Emerging Technologies Consulting

IT World posts two Facebook-related studies, one of which claims that workers who use Facebook and YouTube at work are better employees and the other that says that Facebook users have lower grades.  Eszter Hargittai at Crooked Timber has already picked apart the second study, suggesting it’s not carefully done, doesn’t account for things like socioeconomic status and that the question is a difficult one to answer anyway.  There may, in fact, be a correlation between students who use Facebook a lot and lower grades, but it doesn’t mean that Facebook is the cause of lower grades.  The second Facebook story, the one that’s more negative has gotten a lot of legs on the Internet, with many blog posts about it and its implications.  The first one, if my reader is any indication, did not gain as much traction.  That in itself, is quite interesting.  I think people are looking for hard data to back up their gut feeling that being online is bad for you in some way.  Any data that shows the opposite just isn’t as appealing.  I think we all know that too much of anything is usually a bad thing.  Whatever that thing is doesn’t much matter, but the media keep harping on the Internet as an evil presence in our lives–which might explain why the media is losing ground to the Internet.