Social Media Messed Up Our Kids. Now It Is Making Us Ungovernable
noemamag.com
noemamag.com
I think that a bigger factor is the car-centric city and suburb design that started in the US after World War II. It was intended to give everyone what they wanted; a big house, a yard, consistency, etc., but it prevents anyone without a driver or a car & license from socializing and visiting a "third place." I think that it increased individual isolation even before the internet or social media existed and thus set the foundation for social media to be as big of an influence as it is.
As a German, the typical US city and its suburbs really represent a kid-hating hellscape.
[There is something strange about using both the words "determine" and "choose" instead of just one.]
I can't speak about self harm, but them kids got in couple of years around a decade ago insanely unable to focus. They were consistently distracted.
Adults who use lots of internet in general (regardless of socials) are the same. Applies to my girlfriend (she changed a lot since she started working behind a computer) and I have to admit to myself (which is why I block most of the internet during working hours).
It's insane how your brain gets rewired by doomscrolling into essentially dopamine seeking.
Sometimes I wish there is a special prison that admits people who wants to achieve something but are too distracted to do so. It doesn't have Internet, nor does it have smart devices. It doesn't allow them out until they achieve the objectives. I'd be happy to buy its service.
8 year olds swearing left and right, talking about porn and pedos or making all sorts of unpleasant statements that you seen on 4chan can have a pretty debilitating effect on a child's development, especially before puberty has even begun. A kind of "innocence lost", a cruel and cynical culture that can envelope those who weren't exposed to it early on. Metasize that 10 years later and in 2015 or so we see the side effects of it. Now of course that might be just my school then, but it's still something I would consider today. There are certain heuristics regarding the changes in mass appeal of certain genres that I would correlate to deep, fundamental cynicism in the mainstream zeitgeist.
When social media came we did as we always do; we talk about the potential of the emerging technology. Connecting people across the world, learning, sharing experiences. I don’t think we were wrong in the assessment, but I do think many of us were missing that potential is not the governing force - it’s the incentives.
Now, people are doing the exact same thing with gen AI: talking about the potential. But what’s the business model? Will our kids get excellent private tutors with endless knowledge, or a barrage of post-truth content designed to market, sell, influence, nudge and confuse?
Create safe districts, moving the real election to the primary stage, and then give the electorate a doomscrolling-device as their primary information source.
So the primary voters become more radical and paranoid and we wind up with growing proportion of fringe candidates who would lose to a dog if only they weren't safe seats.
Moreover, the growing rural/urban partisan polarization means even non gerrymandered districts that are created by nonpartisan panels or algorithms are frequently left or right polarized. Creating competitive districts would require gerrymandering in many places in the USA.
Missouri Compromise, Kansas Nebraska Act, Nevada, Utah, and the Dakotas' existence, Washington DC not having representation, Puerto Rico languishing
Coincidentally it seems like the rural United States has disproportionate representation and power. I'm sure that has nothing to do with the Republican party not winning popular votes in presidential elections for all but one election in over 30 years
Many solid “red” rural states today frequently elected statewide democrats just a few decades ago.
That’s not even getting into that the claim of Biden as “center right” is based on Overton window shifting. Biden repudiated many of his earlier more centrist positions on DEI (e.g. his anti-school busing activism in the 70s), immigration, abortion, etc to win the nomination. Compare Biden’s platform and positions to the Obama 2008 campaign platform and can you really see it as a “rightward” shift?
[0] edit - see for instance https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/19/about-1-i...
https://www.verywellmind.com/dsm-5-and-diagnosis-of-depreasi...
As for the assertions about "governability," that seems to be more about the government reaching consensus. I think PACs play a bigger role there than social media, but I try to follow the money.
The issue lies not only in the quality of the content but also in the mediums through which they are consumed.
Today, we are surrounded by low-quality content that can be quickly and easily accessed. Those familiar with ADHD(and struggle with it) understand that the instant gratification from these videos can lead to a craving for more.
As a millennial who grew up with unrestricted access to the internet and the advent of smartphones, I truly believe the situation will continue to worsen rather than improve.
I even wrote an entire book on this topic, detailing how internet addiction has profoundly impacted my life.
https://www.amazon.com/Enough-Seeking-less-world-more/dp/B0B...
If anyone wants a free copy, send me an email and I’ll send you one gladly!
Parliament not doing anything is obviously a self-fulfilling prophecy, and small, local solutions to a tragedy of the commons.. I don't believe it'll work.
Within the past 40 years they used to lock people like me up, give us lobotomies, forcibly medicate us, etc. Its easy to forget how society used to treat folks with mental illness. Its frankly no wonder that people to this day still hide it. Heck, I've had to contact the EEOC more than once. But the thing is, social-media didn't cause this, video games didn't cause this. I've always been genetically predisposed to this. In my opinion, unfettered access to the Internet in general is probably the worst environment for people with predispositions, but to simply blame everything on the environment we've create online through video games or social-media is wrong if not irresponsible.
