From the Editors
Facebook Makes You Smart, Twitter Dumb?
That's (sort of) the lesson in a study by Scotland's Dr. Tracy Alloway, who found that Facebook use (as well as Sudoku and strategy video games) enhances working memory, while Twitter's "endless stream of information" weakens it (via The Telegraph). Mashable's solution is simply to use both services: "While looking at Twitter like a zombie for the better part of the day is probably bad for you, if you mix it up with other online activities--such as Facebook--I doubt you'll see any negative effects." "We'd agree to a point," writes Tech Watch. "The sense of community Facebook provides is certainly laudable, although users' status updates can still be pretty bite-sized." But Retro Yakking predicts this research will have little effect on anyone...
“Twitterers will scan the article, go ‘hmm’, then return to their microblogging without having understood a single word of the post, mostly because it is not written in Twitspeak, or ‘Twtspk’. Facebookers, with their slightly larger brain capacity, will most likely have digested the article, blogged about it and took a photograph of themselves doing so within an hour.”
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