Watch: ‘We’re Creating Mental Two-Year-Olds’ – Vince Marmarà Warns Of Serious Focus Crisis
Leading statistician Vincent Marmarà has sounded a warning about how social media’s addictiveness is harming people’s ability to focus.
In an interview with Lovin Malta’s Tim Diacono, Marmarà said he is concerned that people are spending so much time on social media rather than dedicating it to something more useful, and that the prevalence of short reels is forming “mental two-year-olds”.
“If you want the best quality in your actions, you often have to shut yourself off for four hours straight without any interference. But if you spend so much time on social media, how much can you stop and think about an issue in depth? This really worries me and it is one of the major concerns I have about future generations.”
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Marmarà, who has been lecturing at the University of Malta for around 15 years, said he has even noticed behavioural changes in some of his students over time.
“I’m not talking about all my students but sometimes I feel as though I’m lecturing to robots. Their emotions, interactions, participation and passivity worry me.”
“If we used to say that generations change every 20 years, nowadays it changes every few years. Technology and social media have developed at such a rapid rate that we can’t even keep up in terms of our curricula.”
“People will adapt to this progress to a certain extent because it doesn’t take much effort to learn how to use tools like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and ChatGPT. However, we aren’t taking into account how we still lose focus if we spend an hour on social media a day, split into five-minute periods, let alone youths who spend several hours on it.”
Marmarà went on to warn that the content people view is often not useful information but consists of short reels that pop up on their feeds as dictated by algorithms based on their online searches.
“Content consists of several short reels, one after the other. If I search for jackets today, I’ll get exposed to videos of jackets for an entire month. Algorithms decide what you see, so it’s not even like you’re exposed to different types of content.”
Marmarà warned that the state of play is promoting some form of mental arrested development.
“I have three young children – aged two, four and six. The six-year-old can watch an entire film, the four-year-old is less capable of doing so, and the two-year-old can only watch videos of 10 – 20 seconds, maybe one or two minutes.”
“Since social media revolves around marketing, it constantly pushes out 10-20 second videos, which means we are programming minds to think like two-year-olds.”
“When you constantly switch from video to video, you lose patience and it automatically becomes an addiction because you’re only seeing what you want to see, and it could also be that the content you’re viewing has wrong implications.”
He recounted how a survey he conducted three years ago revealed that some 60% of youths in Malta suffered some form of online bullying.
“This is very worrying. I’m not saying that social media shouldn’t be used, because these technologies can have major benefits if they are used as tools, but the problem – and this applies for everything – is abuse. All of those hours spent watching short videos, all of this passivity, and you end up watching only what other people decide you will watch.”
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