This is your brain on social media

As Millennials everywhere head back to school over the next few weeks, we are going to be thinking and talking about some intersections of social media and the college experience.

Today is the first day of school for many students across the country. After a few months of beach vacations, summer jobs, and lounging around the house, it's time to get back into the swing of going to class, writing papers and taking tests. With its increasing popularity, social media is bridging both worlds - in the classroom and out - and people have begun to study what all this social media is really doing to our brains.

My mom used to tell my brother that video games were going to turn his brain to mush. Many studies now dispute this, showing that gaming can actually improve perception, sharpen thinking and increase patience. Point for my brother. (Unfortunately, I lost interest in video games after they moved beyond the original Nintendo.) Similarly, some have speculated and worried lately that all of this social media use by today's young people is ruining their ability to write. At the very least, they say, Facebook and Twitter leads to time wasted talking about yourself to no one in particular.

And with all our ROTFLs BRBs TTYLs RTs, HTs, and other abbrevs, I can see how our teachers might be concerned that proper spelling, capitalization, sentence structure, and good old fashioned grammar have gone by the wayside. But could it be that our constant texting, tweeting, blogging and facebook posting are actually just as helpful as summer reading and flash cards?

Yes and no. Tracy Alloway, a psychologist in Scotland, recently studied the impact of social media on working memory. She claims that Facebook helps enhance our intelligence because keeping up with so many friends is like a workout routine for our memories, but she warns that other types of social media might not be so helpful. Twitter's character limits, along with the brevity of text messaging and YouTube videos, shrink our attention spans and fail to engage our brains because we don't have to process the endless stream of information come at us. 

So social media's effects on memory seem to be split. What about other skills? The social web has turned us all into content producers, rather than just consumers. In addition to giving us an opportunity to share what we think and voice our love, hate or indifference on all manner of subjects, it also gives us the valuable opportunity to practice writing.

Andrea Lunsford of Stanford University says that her study shows that technology and social media are improving students' ability to write. Like we've always been told, practice makes perfect, and thanks to our habits of constant online communication, this generation of students is getting more writing practice than any group of students ever before. This is because Millennial students are not just writing in the classroom; they are writing throughout the day. Clive Thompson points out that this is a huge paradigm shift - in generations before us, essays were written in class, and that was it. And it is more persuasive writing because they feel they are always writing for an audience.

Not only do they write more, but today's students are also adept at using appropriate tone and style for their audience. Because of the interactive nature of social media, users are more aware of their various audiences. Rather than just writing for one professor, they are writing for friends and peers with whom they have varying types relationships and shared interests. They know not to use the same writing style in a research paper as they do posting birthday well wishes on a friend's wall. Likewise, it's often occurred to me that Twitter helps me to practice a more concise style of writing - a habit which can be difficult to form.

Are you convinced? Is social media the best thing that's happened to the classroom since the overhead projector, or are you still waiting for our brains to turn to mush?