7 Times The Media Spectacularly Failed To Understand Science
4. Facebook Causes Autism... Or Something
Susan Greenfield is Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University, a position that she has quite frankly been abusing to sell books and fill column inches.
Rather than taking the firmly trodden paths of "WiFi/fast food/communism is giving us all cancer", Greenfield decided to grab the attention of the press by dropping the A-bomb: Autism.
In her books and various press interviews, Greenfield makes the link between the increased use of social media and rising autism rates. Basically, she thinks Facebook is giving our kids autism. Despite enjoying exposure in publications such as New Scientist, she has so far failed to back up her claims in a proper, peer reviewed scientific paper (presumably because Barnes and Noble wouldn't stock it), instead preferring to prey on the deep-seated paranoia we all have that something about our society is making us sick.
The problem is that Greenfield is irritatingly vague about the whole thing, correlating things like "happy-slapping" and Twitter use, whilst harking back to the glory days of sitting in front of the TV in an almost laughable back-in-my-day exercise in nostalgia and fear that has a distinct flavour of an old man shouting at clouds.
This would all be well and good, if she had any evidence. But the fact that she has so far failed to present any original research on her findings, whilst telling people to buy and read her book for the evidence, frankly, stinks.