Customer Reviews:
 where's my body? June 6, 2008
Rosyparrott (Reading,England)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
One of the interesting aspects of these frameworks for identity is the absence of the physical body. As Greenfield is talking about the Consumer Society, which begs us to treat our bodies in terms of having rather than being, this dislocation is strange.
Greenfield is enthusiastic - and it is always good to read something written with passion.
And, other reviewer: books are three dimensional, highly tactile objects, utterly different from attempting to read or study using an e-book. Try it.
I can play computer games for hours, may be it'll be the problems of reading a pdf, but I can only bear an e-book for 30 minutes.
hotchpotch May 21, 2008
PoppyPig (UK)
12 out of 16 found this review helpful
A hotchpotch of social, educational and technological commentary, with a reactionary emphasis, interspersed with chunks of neuroscience and psychology. The neuroscience is familiar stuff about neurons, synapses, serotonin, dopamine, plasticity, case studies like Phineas Gage and a description of a brain dissection class. The psychology includes discussion of disorders such as schizophrenia and depression. The technological commentary is about Google, Facebook and the fact we're spending more time using mobile phones and screen-based devices. (Well I knew that.) There are questions asked about what the implications are for our future identities but these are mainly left hanging.
What I struggled to find were interesting new ideas or explanations to unify the material. I did however find some familiar errors of reasoning.
For example, depression supposedly results, among other things, from a paucity of serotonin. Not being a psychologist, I may be missing something, but this doesn't make sense. They've looked inside depressed peoples' brains and found another symptom: low serotonin. But they have no theory to explain it, which means they have no theory of depression. (Low serotonin might actually be acting to reduce depression. Rather like braking correlates with car accidents. Brake pedals don't cause accidents, they generally help prevent them.)
The author dislikes video games and is worried about their effect on children. The biggest objection seems to be that they are displayed on a 2D screen. Books are preferable. But wait, don't books consist of 2D surfaces? (i.e. pages) Book readers are solitary humans imbibing a 1D stream of secondhand text. Books were also resisted by parents and reactionaries when they became cheap and popular. And if language is so important, why does the author seem to assume that children won't want to improve it later on?
Apparently screen-based life also kills the imagination. The Oompa-Loompas claimed this over 40 years ago and I still want to know why.
The reality is that video games are increasingly multiplayer, they involve language and text, and even where this isn't so they require intensive problem solving. This creates knowledge and transferable metaknowledge in the mind of the player, which is the benefit that the author has missed. They aren't "compulsive"; when a player stops improving, he starts to get bored and does something else.
ID does contain some interesting facts and snippets. But science is about explanations, and I just can't live in the author's world of socialising, Doystevsky and "good old homework".
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