Spending time outside is good for you. Socializing with real people in front of you is good also.
Not sure if we can ever go back to that without some major catastrophe.
We easily can. With the network effect, we can just encourage everyone we know that socializing with real people in real life is important and set up some coffees, lunches, dinners, walks, board games, etc, and then encourage those people to do the same with the people they know.
Won't take very many hops to reach everyone this way and get back on track.
There are lots of people who have done exactly what you said, and others that never became terminally online, yet real-world re-adoption has been slow.
Realistically possible: "Obesity levels keep going up"
It has to start somewhere after all. <3
I say this not to by cynical or cop-out. Im actually pretty optimistic about that things will swing back in the opposite direction. I just dont think it will be a quick snap out of it, but a painful lesson for many people, and a lot of people will be left behind.
That is to say, a quick global anti-online revolution is compatible with the laws of physics, but I dont think it is likely.
The good news is that nobody has to wait for the global revolution. They can do whatever they want starting today. I find physical interactions more rewarding and healthy, so I put in the effort to have them. I suspect most people would be happier if they did the same.
The internet gives you an instant connection to people who have interests specific to you better than even an expensive international convention can do for essentially free. If you decide this is worth it anyways, well you’re going to end up financially behind somebody using the internet in a cheap apartment on undesirable land, and that is going to undermine you bit by bit.
Those who thrive in this era of humanity I think are just going to be well adapted to an online world, or just be wealthy enough that they can afford the luxury of meeting in person. The only way in which I see this trend moving in the opposite direction is that the average amount of people living in each home is likely to rise due to land cost.
How is the depressed person living in an undesirable place ahead exactly?
I think about this because in my youth the kids who spent all day in front of a computer were treated as disabled, disordered, and aberrant who needed to be pushed to be more social to succeed. Mostly boys were treated in this way. Yet I feel it’s these socially driven people who are fucked. Mostly women.
Sometimes I wonder if people read what they actually write?
What you're saying is you want everyone to disconnect and no longer be part of the network effect we're currently under.... This thinking seems to have a few flaws.
1. You have to remain within the supposed 'bad' network effect to broadcast your message. If you leave and go do your IRL things, you won't be there to broadcast your message (maybe bots doing it for you?).
2. You expect said networks to carry your message. You: "Lets all go outside", X: "Your message has been deleted due to violations of community standards".
3. You assume that being terminally online is not an addiction. That is just saying "Hey, lets go outside" has any effect on the vast majority of people that need to hear the message. Don't think of being on like smoking, it's not something you can just ban because it's part of life now. Think of it like eating, and how poorly that is going for the world at the moment with ever increasing obesity rates.
Part of the allure of the internet is that if I want to talk about Mass Effect tabletop roll playing, there are plenty of other people to talk about that with. If I want to have a conversation about the same thing in person... Maybe there is someone in my city who might want to talk about that? But it is so much more work to make that happen than online.
I dont mind talking about sports/local stuff/mass media/small talk all that much but that is most of what I'm going to get from the folks I'm interacting with on a regular basis IRL.
The good news is that individuals don't have to wait on society. They can choose to be early adapters.
Now that outlet has been replaced by a digital version of the exact same inescapable social matrix from school. Perhaps this theory is less supported by the observed effect being greater on girls (at first glance one would think a frontier would be more important to boys). But on the other hand psuedonymity allowed everyone to have personas not tied to gender, and perhaps girls actually need the escape more.
And I don't think we can come back from this. That we can go back to ignorance. We need to adapt, the way species always adapted. By letting weaker ones die. And that's exactly what will happen unless by sheer accident some technological miracle pops up to save us from this problem. We won't step back from profitable technologies. We never did.
I'd say it gives you an accurate depiction, exposing the shit in the world around us.
Whereas people not online so much are happy because ignorance is bliss.
Why not declining social mobility? Why not climate change anxiety? Why not late stage capitalism? Nah, it's always easy to blame Tik Tok as if the chosen release isn't indicative of something much greater going on.
I've never been able to figure out what the problem is with climate change was so I dunno; maybe that is fair. But nothing new seems to have happened in the last decade that wasn't also happening in the 2000s.
It's likely several factors at play and at different severities in different places.
Plus microplastics likely accumulate over your lifetime - a mental health issue caused by microplastics would show up much more quickly in the elderly of middle aged than in teens.
Archive https://www.afterbabel.com/archive
Here are 13 Other Explanations for the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis. None of Them Work. https://www.afterbabel.com/p/13-explanations-mental-health-c...
She finally gets to the deciding modern condition - the one where kids are systemically denied critical growth time (daily blocks of adult-free time & safe places to roam [safe=no threat of police or other compulsive adults]).
