The hazards of screen culture, and the first one is ... Susan Greenfield ...

(Above: oh dear, the thing that lurks on screens strike again).

Well there it goes, and civilisation and the pond will never be the same.

It's the end of the Lara Bingle bump, and quality television network Ten style.

The whisper around the traps is that Telstra is looking for a television network to buy. Seven's a little too premium with an unwilling owner, and there's nothing to be done about Nine until it goes into receivership and its burdensome debt structure gets sorted.

The last time Nine was floated as a Telstra purchase option was back in May with this story Telstra eyes troubled Nine television network (may be paywall affected) when the debt was reckoned to be $3.8 bn. Even amongst chums, that's more than loose change.

That leaves Ten, driven into the ground by the current Murdoch-inspired cabal, aided and abetted by that classy media entrepreneur Gina Rinehart - you know, the one that routinely shows fear and loathing and disdain for journalists.

Could the last Bingle bump see Ten bumped to Telstra? Aided and abetted by the Shire and assorted other follies that have seen advertising revenue drop and the share price spiral into the ground.

Who knows, but it's a reminder of the dangers of television, and the deadly plasticity of mind-warping screen culture.

Yep, and that's the cue for the pond to be drawn, like a moth to the flame, to the latest column from Susan Greenfield, a scientist always alert to the danger of screens in our lives.

Of course you could put her message all in one fear-laden New Yorker cover:

Is there no end to the hazards of screen culture? The world reduced to tweets and texts?

Greenfield's at it again thanks to Fairfax, who've offered up How digital culture is rewiring our brains, a familiar regurgitation of all Greenfield's standard talking points, as well as a handy promo for her forthcoming tour down under.

As usual, Greenfield is just asking questions about all-pervasive digital technology, without providing any coherent answers, while hinting at the need for digital panic, fear, uncertainty and doubt (put it another way, games and gamers are ruining themselves and the world).

And as usual, it's always fun to spot the point where she inserts a disclaimer in relation to relevant research. That's the way it goes, question, thesis, and disclaimer.

So first of all we turn to social networking and a hideous loss of empathy over the past thirty years, and the last decade in particular, which might well be due to screens in our lives:

Such data does not, of course, prove a causal link but just as with smoking and cancer some 50 years ago, epidemiologists could investigate any possible connection.

Such data might not even be reliable, especially when grappling with the fuzzy concept of empathy. No doubt it was the presence of feature film screens throughout the land that led to a startling decline in empathy for Jewish people during the years of Nazi rule in Germany.

Then there's video games, which pose all sorts of speculative possibilities:

Second, video games. Neuropsychological studies suggest frequent and continued playing might lead to enhanced recklessness. Data also indicates reduced attention spans and possible addiction. In line with this, significant chemical and even structural changes are being reported in the brains of obsessional gamers.

Note all the clever qualifiers and adept fudges. Might lead to enhanced recklessness, for example. Compare and contrast this to the enhanced recklessness you might get from a night on the piss, or a dose of speed.

Fling in an "indicates" and "possible addiction" and the next thing you know you're off with obsessional gamers. Compare and contrast this to the significant chemical and even structural changes induced in the brains of obsessional poker machine players.

It's always the games and the gamers that cop it from Greenfield, an obsession which led to Miranda the Devine and the like becoming obsessional about Greenfield. After all the Devine and the rest of the right wing commentariat aren't happy until they've got something to blame. Getting pissed in the streets and going the biff? Must be a gamer.

Eventually the Devine tired of the game and moved on to new speculative endeavours. Was it perhaps because of this sort of rubbery Greenfield speculation:

No single paper is ever likely to be accepted unanimously as conclusive but a survey of 136 reports using 381 independent tests, and conducted on more than 130,000 participants, concluded that video games led to significant increases in desensitisation, physiological arousal, aggression and a decrease in prosocial behaviour.

Indeed. Why it's also possible that participation in the military, turning up to actual warfare, and indulging in post-colonial adventures might lead to significant increases in desensitisation, physiological arousal, aggression and a decrease in prosocial behaviour on the killing fields.

These days Greenfield has a new problem to add to deviant games and gamers. Search engines!

Third, search engines. Can the internet improve cognitive skills and learning, as has been argued?

This is of course merely a straw question, which cleverly conflates the internet, and the content that might be on it, with search engines, a very specific activity undertaken in the context of the internet.

That's so Greenfield can get down to the real business, which is to get deeply concerned about the internet and get us all thinking about the redeeming joy of reading a good book:

The problem is that efficient information processing is not synonymous with knowledge or understanding. Even the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, has said: ''I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information - and, especially, of stressful information - is, in fact, affecting cognition. It is, in fact, affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.''

There, even Eric Schmidt thinks a good book is better for you. You might think you're just having a surf, but actually the information is stressing your brain. Could there be an upside?

Given the plasticity of the brain, it is not surprising adapting to a cyber-environment will also lead to positives - for example, enhanced performance in skills that are continuously rehearsed, such as a mental agility similar to that needed in IQ tests or in visuomotor co-ordination. However, we urgently need a fuller picture.

