There's a growing cottage industry devoted to analysing the social and psychological implications of digital technologies, and no wonder: the internet and the mobile phone have fundamentally changed the way many people interact with the world, and that's a rich topic for neuroscientists, psychologists, educators, social critics - and, not incidentally, parents and journalists.

The easy and long-standing critique, voiced most prominently in Nick Carr's Atlantic magazine cover story, is that the internet is making us stupid. It shortens our attention span, constantly distracts us rather than engaging us, makes us lazy, militates against thoughtfulness. Reading on the internet isn't even really reading, according to various educators quoted in a weekend New York Times story on the subject, since it usually doesn't involve good prose or great books.

Anyone with a teenage child can't help but be given pause by the frantic text messaging, IMing, photo-sharing, pseudo-music-making and virtual game-playing that seem to dominate the life of the wired child. Hours on end surfing YouTube for mildly amusing videos – can that really be good for cognitive development? Wouldn't it be better to learn to play an instrument then to play with your ringtones, or Garage Band game?

As a professional journalist, it makes me shudder when I see a service like Twitter touted as a potentially important new medium for news. A one-liner about what you're doing right now is news? The "news feed" on Facebook, tellingly, is not about news (which I would define as events that have a significant impact or meaning for a significant number of people), but rather about what your friends are doing. Call me old-school, but there is a difference.

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  Jonathan Weber

Personally, I don't understand why I would want to know what my friends are doing all the time, or vice versa. I don't even remotely have the time for "social gaming," which, as evidenced by the big funding announcement last week from social gaming start-up Zynga, is seen by many as the next big thing. (I do see the appeal though: if I were, ahem, in a corporate job with time to kill, I'd play Scrabulous on Facebook all day long).

I do notice in my own media consumption habits that I tend to flit around a lot more on the net. I read fewer stories through to the end then I do when I'm reading print - something more interesting or important might be just a click away, and I have a lot of ground to cover every day. I have less time for books, partly because I'm a news junkie and endless amounts of news are now always at my fingertips.

I've always argued that media consumption is habit-driven, and modern cognitive science suggests that our habits actually shape the structure of our brains. So the internet may indeed be shortening my attention span – and God knows what it might be doing to the pliable minds of my kids.

Yet despite all this, I have a hard time getting worked up about the allegedly nefarious impacts of digital technologies, mainly for one simple reason: we all still have choices, and in fact we have more choices than ever. I don't really deal much Twitter, or MySpace, or Second Life; I don't have an iPhone, and I rarely text message. As an internet media entrepreneur I need to try and stay abreast of a lot of things, but as an individual I can pick and choose.

The sheer diversity of ways in which people engage – or don't engage – with new media is, I think, very much under-appreciated. Any statement of the form "people like to…" is misleading at best, since some people will like to do whatever it is and some people won't. These days, there aren't technophiles and technophobes, but rather many complex layers.

I'm all for trying to understand how our technologies are shaping us, but simple formulations are not going to capture what's happening. And if you're worried about your kids, I still don't think the web and the Xbox and the mobile phone and the relentless pop culture that they channel have more influence on their brains than their parents.

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Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a regional news service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard

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