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Does Social Media Breed Learner Laziness?, Shelley Kinash, Jeffrey Brand

Jeffrey Brand

Extract As new technologies grow in popularity, the associated cognitive and moral worries, concerns and questions intensify. The current devices of choice are smartphones, tablets and laptops. People primarily use them for texting, social media and massive multi-player online games. Parents and teachers are concerned, asking questions such as: are people losing the ability to [offline] socialise; is the current technology too addictive, in that children need to be forced to pick up a book or go play outside; is abbreviated and phonetic messaging interfering with people’s spelling and grammatical skills.