And even tho she has this on her list of false suppositions she admits probably isn't as false as she infers.
But she then immediately minimizes this historic erasure of development by saying it's just 'independence' kids have lost. Gaslighting done, she bizarrely accuses devices & social media of causing it, even tho it was obvious by the 1980s that options for free-roaming and adult-free time were well on the way to being eradicated.
Perhaps being so invested in pregurgitated conclusions, she's unable to notice super-obvious competing factors.
If it was just about independence, countries like Germany or France would not had the issue.
All that said, the authors who publish on that site are also very pro-unsupervised free play and think its decline has caused mental health issues of its own (see Haidt's The Coddling of the American Mind).
I think human social systems have a lot of 'anti-fragile' built into them. That is any one factor, unless it is insanely serious, isn't going to cause a mass collapse of society. We adapt and smooth things over. This is something we see in ecological systems all the time. The problems start cropping up when multiple stressors are introduced to the environment. For example, I'd say the disappearance of 'third places' forces more youth to social media thereby increasing said harm of social media.
Also, social media likely needs broken into a series of different factors on what is harmful about it. You have the direct "Kids going things to kids", but neglecting what social media is doing to their parents would be missing the forest for the trees. The 24 hour news cycle tapped into the fear sells, and online has taken it to 'fear gets eyeballs'. Add in advertisers being unscrupulous, and countless bots attempting to manipulate you, it's no wonder we're not all insane.
What is social media if not an aspect of late stage capitalism? Unlike a normal customer <-> business relationship social media companies don't give the slightest shit about your well-being or satisfaction. Indeed, you're not the customer at all.
the current state of online is the food. it just really sucks.
These days we can barely survive without a mobile phone always on, permeating every little interaction we have with the world. It’s quite a difference.
and cell phones have been around a lot longer than 10 years when this really picked up steam. even if you filter this statement to exclude everything but smart phones - smart, internet connected phones were around well before ~2012 when we saw a sharp spike begin in this trend, and that’s really the dawn of dominance of the YT/FB/IG/etc era.
A beeper isn’t even in the same league and it’s really not a point here.
Nerds doing nerd stuff aren't going to affect the zeitgeist much, it's the network effect of having essentially 100% of your peers spending much of their time on social media.
You are attempting to put a square into a circle here.
reading all of these 'royal we' anecdotes makes me feel grateful that I can survive without a mobile quite fine. HN is as close to social media as I get -- so I guess i'm stuck wondering : are all these 'conditions' of the modern world inexorably linked and self-perpetuating?
Like, if I wanted to develop a mobile-phone habit would it be best for me to get interested in social media, and vice versa?
Maybe my ducking of these trends just stems from my aversion to social media all together, and that saved me from mobile-phone overuse?
I don't know. But it is interesting, and wildly segmenting, that everyone around me refers to these problems that 'we' have -- but I don't. I can't be alone in this feeling.
p.s. to be clear, i'm not gloating -- if anything it's kind of loneliness inducing that I can't relate to the struggle.. but it's kind of a bittersweet feeling like being one of the few who doesn't catch a plague and has to watch others suffer.
I think those are the main things I use my phone for, and getting rid of it would be very inconvenient at this point, especially since I have an iPhone anyway so I can shut off all push notifications and all tracking software and what have you. It's not 100% secure, but what can you do. Though, to be honest, I think this will be my last smartphone, I won't get another one after it breaks. I was in my local library the other day, just checking it out, and there happened to be a travel guide for a city I'm visiting soon. My god, that thing was way better than any info I've found online, and it was quite pleasant to sit down and read a book for a few hours, instead of frantically browsing through one million websites to find out what was cool, interesting, and legit, and what was a tourist trap. Its a shithole, the internet, its just a means for large-scale fraud, theft, and surveillance. But there are still a few good things left, and that redeems it somewhat.
I feel the same way. HN is as close as I get to social media, I don't even look at reddit.
I think it is a "good thing" people use your "royal we" term in that at least people see phone addiction as a problem. It is usually always couched in the tone of "the problem is too far gone" which isn't a good thing.
I wonder what it would be like if an entire country picked one hour during one day, and everyone just somehow disabled data on their phones, calls only, with the idea being that you only make calls that are required, not to stymie boredom.
The other half of the mobile 1-2 punch is that the UX is terrible, due to both the limited form factor and the hostile software. People are social animals so most just suffer through it for the connection, and not knowing that the experience can be so much better on a real computer. Using software that functions across devices, I do feel the same attractors on a fully fledged desktop. But it's much less concentrated as I can read the entire context without scrolling, type out a response at a comfortable speed, and then switch away from that window until I poll it again. Whereas even with a phone running mostly libre software it feels like being sucked into a tap-tap-tap morass that I'm only using because I have to.
