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Comment by mbg721 | Hacker News Reader

> We spend a lot more time on social media than we did watching the TV.

Is this actually true? When I was a kid, the amount of TV time was something of a moral panic; I'd have a hard time believing there were many more hours in the day left to consume. What I would believe is that social media's use of intermittent rewards makes people obsess about it even when they aren't actively using it.

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You didn't have TV in your pocket, in bed, at dinner, in the car, the moment you wake up, while waiting in the bathroom, literally every moment you're even approaching the possibility of being slightly bored. You didn't have the opportunity to broadcast yourself and get immediate validation for the broadcast.

The rewards are the icing on an all-inclusive cake.

Ponzi finance in Albania in the late 90's shows that you don't need TV or social media or smartphones for pyramid schemes to take over an entire society.

What you need is widespread magical thinking combined with greed, corruption and an economic shock.

"Albania became one of the most enthusiastic implementers of shock therapy, a set of policies that included the liberalization of markets, strict monetary policy, and privatization of public services and infrastructure."

"Factory closures and unemployment soon followed. Inflation and currency devaluations wiped out savings and welfare entitlements."

"Politically connected businessmen appropriated the profitable parts of state assets in an upward redistribution of wealth of world-historic proportions. Food subsidies were slashed; hunger rose."

Citizens regarded capitalism "with childlike naivete—and grown-up greed"

Albania "became a playground for Moonies, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses."

In Albania a vicious civil war followed the collapse of the pyramids.

Many parallels to the United States in 2022 (and this is far bigger than just crypto).

Source: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/pyramids-eve...

Television has gone through something of a redefinition in recent decades. Today, TV can be seen as more of an atmospheric decoration - it's "always on" in the same sense as when broadband internet was introduced to the public: TVs can always be used for something, because there is always something available to watch.

Modern consumers tend to use some other screen at least part of the time they're watching television.

Before, TV used to be dependent on the content being broadcast, and so there was something of a hard constraint upon the amount of TV time - especially for children. This has gone completely out the window in recent years.

I think that's a consequence of reruns. My parents use Gilligan's Island or Columbo as background noise, because they know how they all go. The writers intended for each episode to be the focus of the room's attention, but it didn't work out that way later.

My unqualified crackpot theory is the stranger danger panic plus trend towards children later in life compounded in more "kids indoors" time, which translates into media consumption. The generations inheriting that arrived just in time for "social media" to become a zeitgeist.

Which is interesting because the "stranger danger" panic was basically fueled by the media itself, as it sold well.

They could have been doing research into all the actual non-stranger cases of abuse that were going on but secret, but no, that doesn't sell as well.

I don’t think that’s an irrational take it all.

The part I don't understand is, where did the stranger-danger thing come from? Was it an early reaction to institutional sexual abuse that was just becoming well-known? Was it a culture-war thing where racism was socially unacceptable, so we had to fear everyone? Was it just that TV became ingrained enough that everybody lived in fiction more than real life?

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