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Email, videos of cats falling over, frivolous list-based websites—there’s no-denying that the Internet has given us some pretty wonderful things. However, all this awesomeness comes at a cost, and that cost is the destruction of our minds, sanity, and social lives. That’s right: For all the good it’s done, the Internet has the potential to make us very miserable, very angry, or very dead.

10 Email Is Addictive (Just Like Gambling)

The trouble is, email follows something called the “variable interval reinforcement schedule,” which is the same process that drives gambling addiction. In both cases, you perform an action (check your email or put a coin in the machine) in the hopes of receiving a reward (an interesting email or a whole lotta money). But that reward only comes at unpredictable times—causing you to perform the first action more and more frequently. It’s one of the strongest habit-training methods known to man, and nearly everyone who owns a computer has been subjected to it for years. 

1. Sleep. Using a laptop, cell phone, or iPad late at night can seriously mess with your sleep patterns and habits, potentially leaving you with a sleep disorder. Late night use is also associated with stress and depressive symptoms.

2. Depression. A Swedish study found that participants who felt the need to have their cell phones constantly accessible were more likely to report depressive mental health symptoms. 

3. Addiction. Several studies have actually suggested that the brains of technology abusers develop a certain pattern of change over time. Studies also suggest that the amount of times technology abusers check their gadgets are just enough to trigger the addiction-oriented parts of our brains. 

David Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan who’s studied the effects of divided attention on learning, takes a firm line on the brain’s ability to multitask: “Under most conditions, the brain simply cannot do two complex tasks at the same time. It can happen only when the two tasks are both very simple and when they don’t compete with each other for the same mental resources. An example would be folding laundry and listening to the weather report on the radio. That’s fine. But listening to a lecture while texting, or doing homework and being on Facebook—each of these tasks is very demanding, and each of them uses the same area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex.”

The moment of encoding is what matters most for retention, and dozens of laboratory studies have demonstrated that when our attention is divided during encoding, we remember that piece of information less well—or not at all.

Literacy has been under siege for some time. The supposed agents of this threat have changed over the years but the perception remains constant. Television, movies, video games, mobile phones, and the Internet have all been identified as the culprits that rot the brain, desensitize, delude, and generally ruin the minds of the young (and perhaps everyone else too). At the core of much of this concern is the perceived decline of literacy. One of the most passionate and eloquent commentators on this decline and its impact is Chris Hedges. In Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009), he notes, “The illiterate, the semiliterate, and those who live as though they are illiterate are effectively cut off from the past. They live in an eternal present.”

This “eternal present” is comprised of “comforting, reassuring images, fantasies, slogans, celebrities, and a lust for violence.” It is a world devoid of substance, dislocated from history, reflection, and nuance. The media and popular press point clearly to new technologies as the cause of this decline but also, ironically, as the source of the “new literacy.” Texting, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and countless other technologies and media are widely seen as undermining or displacing literacy. Not so. They are certainly changing our relationship with literacy and altering what it means to be literate in a ubiquitous multimedia world. But all these things are intimately linked to literacy.

So it turns out that most new technologies and media are not threatening literacy but in fact enhancing it. As a result these are not the tools and capacities that will displace literacy; they are much more likely to be sources for the defense of literacy. While they may be easy targets for the luddites, none of these technologies has exhibited a capacity sufficiently powerful to displace literacy or even create a substantive new literacy. In fact, most are based on a foundation of conventional literacy. The Internet is the largest, most comprehensive information resource ever assembled. It represents the triumph of literacy not its demise. These technologies are not candidates for post-literacy. A replacement for literacy will require a greater level of capability and capacity than that of these relatively primitive technologies.

Some social critics are of the opinion that the spread of the electronic media is destroying literacy. Standardized test scores of reading and writing ability have in fact gone down in recent years. Are the new media the main cause?

the number of hours spent watching television declines as the education levels of viewers rise, but education-related differences in the amount of television use are not large and they have been narrowing

Volti notes that Marshall McLuhan was of the opinion that television affected viewers by requiring they use all their senses, that viewing television was not like reading, which is linear. Television is less concerned with sequence than reading.

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

At least since the invention of television, critics have warned that electronic media would destroy reading.

Some traditionalists warn that digital reading is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories. Often, they argue, writers on the Internet employ a cryptic argot that vexes teachers and parents. Zigzagging through a cornucopia of words, pictures, video and sounds, they say, distracts more than strengthens readers. And many youths spend most of their time on the Internet playing games or sending instant messages, activities that involve minimal reading at best.