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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

I'm old enough to remember when it was TV that was supposedly wasting the time and destroying the youth. Before that, it was comic books. And movies. And even in the 19th century people were complaining about novels. Yes, in theory it is better if people do something constructive rather than just enjoy entertainment. But people can't be 100% in productive mode 100% of the time.

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There's some equivalence, but consider the amount of engineering and research that Facebook, Instagram and Youtube put into keeping eyes on screens, and I think it's worse than ever.

I call survivor bias.

Books without action can render useless. TV can consume countless hours and does eat lives. Smartphones are the same, but more so.

We must recognize the danger all these thing. Information without physical action is a danger.

Taken to an extreme simply talking to--and visiting--friends a lot can be considered a useless waste. For example, loitering is forbidden in many retail places yet it's become culturally accepted use of indoor malls for teenagers (pre-COVID).

Life requires balance. And everyone gets to decide what they do with their down time.

Loitering is a better use of land than metastasized retail. Anti-loitering is a fucked up policy on so many levels.

being synchronously social with other human beings is easily the last bad part of malls and phones.

Loitering laws are pure bullshit that's used selectively to get "undesirable elements" away from commercial areas. Be they teenagers, the poor, or - back in the day - certain races.

As the graffiti says: "Homeless, go home!"

I remember this discussion vividly as well.

And I also distinctly remember the answer of Harald Schmidt, back then Germany‘s most famous late night show host, when he was asked whether he thought TV makes people dumb:

„With all due respect, I think TV makes intelligent people more intelligent and dumb people more dumb.“

20 years later, I couldn‘t have said it any better.

In the time of Socrates and Plato, the thing destroying the world was writing.

And to add to that, there is this presumption that phones are purely for entertainment aka "time wasting". They are also very useful devices for business, work, education, etc. Let those individuals decide what's good/bad - who are we to lecture?

tl;dr: There are no solutions, just trade-offs

This is a logical fallacy. If you increase the dosage of mercury, it'll eventually be deadly. In the same vein, smart phones, social media, etc are entirely different beasts to books, radio and even television.

And we'll adjust, as we always do. It's fine to have this discussion, but the position that it can "destroy you" and comparing it to a lethal dosage of mercury is on the extreme end of the discussion.

>And we'll adjust, as we always do

I don't understand this line of thinking. Sure, it may not be the literal end of the world, but that doesn't mean that it won't cause a lot of damage before people 'adapt'. People have always adapted to wars, but that doesn't mean that the world wars weren't absolutely catastrophic.

And while I don't think that smartphones will 'destroy you', I think there's a good chance that it can both be very corrosive in all sorts of manners. I think smartphones are a lot more potent at sedating people and making them detached than novels ever could hope to be, which can have a very harmful impact on society at large.

How do you feel about television?

At least there's some ability to interact with a smartphone, there's absolutely none of that with TV, and yet society survived.

> How do you feel about television?

I think it's kinda too early too judge (only ~60 years of widespread adoption and in this time the TV landscape has changed massively), but I think there's a pretty good chance that 'tabloid style' TV has caused a good deal more damage than the yellow press has.

> At least there's some ability to interact with a smartphone

Sure, but that also makes it a lot more addictive. You generally won't see people who are glued to their TV 24/7, but with smartphones that's not uncommon.

> yet society survived

Again, I'm not saying that society will just implode on itself, just that these things can do a lot of damage.

I dunno man, the average American (used to) watch eight hours of TV a day. When you look at the changing media landscape, it's that mobiles/PCs are being substituted for TV watching.

Thank you for the answer though, I appreciate consistency when examining the impact of media.

I wonder if productivity per capita has went down?

Although maybe the biggest concern being expressed is by the old who are in dire need of the youth working to look after them. From that perspective, the situation seems a little sad.

Considering the amount of time my relatives and parents spend on Facebook and increasingly Instagram, I don't know who's raising concerns here. It's likely the really old elders (70+ folks who don't know their way around a mobile app).

There's a huge segment of the Indian youth population (around 30% iirc) that's underemployed or unemployed, that spends a lot of time on Facebook and Instagram. There's a reason India has the highest consumption among all countries in Facebook and Insta, yet one of the lowest ad revenue rates - advertisers simply don't find value advertising to these fellows.

The amount of toxicity is also a factor. Novels, Comics and Movies are much less toxic than Media.

Politics are creeping into movies and TV and becoming quite toxic as well.

All three of those are forms of media.

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