Hacker News Reader

It's funny to think that people might look back at how much time and attention people from 2010 to 2020 spent on their device and think how backwards we were.

Like how "dumb" past generations were for putting lead in gasoline.

View on HN

Seems more likely to me that all the overreaction to social media will be what is viewed as silly and old-fashioned. History is absolutely full of very similar examples of people freaking out over how new mediums like novels or bicycles or radio or rock music or whatever are a waste of time and/or are destroying the children's minds.

There are also examples of when ignoring addictive behaviour -- or just pretending there isn't a problem -- leads to disaster.

The world wide web was the new medium, social media is the attention grabbing (and addictive for some) hook that enables a couple of large corporations to charge more for advertising impressions.

Right, history is also full of examples where enough reaction was non-existant and where this precise argument was used to allay concerns. History is probably also full of examples where it made sense.

History is full of all kinds of examples.

In future, the caricature of our time will be people blindly stumbling around while pressing small hunks of metal and plastic against their faces.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com