> The thing that disturbs me about this argument is that IMHO it's a slippery slope towards "back in my day, we didn't have this new-fangled stuff".
> I just think we all need to be mindful about where our concerns might be coming from.
Basically we're on the same page.
Here is proposition. I'll steelman the Conservative view and you tell me what you think. I promise not to claim vidya causes violence or D&D is a leading cause of Satanism.
My proposition is that television media has meaningfully worsened our society by making it dumber. This is an artifact of the medium itself, rather than an issue with any specific content on it. To explain what I mean by dumber I must elaborate.
The television is a unidirectional medium. It contains consensus on various intellectual issues of the day and gives a description of the world I'd call received opinion. There exists no meaningful difference between the advertising that tranches people into buying products and the non-advertising that tranches people into buying ideas. Most ideas that are bought are not presented as items to be sold, they are pictured as 'givens', obvious. Most lying is done by omission. Even were all information presented truthfully, we have a faux sense of sophistication about our awareness which is a problem. When you buy prepackaged meals at a store you are not in the makings of becoming a chef, and in that way you are not chewing over the ideas presented to you, you do no mental cognition. Your state is best described as, and feels like, a hypnotic trance.
One of the problems with this is that television creates a false sense of normalcy that has no objective basis. It asks the questions and provides the answers. All debate is rhetorical debate.
It's the cognitive equivalent of 'traffic shaping' that Quality of Service mechanisms do on routers. In a way that is a much bigger lie. This concept is very similar to Moldbug's Cathedral concept. The people who work for the Cathedral don't realize they represent a very narrow range of thought on the spectrum. Their opinions cannot plausibly be of their own manufacture because one arbitrary idea is held in common with another arbitrary idea and they all hold them.
The key to understanding this is very real and not at all abstract, is that millions of people have synchronized opinions on a range of issues without any other discernible cause other than the television (or radio). Why do populations of teenagers become anorexic after the introduction of television where they did not suffer before it? Synchronized opinion is always suspicious. It defies probability theory to think my grandmother and millions of others suddenly came to the conclusions for example, that gay marriage was a positive idea? Why do millions of conservatives think buying gold is a good idea? It is not that there is something wrong with gay marriage or buying gold. It's that there is no genuine thinking going on about about any of this. There many ways to hedge against inflation that don't involve buying gold. Why is gay marriage the morality tale of the age, and not, say, elder abuse in nursing care facilities.
Why do some things become 'issues' and not a myriad of others? How directed this is is up for debate, but what is not is that the selectivity and constraints of the medium have narrowed our perception of the world, and that has led to the thing that made us dumber: it stunted our native creativity and curiosity.
> Yet kids ALWAYS adapt. They don't view smartphones or tablets as anything particularly out of the ordinary. It's just their ordinary. I'm certain their brains will build on top of this foundation. That's the thing - brains are extremely adaptable. All of us adapted.
There does exist a series of schools in Silicon Valley. The software engineers at Google and Facebook and other firms send their children to them, and they strictly contain no computing related devices. Instead it's schooling of the old fashioned sort, from the early 20th century.
It is possible that this is juvenoia as you suggested. But at least take into account those parents may understand something else about electronic media and its affects on brains. After all many of them study seriously human attention for a living.
The other thing I want to ask you is have you ever visited in your country what we call council estates in Europe? These are places which contain the poorer class of people in our society. I've been to many of these gray lifeless places and they all have many characteristics in common. Television is a major part of their lives and their shelves are bare of books. It is ubiquitous. In the past the working classes were much more socially and intellectually mobile. They read. They did things. Little evidence remains of that today, but it was so.
It is possible that television is like a slow poison that affects some classes more than others. You can't just say people you know are unaffected and therefore it does not matter, because it is possible you may be part of an advantaged group for which reasons may exist why they could be more immunized than most e.g. having challenging or interesting work to do. It's worth considering that all the problems I mentioned still exist without television in society but you might say the 'dose' determines whether it's medicine or poison. There is certainly a sense among many people that television has progressively gotten worse and watching old news broadcasts and documentaries it is hard not to see what they mean. I appreciate this isn't objective measurement, but comparing like with like, say James Burke's Connections with Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos, the difference is obvious and the Cosmos reboot would be considered very good relative to its current competition.
Evidence for my claims could be a reduction in the number of inventions (excluding paper patents) per capita, reduced library visitations with respect to population changes, increasing numbers of younger people unable to read, evidence of decreased adventurousness or increased passiveness in the population, some metric for diminished curiosity/creativity over time. If those were mainly found wanting then I'll concede my error.
I'd be much more concerned about curiosity/creativity, than reduction in IQ or school test scores because creativity is really the key to much of what is good about human endeavor.
I'd also like to point out that you might not be able to spot the 'brain damage' so easily, since it's hard to come up with objective measures without a good control group. If it happened to most people then it's a new normal but that doesn't mean it had no effect.