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Comment by chadlavi | Hacker News Reader

Internet is the new boogeyman. TV used to be it. Radio was it one time. Hell, _novels_ were treated this way.

The one thing they all have in common is being new behavior patterns that people can worry and kvetch about.

I agree with you somewhat, but there's something unique about the internet I think is dangerous: there's no clear boundaries of when to stop. Radio stations would stop broadcasting, you reach the end of a book, and tv shows end. But, the internet just keeps going. You can just keep scrolling and clicking through website after website until you die, with very little prompt that it's time to stop.

You go to the next book to read in the same way you click on the next link on the web.

Or even more obviously, keep clicking and scrolling to the next channel on TV. Not that much these days, because everyone switched away from cable onto the streaming services, but it should still be an easy comparison that is understood by most here.

Broadcast TV stations used to stop broadcasting every night. By midnight or 1:00 or so, none of the three or four channels you could receive was showing anything at all.

Yes but with substantially more friction. I have to stand up, walk over to my bookshelf, go through my books, grab one, sit back down, and start reading vs click

have to stand up, walk over to my bookshelf, go through my books, grab one, sit back dow

You can treat that as a chore, or as something exciting. Pick the latter and it's not really friction anymore, in that it's enjoyable friction: there's a certain expectation I get from picking the next book, encountering something I haven't read for ages and remembering how good it was.

Not if you bring the whole pile around with you or you have a Kindle!

Not that I've ever done such things. Carrying around 4 books would have been absurd. Not me.

Actual data points at millenials and zoomers actually reading more books than other generations [1].

This seemed weird to me until I figured out how few books my parents actually read.

This thread is full of social media as a generation-destroying boogieman, but nobody seems to consider how much more common youth alcoholism was 20+ years ago or how much of our parents' lives was spent in front of the TV.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2017/01/16/millennials...

When you think about it, the internet is very interactive and most of it is reading (youtube aside), compared to TV which is 100% preset video content.

Exactly, because of the Internet we (as a collective) are probably reading and writing the most amount of text in history.

The difference between the past and the present is not that we're on the direction of illiteracy, but that the structure of text is becoming much more non-linear than before (distributed, discretized, highly referential, algorithmically sorted and processed text rather than continual, serial, and isolated text) which has consequences (both positively and negatively) in shaping our way of thinking about reality.

None of those things have the addictive and distraction power of the Internet. Along with the Internet has come ubiquitous things like laptops, tablets, and cellphones. It is an actual problem, not one for people to merely "worry and kvetch about".

Wasn't TV viewed in the same light?

I imagine a large segment of humanity has always looked for addictions.

Well most of the population seems to drink coffee and is somehow proud of not being able to quit, so yeah. Addiction is a part of our life, we just have to be careful to not form harmful ones.

TV was viewed in the same light, and a large chunk of the population remains addicted to their TVs to this day.

And to some extent, all of the nightmare scenarios from those technologies happened. Over time, those scenarios just became the new normal way of life and we adapted to it. Of course, many have made the case that a lot of our psychological and societal problems have their roots in those technologies just as their opponents originally thought they would have, but, again, this is the new norm now so people mostly don't think about it.

They are radically evolved means of consumption, too. If you go back far enough, even back to single cells, it's all been consumption this whole time. The more modern means help us select for specific types and amounts of energy via stimulation. Which is pretty amazing really.

That helps put it into perspective for me. I can watch the stimulation and consumption from the outside, so to speak, and get a helpful picture of what's going on in my life.

Most moral panics are in-retrospect entertainment. But some are on the money.

Not really. Moral panics are like their names suggests panic, on baseless fear. Even if it is a problem to be concerned about like kidnapping they will focus on the wrong aspect that incites the most fear instead of what is actually germane. See "stranger danger" and fears of pedophiles looking for some lurking creeper when they should be looking at their divorced ex or a trusted part of their kid's life.

It is a common problem, they always look for some sort of cartoonish villain to blame things on.

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