Considering she’s happily outspoken, clearly likes to be well-versed in current affairs and has legions of supporters on the social networking site, actress Emma Thompson won't be joining Twitter any time soon. In fact, she loathes social networking so much that she’s written off our generation as a ‘lemming generation’ today.
‘I’d rather have root canal treatment for the rest of my life than join Twitter,’ Emma told Vanity Fair. ‘God knows what it's all doing to us.’
Sounding a bit like a parent frustrated because they don’t know how to hang up their iPhone, regularly pocket dial you for three and a half minutes or get annoyed that you might spend an entire family dinner texting other people because they’re being grumpy and untalkative, she continued, ‘I hope that everyone does realise that we are all just one giant human experiment at the moment. We are just a great big bunch of little gerbils on wheels.’
And there are more predictions of internet-induced doom where that comes from. ‘In about 25 years time, maybe, a sudden generation will just drop dead. Everyone will just die on the same day. And I’ll say, “Oh, what do these people have in common?” Hang on. They were connected every day 24/7, you know!’ She then made quite a salient point about children having access to social media. ‘We invent stuff, we just fling it out there, we let anyone use it. A three-year-old could fucking be on Twitter. A three-year-old!’
But then she went on and on and it didn’t make much sense. ‘And then they go on and on and on about everything that there is. And get reviewed every day by Facebook. And then we will wonder why, at the age of 60, an entire generation chucks itself off a cliff like a bunch of lemmings. It’s the lemming generation, I’m telling you,’ she said sounding somewhat hysterical by this point.
But as much as these might seem like the ramblings of someone who really doesn’t know that much about the technology, even university researchers admitted recently that they don’t know much about how the internet can affect us.
A comparison of 135 studies into the use of the internet by teenagers shows that there is no evidence that its use can cause long term brain damage. But, before you breathe a sigh of relief into your screen, have a little think about this – Kathryn Mills, the PhD student at University College London who conducted the comparison, says that ‘finding lack of evidence is different to finding evidence of no effect’.
Which basically means, just because we can’t see any proof that the internet is bad for you, doesn’t mean it’s not bad for you.
Follow Sophie on Twitter (at your peril, lemming) @sophwilkinson
Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.