Uh huh, it's only a speculative upside.

So why do we need a fuller picture? Well somewhere along the way you'll usually get a line like this:

The design of innovative software that attempted to offset some of the perceived or agreed deficiencies arising from our digital culture would be enormously valuable. We need more detailed profiles of computer use, along with surveys of the views and insights of parents, teachers and employers. Then, in the light of all this input, this hypothetical initiative would make recommendations. It might well include a root and branch re-examination of education and subsequent training that best equips the citizen of the 21st century to be personally fulfilled and useful to society.

Yes we need innovative software and a screen-based software-driven solution to our screen-based software-driven problems.

This is the sort of tosh that back in 2007 saw Greenfield launching MindFit, PC-based software alleged to halt mental decline. (a BBC news item here).

One of Britain's top scientists is joining the likes of Chris Tarrant and Nicole Kidman by putting her name to a new wave of computer games designed to keep the brain fit.
As if the gym was not tyranny enough, now there's another fitness routine that's playing on the insecurities of the masses - the brain workout.
But at least couch potatoes will not have to stir from the sofa to take part. This path to cerebral salvation can be navigated sitting down, in front of a screen, with a computer game.

Don't you just love it? You do?

Well that reminds me, the pond has invented the perfect exerciser for you. All you have to do is sit on it in front of the television, let it shake you like James Packer shaking down the NSW government, and within thirty days, you will have a body equal to a Greek Adonis (no exchanges or refunds).

Occasionally readers of Greenfield get agitated, as with this bit of angst in relation to her ill-informed speculation that autism and ADHD might be related to the intertubes or screens or whatever.

But she usually gets a free kick when she ventures into the antipodes - this time she's turning up as guest speaker at Creative Innovation Asia Pacific 2012 Never mind that in the past decade she's spent most of the time outside her speciality fulminating about creative digital innovations and the dangers they pose to the world - that's just the qualification you need to cultivate a cup of creative innovation.

Will they have a screen for her at the show, will they stream her, will the plasticity of the audiences' brains be frayed and fried a little more?

Part of Greenfield's skill is to conflate and draw together unrelated issues and treat them as another way to ask speculative questions - so brain change is as significant and as poorly understood as climate change.

Which is why the pond would like to include this quote from a 2008 review of one of her books because nothing much as changed in the interval (to get the full cultural reference you need to know that agitated Colonels in Tunbridge Wells frequently write to the newspapers deploring the way teenagers will turn out sinister and different to said agitated Colonels):

... It is not her fault that she can't get from mental metaphor to neural quiddity. It is her fault, though, to give the impression that she can - by leaping so irresponsibly from metaphoric to literal, from mental to neural; or by asserting that neural networking "personalises" the brain. In a sense, it must do, but this simply begs the question, using a formulation that any non-scientist could blithely use - no more authoritative than her account of human individualism as a naturalised version of the Seven Deadly Sins. Despite her expertise, Greenfield is unable to do more than the rest of us - deduce from brain activity and behaviour to speculative causes and effects, and rely on dubious metaphors. If we discard the metaphors, what are we left with? A complaint as ancient as Plato's against writing, or Renaissance elites against the printing press. The neuroscience never marries up with the complaint, just impressively but speciously adorns it. Which is why Greenfield's speculations, interesting as they are, don't get much further than Tunbridge Wells whimsy. (here)

Of course writing changed the world, and so did the printing press, and so did telecommunications and radio, and so has the screen, but the fervid paranoid imaginings of Greenfield in relation to screens and brain plasticity holds as much water as the notion that television ruined the baby boomer generation (hold on, could it be that television helps explain why Greenfield has such a bee in her bonnet about screens?)

The one thing we can be sure about is that Greenfield is more a part of the problem she dreams up than a part of any solution.

She is in fact a child of the screen, made known by the screen, and relieved of deep questioning about the screen by the need to keep constantly moving, like an agitated Colonel or butterfly.

Shwe's a dab hand at publicity, trades on her status as a scientist and a baroness, and so has scored her very own tag in the science section of The Guardian where assorted journalists and scientists worry at the bones she tosses into the air without any supporting research.

She is invariably to be found on a screen near you, even if you're not sure what it all means, as noted in The elusive hypothesis of Baroness Greenfield:

Baroness Susan Greenfield has an idea. It's a scary idea that could have far-reaching consequences for our society. Greenfield has used newspapers, magazines and television channels to promote her idea. This has caused alarm, and other academics have demanded that she properly publish her idea with supporting evidence in a research journal.

There's one big problem though; nobody seems very sure what Baroness Greenfield's idea actually is.

Indeed. On a bad hair day, Susan Greenfield reminds the pond of Marshall McLuhan, who was equally fuzzy in the use of terms and concepts, whereby certain media could be hot or cold or even lukewarm.

It's a fine way to provoke people and get the world into a tizz, but reality is inclined to be more banal.

Greenfield fancies that she's at the cutting edge of new insights into new ways of going about things, but then so did phrenologists.

Perhaps she needs to spend a little more time away from screens, and the nightmares they seem to provoke in her ...