2009-05-09 (accessed 15Nov2009)
LAST month, a study found that college students who use Facebook tend to have poorer school results than non-users - apparently a half grade point lower.
The study was done in Ohio Dominican University, by researchers Aryn Karpinski and Adam Duberstein. It concluded: 'It may be that if it wasn't for Facebook, some students would still find other ways to avoid studying, and would still get lower grades. But perhaps the lower GPAs could actually be because students are spending too much time socialising online.'
What balderdash.
And yet another study, touted by the Freakonomics blog, by Baroness Susan Greenfield, a University of Oxford neuroscientist, warned that the instant feedback and impersonal communication offered by social networking sites could drive behaviour in negative directions.
'As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity,' she said.
Is this 'Facebook Brain Drain' for real? Does reconnecting with your friends, trawling through their pictures and interacting through games and quizzes really lower your IQ?
Then again, the Freakonomics authors - University of Chicago economist Steve Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner - did juxtapose those Facebook studies with other studies that claimed that surfing the Web increases workplace productivity.
So does social networking really mean users develop more slowly intellectually? Or do mentally challenged people just naturally self-select into seemingly pointless Internet habits?
I'm going to sit on the fence and say the answers should be decided on a case-by-case basis.
The 'Facebook Brain Drain' really bothered me when people started talking about it. Those who never really got the whole online social networking thing were saying 'I told you so'. My parents even encouraged me to return to more 'serious journalism' and turn my back on this 'digerati stuff'.
Then I started playing Playfish's latest online game on Facebook - Restaurant City.
It is much like SimCity - a city-building simulation game, first released in 1989, which morphed into various versions of best-selling games by gaming company Maxis. In SimCity, you build cities, playground parks, condominiums, safari parks to keep the people happy.
In Restaurant City, you are a restaurateur, trying to collect ingredients for high-end dishes, decorate your eatery, hire your friends and keep your customers happy. The aim of the game is to make money to build bigger and more popular restaurants as you level up.
Initially, I thought it was just another silly Facebook game. You have a few tables, one or two hired staff, and just let the game run in one of your background screens while you do something else - like, er, work, for example.
But as you start levelling up and your restaurant gets bigger, you have new responsibilities. You must provide toilet facilities for your guests, hire cleaners for those toilets, hire more wait staff and cooks. It reminded me of my 'Operations' module in business school.
I had a couple of cooks who'd be busy flipping their pans, but not enough wait staff to serve the dishes and clear the tables. Then when the wait staff got their act together, the customers would mess up the toilets.
This was turning out to be a game not just about collecting ingredients for exotic dishes any more. It was turning out to be a production line - a production line with bottlenecks, excess capacity and human resource problems.
In B-school, I remember very clearly a video we watched showing a clothing manufacturer's production line which appointed members to do specific tasks - like sew the leg seams of a pair of trousers or attach zips. The bottleneck problems occurred when the thread broke on a sewing machine, needed to be replaced and caused a pile to build up.
The lesson: Train your staff to double or triple up on duties. If there was a pile with zips to be attached, the person doing the sewing would have to stop what she's doing, help attach zips until the bottleneck eases up, then return to her designated duty. Common sense, you would think, but apparently not to production line managers in the real world.
Well, not this online restaurateur. My waitresses double up as toilet cleaners when the need arises, and my chefs help out with clearing the tables when business gets too brisk.
Spend money to decorate the walls and separate tables for customer privacy? Forget about it. My tables surround the kitchen area so the waiters walk a minimal amount.
After a week, I've realised it's not a game you can just leave on. I have to keep my eyes on the business every five minutes to make sure idle chefs help clear tables and/or clean toilets. This wasn't a game; it was a business.
Are Facebook games a waste of time and brain cells? It depends. On what? On whether the lessons - social or mental - are identified and absorbed by the Facebooker.
But why do I do it? Ask me another time, when I'm not reassigning my staff to cover for one another in my restaurant!
joannel@sph.com.sg
EDITOR Are Facebook games a waste of time and brain cells? It depends. On what? On whether the lessons - social or mental - are identified and absorbed by the Facebooker.
Comment: I agree that restaurant city can train my brain!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment