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My opinion (as a parent of two <10yr old boys) is that screens are the new rock music/comic books/video games/bad-thing-du-jour that parents are demonizing as destroying the younger generation. There's always something, and it's never anywhere near as bad or destructive as was feared. It's just the next phase of a natural and inescapable societal progression.

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I think media can harm attention spans. I used to spend a lot of time reading books/programming for fun and after spending more time consuming short term content my attention span seems far more fragile.

Abstractly, anything you spend a lot of time doing is going to shape how you think and not necessarily in positive ways.

Those were generally about culture and morals though, right? Rock and roll, drugs, etc scared parents because it was viewed as depraved & debaucherous, nobody was worried it was a substitute for good parenting and that it would impair your development of social skills.

Concerns about "screens" today seems more analogous to the old "TV-as-parent" issue.

Worse, screens today are about companies directly tapping into brain mechanisms to induce as close to addiction as they can get. Opiate of the masses indeed.

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