"Not neurotypical" is a very wide category, and the vast majority of such were neither locked up nor given lobotomies.
On the other hand, ADHD kids in the 1990s were indeed forcibly medicated, as in, some schools coerced parents to give Ritalin to their child in order to attend school. IDEA 2004 included the 'Prohibition on Mandatory Medication' to prevent schools from doing that: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/34/300.174 .
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=u...
The interviewer's statement in questions makes me think they have a hobbyhorse to ride.
The possibility of arriving at a governing consensus through negotiation and compromise is being shattered by a cacophony of niche propagandists egging on their own siloed tribe of the faithful to engage in an endless partisan battle.
The social media environment does also mean that when subjected to bullying it is amplified by a massive factor that previous generations were not exposed to, so the change in expectations is certainly not the only factor at play here.
I don’t even need a citation here, I’m just curious what you’re imaging when you say this.
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jacob-riis/riis-and-reform.html
The amount of filth, trash, disease, and other unpleasant things used to be pretty crazy in NYC (and in other places like London or Paris, for that matter.)
https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/when-new-yorkers-l...
The good excuse to push for population censorship and control.
The truth is that the problem is coming from the social society that we prefer to ignore: education collapsing, government and political world having arms wide open to dictatorship when it benefits to them,...
Just to remember that a few decades ago, same kind of persons were stating that books and free press are responsible for all of the moral corruption of the society...
I think you’re quite confused on this point.
For example, the Catholic Church established its Index of Prohibited Books way back in 1560, and it remained in effect until 1966.
(this is not a criticism of the Catholic Church specifically, mind you... most faiths had similar restrictions, and many still do).
There are religious bookbanners today and they have very little overlap with the anti-social media crowd.
I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree on that. To me it doesn't matter whether there's any actual overlap between the groups. It's the censorious impulse they share. Believing that they have the right to make this type of decision for others is what makes them the "same kind of people".
A censorious impulse is a censorious impulse, after all!
Obviously you can use whatever taxonomy of people you want, but yours seems like an extremely esoteric and rather useless one.
What about people opposed to allowing non-doctors to call themselves doctors?
There are a million examples of “censorious impulses” you would not lump in with these, ergo the taxonomy is a bad one.
I did nothing of the sort. You're trying to set up a classic slippery slope fallacy and I'm not going to play that game.
Me: I think alcohol prohibitionists are meddling busybodies. You: Oh, well, I guess you think there's nothing wrong with injecting babies with pure grain alcohol starting at birth.
Me: I think furnaces and central heating are wonderful inventions. You: Oh, well, I guess you think it's okay to go around setting houses on fire.
That's how the game is played. I stopped being impressed by it decades ago. Likely before you were even born.
Bye now!
The system isn't designed to handle anything like that, and a ton of damage could be done by a concentrated effort from a group that intentionally refuses to play by the rules/norms.
Why do you think this approach would dismantle education?
Is it that hard to foresee what’ll happen if Louisiana et al started teaching children that the earth is 6000 years old, evolution is a farce, the US is a Christian nation, and also don’t worry about learning much outside of our immediate local (failing) economy?
By the way, it's sad that this needs to be written, but I'm commenting in good faith. Without any kids in the education system, and without having been through the education system in many years, I'm not up to date with the latest statistics. All I have to go on is the occasional anecdotes from the people around me, which seem to be largely negative, but which could also be based in fantasy. I recognize that I have these blind spots, which is why I'm asking these questions.
The fact that this seems particularly strong in Anglo and historically Protestant places and less in other developed countries suggests to me that this is more of a specific cultural phenomenon and less of a problem directly attributable to social media. But of course that's a much more complex topic and not something that you can wrap a trendy new nonfiction book around.
Social media is not like those earlier innovations. I think the best metaphor here is to imagine a public square in which people talk to each other. They debate ideas or put forth ideas that may not always be brilliant. They may not always be civil, but people can speak while others listen. Sometimes people are moved by persuasion or dissuasion. I think the Founding Fathers assumed that’s about the best we can hope for. Imagine one day, and I’ll call it 2009, that all changes. There’s no more public square. Everything takes place in the center of the Roman Colosseum. The stands are full of people who are there to see blood. That’s what they came for. They don’t want to see the lion and the Christian making nice; they want the one to kill the other. That’s what Twitter is often like.
The public square was emphatically not what media was like before social media. It was a locked-down space controlled by large corporations: newspapers, TV stations, and other institutions that told you what was acceptable to talk about and what wasn't. It wasn't a public square with equal access for all.
The Internet, just like the printing press in the 1500s-1600s, took that ability and spread it to millions of people that previously didn't have it. The results of the Gutenberg printing press were both good and bad, depending on your persuasion, but these types of "we need more restrictions on Internet publishing because old authorities are losing power" really sound like something that was said about the Gutenberg press when it started to spread information that called authority into question. It didn't work then, and it won't work now.