The House of Lords in England have been judging the Internet recently, and having passed their up-tipped chins over the evils of social networking have decided that Facebook is the MTV of this generation. In that Facebook is the devil. And that devil is trying to rape your child’s mind.

After the usual discussion of privacy and sexual predation, Baroness Greenfield brought up the far more important issue of social networking sites, like Facebook, being harmful because they are changing children’s brains. No-one likes change, especially a Baroness who realises that an inherited title might come under threat when the increasingly socialised youth come to realise that hierarchy as an assumed right might not fit in with the experience they have of the world.

But wait. Before we all start running through the streets, smeared in our own faeces and demanding that Greenfield be strung up and sodomised for her babbling, i should make you aware that she is a neuroscientist and therefore might not be saying all this so she doesn’t lose her right to wear a wig and shout at other people across a room for a living

Greening’s theory is that basically kids brains are little and growing, and therefore susceptible to their environment. Clever stuff my dear. I learnt that when i was child and my brain was little. But there’s more. Exposure to Facebook and heavy use of social networking websites might change the way children’s brains develop, with results that could persist through adulthood.

Oh good god.

The result of this altered development is expected to lead to a whole generation who are unable to refer to themselves in the first person, having been unable to develop real world social abilities. The reliance on the Facebook ’status’ to inform ones peers of one’s activities will result in millions of children talking about themselves as if a seperate internet related entity.

Other expected characteristics of the new generation of Facebook raped adults:

1. All personal questions will be met with a ‘25 things about me’ list in which the narcissism is about as subtle as brick-in-the-back.

2. Commenting will extend to the real world where ‘bonerfest’ or ‘LMAO’ will be found under 90% of publicly displayed pictures.

3. Scrabble will be referred to as Lexulous

4. Attention spans will be limited to the period of time it takes the Facebook homepage to refresh. Any tasks taking longer than this will be dismissed as ‘fucking hippie, typewriter, Hotmail bollocks’

5. People will be unable to interpret the genuine feelings of another unless they are explicitly spelled out for them. For example statuses reading ‘Luke is you broke my heart into a million pieces, wish i saw it coming like i had telekinesis’ will be easily deconstructed whereas facial expressions suggesting joy or sadness will be completely unreadable.

6. A lack of face-to-face networking could alter the way genes work, upset immune responses, hormone levels, the function of arteries, and influence mental performance. This could increase the risk of health problems as serious as cancer, strokes, heart disease, and dementia. AND DEATH (no really i didn’t make this one up – Dr Aric Sigman did)

7. Displacement will lead to people pointing at their IPhones when questioned about who they really are.

Dr Aric Sigman who has suggested a whole bunch of circumstantial things about the effects of Facebook social networking says in a completely non specific way that he is “worried about where this is all leading.”

Well Sigman if you are to be believed, were headed towards the apocalypse, and the four horseman bear an uncanny resemblance to Mark Zuckerburg.