Dr Tracy Alloway from the University of Stirling has said that Facebook helps increase your intellect whilst Twitter has the opposite effect.
The use of Facebook helps people increase their use of “working memory” by making them remember and use information on a more regular basis. The same impact can be witnessed with the use of video war games and solving Sudoku puzzles. When using Facebook “you are keeping track of past actions and mapping the actions you’re going to take”, planning and strategising in war games also has a similar effect. Working memory is vital to the success of many peoples lives, most notably during interviews as a strong working memory will aid them in pairing up the correct answer with questions asked of them throughout the hiring process.
However not all social networking platforms are praised as much as Facebook, as Dr Alloway also states that the use of Twitter, Youtube and text messaging can actually reduce the quality of a persons working memory. This is due to not actually processing the information that you are seeing and at the same time your attention span is being reduced, leading to a reduction in brain engagement and nerve connection improvement.
There is an argument that although Twitter may reduce your intelligence, you’re world and general knowledge will be positively impacted by using the micro-blogging service (obviously dependent upon the types of people you are following on Twitter). Dr Alloway has a retort to this as she states that working memory is “far more important to success and happiness than IQ”.
Either way, I think it’s very unlikely that we will see people swaying away from the service because of this any time soon.