I'm glad write-ups like this one are a thing.
Maybe our parents were indeed right when they told us we are glued to our devices and should go touch grass.
And yet, their generation seems to be the most addicted these days, and the most unhinged when it comes to following conspiracy theories.
I suspect that one reason is that "digital natives" have been raised with the tech, so have sort of a "natural resistance," yet the oldtimers were hooked almost immediately.
For myself, I have been using electronic communications, almost since they were invented (BBSes and UUNet, anyone?), so I have "more resistance" than most of my peers.
Yet, I still have to stay off of Facebook. This is pretty much my only social media venue. The main reason I stay, is because people play [relatively] nice, hereabouts.
We can see lots of useful examples of a protective social norms with alcohol. For example, it’s quite common for people to not drink any alcohol before a certain hour of the day. It’s not illegal to drink alcohol earlier, but it’s “just not done”. We can easily see the benefits of not drinking at the start of the workday.
I’m not going to guess what kind of social media norms people are developing in general. For me I only follow boring, topic-focused people on Twitter, and I only use the “Following” feed. Nobody is making me do this.
Agreed. A lot of older generations fall for a lot of satire and comment on things as if they're 1 on 1 with you instead of realizing that it's a public forum. However, a lot of younger generations are incredibly aware that everything they do and say could potentially be public or go viral. That brings a whole host of other problems and challenges with it.
The ultimate problem is every incentive goes against a "healthy" social media. Companies don't want a "healthy" social media as they're focused on engagement, screen time, content, and advertisers. Most of the primitive portions of our brains don't want "healthy" social media either, as it craves the rush of more likes and followers. I don't think that the logical, self-aware portions of our psyche are going to change the direction of how things are going.
I find this point quite interesting. I didn't drink alcohol until I was nearly 30. I skipped by most of the formative alcohol consumption experiences most people have.
And, incidentally, I don't seem to follow the same norms about what time of day it's okay to drink: I'll happily have a beer well before noon.
The younger generation were raised with media that spread obvious untruths such as conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, etc. and they learned to think more critically about what they are reading.
Except that talk radio is way older than that, and it was the same kind of content.
As a side note, one important change in the modern times is the ability to cross check information from a wide range of sources easily.
Social media, gen z wins: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1314973/global-daily-tim...
Phones in general, millennials win: https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/which-generation-....
get a better argument
That's not even getting into the level of corporate surveillance social media and online advertising have brought us.
it’s a slightly less targeted ad, sure, but my dad only reads conservative papers, and they don’t seem to be written with a common perspective
That's not even remotely close to what they said and is clearly just your own personal grievance with newspapers
And I just found about 15 pictures in a quick Google images search from the 70s and 80s that disprove your assertion.
The obvious difference is that newspapers contain a relatively small amount of information packaged in a non-interactive, non-targeted, and less mind-absorbing format. People don't read newspapers for the dopamine hit, but for lack of something else to do.
Perhaps reading newspapers produces some dopamine, but I imagine it is tiny in comparison to the effects of smartphones, and does not provide the user with the easy option to keep scrolling for more dopamine.
Your analogy is better than you think, because in fact there isn't anything wrong with giving pregnant women thalidomide at all!
You just have to not do it within a very carefully defined range of time within pregnancy, but before and after that it's as safe as milk.
Turns out, the same process that makes thalidomide horribly teratogenic also makes it an absolutely first-rate cancer drug with few side-effects even in pregnancy.
This webpage seems to suggest the risks are unknown after first trimester: https://mothertobaby.org/fact-sheets/thalidomide-pregnancy/
Same from this university classroom material (p.2): https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/MediaLibraries/URMCMedia/life...
I know the image you have in your mind. I've seen it, too.
What you actually mean is "I saw this one picture on social media of a bunch of people on a train all reading newspapers at the same time because war just broke out."
Using that as a logical crutch for social media addiction is like the alcoholic saying "everybody does it."
There is one popular picture where everyone is reading newspapers in a bus. And just like now it is not true that everyone is reading on phone on public transport. It was even less so before, because not everybody carried magazines with them all the time.
This is quite a big pond, my friend. The "get a better argument" line might go over well in your social circle, but HN is a big place with many smart people. Have some humility.
For one, I don't think it was common for people to take a newspaper out of their pocket and look at it during social events with friends and family whenever conversation slowed down for a moment, or whenever it pinged with a notification. I observe my own wife spending far more time looking at her phone today than she ever spent reading a book before. Ten years ago, she might get lost in a book for a day or two, if it was a really good one. Now she walks around the house with her phone in-hand at all times. I had to pry myself back from that after starting to notice the same behavior in myself.
That's a strawman, the issue is kids spending their time on devices rather than outside doing real play with real people. That sort of thing.