Public Perceptions of Digital Dementia in the Age of Social Media
As social media has become increasingly prevalent, concerns about its negative effects have also grown. The phenomenon called “digital dementia” has been proposed, which is characterized by a decline in attention, memory due to overdependence on digital devices. Since this phenomenon is such a hot potato, the research was conducted.
To begin with, they assembled opinions related to #digitaldementia in twitter. The study aimed to comprehensively understand how digital dementia is discussed by the public through content analysis and to evaluate the emotional tone of these discussions using sentiment analysis. Simply put, the researchers would like to know what people debate and their emotional tone toward digital dementia.
The results from the research was interesting. The four main contents people discussed were cognitive decline(38.9%), digital dependency(31.0%), technology overload(19.8%), and coping strategies(10.3%). In regards to emotional reactions, as expected, negative attitudes dominated and composed of most opinions.
These results suggest that the digital dementia is perceived adversely among people and people are aware of alternative hobbies to reduce the overuse of digital devices. As the AI chatbot, such as ChatGPT, permeated to our life, digital dependency is anticipated to increase and new standard about digital dementia is required to effectively treat and build healthy way of coexistence with digital devices.
Sources:
https://www.jmir.org/2024/1/e59546
