This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 22, Issue 1, from 2011.
The media has historically (and misguidedly) blamed many societal ills on technology. Television has reportedly been blamed for over-stimulating children before bedtime (BBC News, 2000). Computer games, the internet and television were criticised for, in part, making children become more selfish (BBC News Online: Education, 2001). Regular television, video or DVD consumption is supposedly closely associated with attentional problems, aggressive behaviour and poor cognitive development (Telegraph, 2007), and, strikingly, social networking website Facebook could apparently elevate the risk of cancer (Daily Mail, 2009).
It seems ironic that the BBC, as the UK’s largest and internationally recognised broadcaster, happily report the association of such widespread and adverse effects with television, but American news channel CNN are willing to take these correlations one step further.
The network recently published reports of research from a University of Southern California study suggesting that “Rapid-fire TV news bulletins or getting updates via social-networking tools such as Twitter could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering” because “the streams of information provided by social networking sites are too fast for the brain’s moral compass”.
The delicious irony of this arises from the fact that CNN publishes updates regularly through 44 Twitter accounts and recently engaged ‘actor’ Ashton Kutcher in a race to be the first with one million ‘followers’. Interestingly, the account belonging to one of the CNN news anchors has been hacked (alongside those of Barack Obama and Britney Spears) obviously demonstrating that social networking tools not only numb morality but are also very attractive to ‘criminal types’.
Clearly the reports hold little significance for news channels or at least insufficient weight to prompt a change in practice, rightly so perhaps, but the notion of being influenced by information outside of conscious awareness is not new.
The Women’s Christian Temperance Union uniquely interpreted a quote from market researcher James Vicary (of ‘eat popcorn, drink Coke’ fame) to suggest that subversive subliminal suggestion was employed to boost ailing sales of alcohol. This was considered, of course, to be completely immoral.
Similarly, reports from 1951-53 demanded from the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act, show tests, now dubbed ‘mind control’ experiments, were conducted with two 19-year-old female volunteers and demonstrated hypnosis could be induced by telephone, writing or speech, and used to make the volunteers perform acts of which they later possessed no memory.
The problem comes when trying to establish which of these reports are actually based on robust and reliable evidence. Vicary was the mastermind of the aforementioned subliminal suggestion study in which cinema visitors were allegedly exposed to slides displaying the words “eat popcorn” and “drink Coca-Cola” for 1/3000 of a second. He reported that popcorn sales increased by an average of 57.5% while Coca-Cola sales increased by 18.1%, figures which are evidently statistically significant.
Replications of the study, however, provided data which were non-significant and upon later questioning, Vicary admitted his own results had been forged. It’s disappointing that one of the most publicly recognised scientific studies of subliminal perception is actually a hoax, but I suspect its notoriety developed as the commercial potential for subliminal advertising gained support.
While stories of ‘Facebook causes cancer’ or ‘Twitter undermines moral development’ may capture the technological and social networking zeitgeist, there does seem to be a chasm between common sense and science. The mere concept that Facebook can cause cancer while MySpace or Google do not is clearly ludicrous.
In the same way that resistance developed for subliminal messages and advertising due to a prevailing sense of fear and manipulation, so sensational stories like these capture the interest of an internet-savvy generation, while preying on the uncertainty and ignorance of those less experienced with computers. There remains little excuse, however, for ignorance of common sense.
