebook taking over the lives of many youth: hurting grades and character

The news about Facebook is bad, stated Rosen during his Aug. 6 report to mental health experts because, he says, teens who use Facebook “show more narcissistic tendencies.”

In turn, parents and teachers here in Eugene have noted for a long time that “kids today are not as friendly as we would expect.” There’s also a growing number of Eugene parents who are limiting their teens time online because they’re either in summer school or “have poor grades.”

“If you feel that you have to use some sort of computer program to surreptitiously monitor your child’s social networking, you are wasting your time. Your child will find a workaround in a matter of minutes,” explained Rosen during this MSNBC TV report Aug. 7, while also stating that “you have to start talking about appropriate technology use early and often and build trust, so that when there is a problem, whether it is being bullied or seeing a disturbing image, your child will talk to you about it.”

After reviewing 300 teens in his study, Rosen said he found that online social networking can “detract from a teen’s learning and grades.”
Rosen also said he noticed that the kids who most frequently “had Facebook open on their computers had the lowest retention of what they read.”
Another study reported by Rosen “showed a similar effect of texting,” stated the MSNBC TV report from Aug. 7.

Facebook becomes phonebook for predators stalking America’s kids

Fears have spread throughout many usually laid-back central Oregon coast summer rental neighborhoods — and in other family communities nationwide — in the wake of the recent brutal murder of 8-year old boy in Brooklyn, New York; while it’s revealed that the suspect, Levi Aron, had “238 Facebook friends,” with Aron’s Facebook page stating: “IS YOUR FAMILY SAFE?”

Not one of “those 238 ‘friends’ of this guy (Levi Aron) on Facebook did anything it seems to stop him from asking is your family safe. I want my family safe,” asserted Leana while walking with her two sons, age 6 and 9, down a central Oregon coastal road this past weekend. “I used to tell them to walk around the house to the beach. Now, I walk with them. That’s what fear does to you,” the mother added in the wake of the brutal murder of 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky who went missing July 13 in his Orthodox Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood.

On July 14, it was reported that his body was found and dismembered. What’s known is that the suspected killer, Levi Aron, was hard wired into his Facebook that experts say has now become a phonebook for predators who stalk children and others with easy access to users personal information on the frequently hacked Facebook and other social media that are known for their security woes when it comes to keeping user personal information safe from “those who use it as hunters track animals in the woods,” said one expert.

Meanwhile the message from child abuse safety officials in the Eugene area is that good health also means protecting yourself, and your family from the predators who are using Facebook and other social networking sites to stalk kids, families and anyone it seems to please, say experts who’ve studied and tracked Facebook nuts such as Levi Aron.

People like Levi Aron carry out their social life on Facebook with no good results

The Brooklyn boy’s body was “found chopped up in a suitcase,” stated the New York neighborhood newspaper the Village Voice July 17, that also reported that some of the boy’s remains were found in Levi Aron’s refrigerator and in his apartment where he spent his time on a PC doing his Facebook messages to some “238 friends.”

“Drawn by the illusion of companionship with the demands of intimacy, we conduct ‘rick free’ affairs on Second Life and confuse the scattershot postings on a Facebook wall with authentic communication,” states the introduction to “Alone Together; Why We Expect More From Technology And Less From Each Other,” by MIT technology and society specialist Professor Sherry Turkle who spent 15-years exploring why more than 500 million people feel a need to expose their personal lives on Facebook that’s now creating huge social and personal safety problems worldwide.

Based on interviews with hundreds of children and adults who are addicted to Facebook as a means to carry out their social lives, Turkle describes “new, unsettling relationships between friends, lovers, parents and children, and new instabilities in how we understand privacy and community, intimacy and solitude.”

Facebook becomes a story of “emotional dislocation” for many lonely people

Facebook and social media – for many sick people such as Levi Aron – “is a story of emotional dislocation, and of risks taken unknowingly,” states Turkle who is the Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. Turkle is also founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, and a licensed clinical psychologist.

The suspect’s Facebook page, under the name Levi A., has now been widely featured on TV and Internet sites since the brutal murder of the 8-year-old boy. Aron’s Facebook page included “238 friends,” stated the Village Voice report, while also noting that “most most disturbing is the Facebook group Levis belongs to entitled, “IS YOUR FAMILY SAFE? Find out who really lives in your area.”

“That scared the heck out of me,” said Eugene local Leana while walking with her two sons, age 6 and 9 down a central Oregon coastal road recently. “I think about this crazy man and his Facebook group who are in to stalking kids anywhere, and you know I’m warning others to watch their Facebook because there’s sick people out there.”

In turn, the Facebook page that Aron and “238” other “friends” used on Facebook to track kids and other horrors is linked to “a catalog of sex offenders,” adds the Village Voice report while noting New York Police Department’s commissioner Ray Kelly pointing to an ongoing investigation into Aron’s Facebook “friends” and what others are up to on Facebook.

Brain refocus vital to avoid computer, Internet burnout for good health

Besides being aware of the dangers of putting yourself and your family’s personal information and photos on Facebook, experts in the Eugene area are telling “Baby Boomers” and senior center groups that “maybe you go back to sending photo albums over posting photos of the kids on Facebook.”

Also, Boomers are warning the younger generation that too much time on Facebook may not be healthy to one’s mental outlook.

Due to overuse of technology – starring at computer, smartphone, iPad and other screens that take you into cyberspace – “your brain sends you false messages all the time throughout your day,” state leading brain experts in what’s become “brain vs. technology” in recent books by neuroscientists concerned about brain health in a time of massive Internet use.

More and more Americans have brains that are leading them down a dangerous path resulting in depression, anxiety, troubled relationships, addiction, excessive anger, emotional isolation and other woes, says Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz in a new “brain health” book. For example, “She’s going to leave me!” is the brain message, writes Dr. Schwartz, while saying a response might be “check my e-mail again to see if she responded, and everything is okay?”

Neuroscientists also make the point that many people today “reply more on technology than their own brains” to understand human relationships when, in fact, a computer, a Facebook encounter is simply cyber space and not real.

A computer can’t smell, for example. It’s a machine, while the human brain is “us.”

What makes us human revealed in the “tell-tale brain”

“It’s the little things that make you realize that being online all the time changes you in some way,” says famed neurologist V.S. Ramachandran, whose taken a Sherlock Homes-style approach to try and understand why people “online” desire to escape normal life over cyberspace in his new book “The Tell-Tale Brain” A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human.”

Ramachandran, who’s lectured here in the Eugene area, is the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and Distinguished Professor with the Psychology Department and Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego. The professor describes the brain as “looking like a walnut made of two mirror-image halves,” that needs food, exercise, fresh air, sunlight and human interactions to stay healthy.

In turn, Ramachandran traces the “strange links between neurology and behavior,” while explaining that the human brain can exhibit “bizarre behaviors in terms of the innermost workings of the brain,” when it’s exposed to technology on a daily and regular basis.

Such warnings, it seems, do not amount to a hill of beans in a world that’s getting more wired daily with no stopping cyberspace and it’s negative and unhealthy influence on both young and old brains that “absorb” information like a sponge.

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