It has been an unproven conviction of mine for some years that the claims to increased productivity due to the information super highway are quite over blown. I mean before the creation of PC solitaire did people actually sit at their desks slapping down the 52 to pass the day? Well, it turns out that at least for academic performance, Facebook is a curse:

University students who use Facebook spend less time studying and have lower averages compared to those who avoid the popular social networking site, researchers say. Researchers surveyed 219 students at Ohio State University – 102 undergraduates and 117 graduates – in the summer and fall quarters of 2008. Of that total, 148 said they had Facebook accounts. Facebook users were typically younger, full-time students majoring in statistics, technology, math, engineering and medicine, said study co-author Aryn Karpinski, a doctoral student and graduate teaching associate at Ohio State.

How odd. Not enough to actually fix a pattern but I would have thought it would have been the dreamy liberal arts kids who were wasting their time on Facebook. Maybe they are just wasting their time in other ways. And, to be fair, this may just prove that the uninspired and unmotivated student is more traceable in the digital world. The statistical benchmark of the 1980s stoners listening to Boston's first album 17 times each day as classes skip by is neither captured nor compared. No doubt such informatics, such an infomatrix, would as easily shown the dud then to be much the same as the dud now.