Idolatry is the worship of an inanimate object meant to represent a god. In the past humans worshipped idols to receive a bountiful harvest, a successful childbirth, or pleasant weather. Later, society began to evolve from these asinine rituals into a more developed practice; they shifted their outlook to a more human-centered approach called humanism. With advanced thinking and new discoveries in medicine, the arts, and architecture, humanism, a philosophical viewpoint that emphasized the value of human beings, became the newly accepted stance of civilization. Yet, today, with the introduction of social media, society has now begun to regress back into idol worship – idolizing technology and social media. In a 2011 survey conducted by Pew
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An Oxford University neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution Baroness Greenfield confers that a child’s repeated exposure to social media sites could effectively “rewire” their brains. Greenfield argued that digital technology had altered the way children processed information. She relates the increase in technology use to the decrease in children’s attention spans, leading to neurodevelopmental disorders such as ADD and ADHD (Derbyshire). The rewiring of the brain that Greenfield referred to also appeared in a 2008 study conducted by UCLA’s Memory and Aging Research Center. The reported examined the brain changes from even moderate Internet use. Gary Small, the head of the Memory and Aging Research Center, scanned the brains of Internet users, ranging from no to excessive exposure. The results of the scans revealed that heavy users had altered prefrontal cortexes (Dokoupil). The rewiring of the brain did not only result in psychological deformities, but also the excessive, almost addictive, use of technology lead to physical defects. Similarly, a study conducted by the Natural Science Foundation of China in 2012, concluded that those who used the internet more frequently than others had significantly lower fractional anisotropy, a scalar measurement that assesses the connectivity in the brain (Lin, Zhou, Du, Qin, Zhao, Xu, and Lei 2346). Each study further exposes that technology has proven to significantly damage a user’s brain and social
An Oxford University neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution Baroness Greenfield confers that a child’s repeated exposure to social media sites could effectively “rewire” their brains. Greenfield argued that digital technology had altered the way children processed information. She relates the increase in technology use to the decrease in children’s attention spans, leading to neurodevelopmental disorders such as ADD and ADHD (Derbyshire). The rewiring of the brain that Greenfield referred to also appeared in a 2008 study conducted by UCLA’s Memory and Aging Research Center. The reported examined the brain changes from even moderate Internet use. Gary Small, the head of the Memory and Aging Research Center, scanned the brains of Internet users, ranging from no to excessive exposure. The results of the scans revealed that heavy users had altered prefrontal cortexes (Dokoupil). The rewiring of the brain did not only result in psychological deformities, but also the excessive, almost addictive, use of technology lead to physical defects. Similarly, a study conducted by the Natural Science Foundation of China in 2012, concluded that those who used the internet more frequently than others had significantly lower fractional anisotropy, a scalar measurement that assesses the connectivity in the brain (Lin, Zhou, Du, Qin, Zhao, Xu, and Lei 2346). Each study further exposes that technology has proven to significantly damage a user’s brain and social