But of course it's not the technical capability that's the problem, it's the always-online culture, the network effects, the constant doomscrolling through algorithm-optimized feeds, the instant notification when someone replies to your kneejerk vitrolic comment with even more vitrol.
And then again, that culture was not possible without the technical capabilities and widespread adoption of them. Nobody was motivated to build a site or app optimized for doomscrolling until there were enough eyeballs and advertising dollars to capture.
There are plenty of millennials that have been terminally online since at least their early teens and weren’t showing this same trend. I’m saying there’s nothing inherent about “online-ness” that should warrant mass levels of depression like this.
Women face all sorts of abuse and minimization online. I've heard of many women using male sounding names online in order to be taken seriously or avoid harassment. The general advice on subreddits dominated by women is to turn off personaal messaging to avoid the inevitable rape threats.
Take a look on Instagram and take a look at some musicians that are men and some that are women. The level of hatred directed towards women and the extra barriers they face will be very clear.
You also have subreddits that glorify misogyny like WomenAreThings or MisogynyKink. You have others where guys steal pictures from girls' social medias and redistribute them with captions about rape fantasy or where they use AI to force their victims into sexual media.
You look on YouTube and the algorithm wants to push misogynistic content aimed at disillusioned young boys and more and more of them are tuning in and blaming women for all their problems, asserting that feminism was a mistake.
If you're on Instagram compare how many women have their profiles set to private than men. This is to avoid the constant harassment they'd otherwise face.
I'm seeing more research every year that suggests women are actively self-censoring, silencing themselves or pretending to be men when online.
Here's a few interesting bits of further reading. I've been told off in the past for sharing these things here because women's rights are politics and therefore against the guidelines of the site but I hope it's relevant enough to the discussion here:
1. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/089443931986551... 2. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/online-violen... 3. https://www.womankind.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/brea...
Everyone is a girl, online.
I didn't actually say anything about men being the problem. Hatred against women hurts women was my whole point. I hope you can appreciate the irony in your comment: I pointed out some of the ways that women might struggle online, even linked to a variety of articles about it, and you felt the need to jump in and baselessly assert that women are the worst offenders.
Females are on average far more social than males. If there's a dose-response effect social media time and mental health, then we should plausibly expect girls to be affected more.
Not that I am blaming porn. I am not. But once the screens and bandwidth became large enough, UI's easy enough to navigate etc AND the devices themselves became quite commonplace, the always online mentality became one used much less for essential communication and business and transitioned more to a cultural way of life (porn is just an easy and funny way to drive that point home).
Doom scrolling wasnt really as much of a thing until Android and iOS matured enough and gained enough acceptance that it was no longer a status symbol. Heck i cant even tell you most of the social media apps these days, much less dating, but having some conversations with my younger cousins over break, there really arent many ways to meet folks outside of some of these apps (at least to them), which is sad. Apparently something as simple as "why not just join some type of IRL hobby and meet people that way" was scoffed at.
I blame the pivot from the chronological feeds to algorithmically generated feeds based on engagement (or whatever other metric).
Ad-based social apps (all of them) replaced that with algorithmic, so you have no real signifier of how long you've spent scrolling.
Tiktok takes this one step further by stripping the date from the videos.
You didnt have people nearly as commonly doomscrolling on the subway on the way to work, or in the car, or in the living room around family, when the computer was restricted to a specific space/time etc.
This is one thing that really gets me.
Your feed is based on engagement. It doesn't have to be GOOD engagement, just engagement.
So when you angrily reply to a tweet you hate, that's engagement. You will be shown more content that makes you angry.
Most of the things people complain about in terms of what Twitter shows them, I don't experience. I don't follow people I hate, and if someone quote-tweets, I avoid replying. Definitely don't click the original tweet to see what other people have said.
I check out Facebook once or twice a month because my wife tells me to like something on it. I didn't even create the account, she did it for me years ago.
Even now, I read. And read. And read. Everything from rigorous scientific studies on down to the weirdest shitposting. From great works of literature down to fringe science theories. But all I see other people doing, if I notice at all, is watching Tiktok videos. Are any of the rest of you out there reluctant to bother with consuming video/audio content, even if a search seems to indicate that it might be the only place the information you seek might be found? Well, then you might be one of those personalities for which being online wasn't/isn't so shitty.
Kids can’t go anywhere and are stuck at home. None of their friends are within walking distance. What do you expect them to do?
It doesn't matter where kids go these days because every single one of them has an internet connected cell phone at their side.
When they are with their friends, they are still with the internet. Their actions are moulded by it, as well they should be. If anything you do could be captured in video and posted online forever, you're going to change your behavior to reflect that reality.