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This year's British Science Festival has kicked off in Guildford, with a slew of headlines about Twitter. According to Tracy Alloway, a psychologist from Stirling University, the social networking website can damage working memory.

Alloway specialises in working memory, which her research suggests is as important, if not more important, than IQ in predicting academic and professional success. She is also a gifted communicator, whose skills were rewarded this year with an invitation to deliver the festival's Joseph Lister Award Lecture, for social sciences. But I'm afraid to say that her Twitter claim doesn't seem well supported by science.

I could see the headlines coming as soon as Alloway spoke at a launch press conference for the festival at the end of last week. After recapping her research, she started to talk about how technology might affect working memory. Facebook, she said, "might have some role in helping social memory", because it builds social connections. Twitter, however, was a different matter:

"Some examples of what can hurt or harm working memory include things like Twitter. When you're receiving an endless stream of information when you're a 'tweeter', it's also very succinct, so there's no need to process or manipulate that information, it's not a dialogue unlike something like Facebook where you might be updating your status and so on."


This claim immediately caught the interest of many of the assembled journalists, myself included. What, we asked her, was the evidence on which the claim was based? The answer, I'm afraid, was very little. She mentioned a study that had suggested that children who send a lot of text messages have lower IQ scores (not working memory, which her own research suggests is a different thing). But when pressed, she accepted that her view was "a hypothesis" that has been completely untested so far.

Here's the transcript of the relevant bit of my tape:

Journalist: Has anybody actually studied whether Facebook or Twitter affects memory?

Alloway: Not that I know of.

Journalist: So there's no published evidence?

Alloway: There's no published evidence, it's just a hypothesis, I'll be starting a research project in January.

Now, there's absolutely nothing wrong with formulating a hypothesis that Twitter might adversely affect working memory. I think that's unlikely (for reasons I'll elaborate on later), but it's not an unreasonable idea. I do question, though, whether Alloway was wise to declare to a roomful of journalists that "some examples of what can hurt or harm working memory include things like Twitter", without any evidence to back the claim up. It was only when pressed that she clarified that this was no more than an untested hypothesis. There was always going to be a high risk that her claim would be widely reported without that nuance -- as much of the media did.

For what it's worth, I think Alloway's hypothesis is also misguided, because I think she's misunderstood how Twitter is often used. She seems to think that it's nothing more than an inane stream of consciousness, short bursts of nonsense about what this or that celebrity had for lunch five minutes ago. But while it's true that a lot of the site's content can fairly be categorised that way, Twitter doesn't have to work that way at all.

Most people I know who use Twitter see it as an interactive tool for conversing with wide groups, and for drawing like-minded people's attention to information that might interest them. It's interactive, full of links, and information-rich. It's a misconception that the 140-character limit makes depth impossible. In fact, to me, Twitter seems to build social networks just as effectively as Facebook, which Alloway thinks might improve working memory.

Interesting Post

CBA Reading it all but ... Twitter FTW!
@KristianDunne