Will the “Social Media Bad” trend die out like the “Video Games Violent” trend? | Hacker News Reader

Will the “Social Media Bad” trend die out like the “Video Games Violent” trend?

13 pointshidden-spyder13 comments

No, because it's not a trend. It's objectively true that social media exploits human nature in harmful ways in pursuit of profit. See e.g. "The scientists who make apps addictive" https://web.archive.org/web/20210416052902/https://www.econo...

I hope not. While I can't comment on the video games (not as familiar) from what I've read, television and movie violence almost certainly does have a negative effect on the viewer, much like people were worried about in the 80s and 90s during that small moral panic. Unlike some hypothesized, it doesn't make us into cold-blooded murderers. But it does seem to result in higher levels of anxiety, distrust and fear of being murdered. Studies pretty reliably show an effect correlating how much someone watches violent movies and how much anxiety they have around experiencing interpersonal violence.

Yes, TV violence was a moral panic to some degree, and it's so easy to get carried away with thinking these are mind control boxes. But I'm kind of alarmed that we stopped talking about that angle almost entirely. (There may be similar issues with sexualized imagery. It doesn't make us hyper-promiscuous, but it may make us detest our bodies and induce unhealthy sexual jealousy.)

This totally makes sense, but I'm always curious what the suggested mitigations here are. Even if I like watching Game of Thrones or other violent shows, it might indeed make me more worried of being murdered. But it seems like that's the tradeoff I (as an individual) take for consuming the content.

You can water down your booze to handle the drunk, but you're also ruining the flavor.

> Studies pretty reliably show an effect correlating how much someone watches violent movies and how much anxiety they have around experiencing interpersonal violence.

Care to share? how can I search this?

You are supposed to have anxiety around experiencing interpersonal violence. It's a survival mechanism.

Of course. But people's level of apprehension is quite out of whack with the actual risk sometimes. I'd guess some people spend far worrying about safe neighbourhoods and being stabbed vs. their diet and impending heart disease.

I think it will die out if it is empirically denied by facts. There has been an astronomical increase in video game consumption and realistic violence over the last 20 years, a time during which murders have been dropping consistently. And, when there are very high profile murders like mass shootings (Parkland, Vegas, Pulse Nightclub, etc), video gaming does not seem to be a common theme.

On the other hand, social media's ills are very real and very proven empirically. To reverse the narrative, social media will have to reverse that fact.

I hope not, because it's true. Social media is awful and a cancer on our society.

Why assume “social media bad” is a moral panic and not a legitimate assessment? The “cigarettes unhealthy” trend has had many of the same moralizing overtones as baseless panics (like over heavy metal music, dungeons and dragons, or satanism among childcare providers), but it’s grounded in scientific fact and so is here to stay.

I don't care one way or another. I just know my life improved when I got rid of FB, Twitter and Instagram ;)

Probably not, simply because there is at least more truth to the social media criticisms. I reckon they'll atomize and a lot of the ill effects will be blunted enough to make it just a background hum danger of living in society.

Like car crashes and obesity. And diabetes. And mass shootings. Exploitation of labor. Centralization of wealth.

...

Climate change. Lack of clean drinking water.

Healthcare.

I'd suspect that "social media makes people violent" might have some merit

The same research showing social media is bad shows video games can be good for cooperative socialization in pre-teen boys. Google Jonathan Haida.

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