While I agree with much of the article - the leap from "social media is making tween girls suicidal" to "adults should not be able to determine what information they choose to consume because then they might vote wrong" is a huge one.
The 2015+ timeline definitely tracks with my wife's anecdotal experience. She's been working in pediatrics (exclusively at Children's Hospitals) since 2003 and the amount of kids she sees with self harm or suicide attempts has grown so much in the recent years.
Mainstream people oriented social media is indeed really bad. But is it the technology or the incentives governing it? In other words, is instagram bad because of pictures, or because of engagement-optimized recommendations and endless feeds? What even is the difference between the medium and the message in a world of hyper-personalization?
When social media came we did as we always do; we talk about the potential of the emerging technology. Connecting people across the world, learning, sharing experiences. I don’t think we were wrong in the assessment, but I do think many of us were missing that potential is not the governing force - it’s the incentives.
Now, people are doing the exact same thing with gen AI: talking about the potential. But what’s the business model? Will our kids get excellent private tutors with endless knowledge, or a barrage of post-truth content designed to market, sell, influence, nudge and confuse?
My opinion is that it’s just partisan gerrymandering creating safe districts is pushing our politics towards the extremes as both parties run far left and far right candidates in their safe district primary. It gives us candidates out of touch with the overall electorate and unable to compromise.
The DSM-5 was released in 2013. Could that have anything to do with the bump in depression diagnoses?
https://www.verywellmind.com/dsm-5-and-diagnosis-of-depreasi...
As for the assertions about "governability," that seems to be more about the government reaching consensus. I think PACs play a bigger role there than social media, but I try to follow the money.
I agree. There have long been concerns about the impact of various media on children, as highlighted by figures like Jerry Mander, Neil Postman, and even Ron Serling.
The issue lies not only in the quality of the content but also in the mediums through which they are consumed.
Today, we are surrounded by low-quality content that can be quickly and easily accessed. Those familiar with ADHD(and struggle with it) understand that the instant gratification from these videos can lead to a craving for more.
As a millennial who grew up with unrestricted access to the internet and the advent of smartphones, I truly believe the situation will continue to worsen rather than improve.
I even wrote an entire book on this topic, detailing how internet addiction has profoundly impacted my life.
https://www.amazon.com/Enough-Seeking-less-world-more/dp/B0B...
If anyone wants a free copy, send me an email and I’ll send you one gladly!
Very American to believe that small communities can solve this problem and to not even expect parliament to do anything.
Parliament not doing anything is obviously a self-fulfilling prophecy, and small, local solutions to a tragedy of the commons.. I don't believe it'll work.
As someone who's not neurotypical and grew up in the 1990s I don't think we really did much for mental illness or have much of understanding of it until the past 15 or so years. Growing up the school system regarded people are disabled, learning disabled, lazy, normal, or gifted. There was no one checking kids out for social-anxiety, bipolar disorder, depression, etc. unless there was an extremely serious problem with their behavior.
Within the past 40 years they used to lock people like me up, give us lobotomies, forcibly medicate us, etc. Its easy to forget how society used to treat folks with mental illness. Its frankly no wonder that people to this day still hide it. Heck, I've had to contact the EEOC more than once. But the thing is, social-media didn't cause this, video games didn't cause this. I've always been genetically predisposed to this. In my opinion, unfettered access to the Internet in general is probably the worst environment for people with predispositions, but to simply blame everything on the environment we've create online through video games or social-media is wrong if not irresponsible.
be ungovernable.
Ungovernable, a phrase that is trending:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=u...
The interviewer's statement in questions makes me think they have a hobbyhorse to ride.
The possibility of arriving at a governing consensus through negotiation and compromise is being shattered by a cacophony of niche propagandists egging on their own siloed tribe of the faithful to engage in an endless partisan battle.
Looking at different generations (parents boomers vs millennials like myself) while there may be some group similarities, it seems to be like addiction or drugs, where humans take to social media on a spectrum from those who avoid it to those who make it their lives and the average people who use it as a tool sometimes
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It may be an unpopular opinion, but I suspect treating juveniles with kid gloves all the time and the popularization of the view that they are entitled not be exposed to anything that may upset or offend them has lead to less personal resilience.
The social media environment does also mean that when subjected to bullying it is amplified by a massive factor that previous generations were not exposed to, so the change in expectations is certainly not the only factor at play here.
Again, the usual scarecrow of "internet is corrupting our kids and our minds"...
The good excuse to push for population censorship and control.
The truth is that the problem is coming from the social society that we prefer to ignore: education collapsing, government and political world having arms wide open to dictatorship when it benefits to them,...
Just to remember that a few decades ago, same kind of persons were stating that books and free press are responsible for all of the moral corruption of the society...
I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that [recent technology] is to blame here, and not decades or centuries-long societal patterns. Especially when that technology is shaking up established "authorities" and calling their so-called expertise into question.
The fact that this seems particularly strong in Anglo and historically Protestant places and less in other developed countries suggests to me that this is more of a specific cultural phenomenon and less of a problem directly attributable to social media. But of course that's a much more complex topic and not something that you can wrap a trendy new nonfiction book around.
Social media is not like those earlier innovations. I think the best metaphor here is to imagine a public square in which people talk to each other. They debate ideas or put forth ideas that may not always be brilliant. They may not always be civil, but people can speak while others listen. Sometimes people are moved by persuasion or dissuasion. I think the Founding Fathers assumed that’s about the best we can hope for. Imagine one day, and I’ll call it 2009, that all changes. There’s no more public square. Everything takes place in the center of the Roman Colosseum. The stands are full of people who are there to see blood. That’s what they came for. They don’t want to see the lion and the Christian making nice; they want the one to kill the other. That’s what Twitter is often like.
The public square was emphatically not what media was like before social media. It was a locked-down space controlled by large corporations: newspapers, TV stations, and other institutions that told you what was acceptable to talk about and what wasn't. It wasn't a public square with equal access for all.
The Internet, just like the printing press in the 1500s-1600s, took that ability and spread it to millions of people that previously didn't have it. The results of the Gutenberg printing press were both good and bad, depending on your persuasion, but these types of "we need more restrictions on Internet publishing because old authorities are losing power" really sound like something that was said about the Gutenberg press when it started to spread information that called authority into question. It didn't work then, and it won't work now.
> You have smaller family sizes; people retreat inside because now they have air conditioning and TV and they’re not out in the front yard socializing as much. So, for a lot of reasons, we begin to lose trust in each other.
I think that a bigger factor is the car-centric city and suburb design that started in the US after World War II. It was intended to give everyone what they wanted; a big house, a yard, consistency, etc., but it prevents anyone without a driver or a car & license from socializing and visiting a "third place." I think that it increased individual isolation even before the internet or social media existed and thus set the foundation for social media to be as big of an influence as it is.