A Brief History
On February 4, 2004, Internet genius Mark Zuckerberg founded the social media networking site he called Facebook while he was at college. Almost as soon as clients from Harvard University joined by the flocks, and membership was opened first to Boston area colleges and then the Ivy League, those intelligent and educated people began to show signs of losing intellect.
Digging Deeper
As membership grew throughout the country and more and more people signed up, the trend toward mental stupidity only got worse. With almost a billion-and-a-half members today, this has had a severe effect on the collective IQ of the United States and the world as a whole.
And what has IQ been replaced with? The seemingly insatiable need to share thoughts and actions about oneself as people feel they have the freedom to post racist rants, homophobic observations, sexual secrets, ill-considered photographs as they break the trust of their friends, commit cyber bullying, brag about crimes and make private details available to anyone.
Age has nothing to do with it. Not only have silly teenagers ruined their reputations and embarrassed themselves, but so have older and supposedly wiser politicians and celebrities.
Meanwhile, Facebook has an annual net income of over $1.5 billion. Not a bad return for a college project. Of the 5 co-founders, Zuckerberg is the best known and richest and is reported to be worth over $33 billion!
Over half of all Americans have Facebook accounts (168 million), even though some have terminated these, mainly over privacy concerns. Making so much personal data available and voluntarily placing all that information in one place makes it easy for the National Security Agency (NSA) or other government agencies to keep an eye on the public. Plus, using all that data to steer advertising toward individuals scares some people as well, especially those afraid of how that information might be used elsewhere. Will insurance companies possibly use the data to drop you or raise your rates? Will you get put on a no-fly list or no-buying-guns list with no recourse? You had better be careful!
So, is there a real correlation between Facebook and the loss in IQ? If anything, Facebook is giving the dummies a public forum to express themselves and be seen and heard they would otherwise not have had. There are so many websites that list stupid, moronic, idiotic, head-scratching and shocking things people have actually posted on Facebook we could not even begin to scratch the surface there. Perhaps soon we will post a list of our favorites. Well, if we have not lost too much IQ by then…
Question for students (and subscribers): Do you find Facebook to be more useful or harmful? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Abram, Carolyn. Facebook For Dummies. For Dummies, 2013.