OK let's ban social media and roll back to 20 years ago. I'm perfectly happy with that. With social media it's so easy to manipulate than emails, websites and phones.
Technological advancement is not always good (for ordinary people).
Technological advancement is not always good (for ordinary people).
Increasingly, we seem to provide solutions in search of a problem, or worse, substitutes for much healthier activities. The power we have to do so is staggering; we are changing the parameters and modes of how people relate to each other on a daily basis.
I feel a strong urge to have more "ok, so where do we go from here?" and "what does a tech industry that promotes net good actually look like?" internal discourse in the community of practice, and some sort of ethical social contract for software engineering.
The open source movement has been fabulous and sometimes adjacent to or one aspect of these concerns, but really we need a movement for socially conscious and responsible software.
I like online banking, shopping, bill-paying.
Everything else is sort of bleh. I'm as guilty as anyone of killing a few hours on YouTube but don't think I would really miss it.
This is a really interesting point which can be extrapolated to many different areas. If something is more convinient, but causes us to lose a useful manual skill, should it be classed as good or not?
When doing home projects trying to thumb thru 50 VHS tapes of This Old House really isn't practical.
> Increasingly, we seem to provide solutions in search of a problem, or worse, substitutes for much healthier activities.
LLMs (and generative AI in general) are probably the most egregious and prominent examples of this, IMO.
Just for my own context and perspective, do you use generative AI or not?
Mainly because the destination is an alternate economy where "companies" are smaller, returns are not concentrated to "founders" or investors or even shareholders, and so on.
The tech industry has become "evil" because it has put on social blinders while pursuing profits. To give up that path and choose another path is to choose more prosperity for "we" and less prosperity for "me". It's not a difficult choice in the abstract, but it's a very difficult for people with (oftentimes spurious, but still) bills to pay.
There are vanishingly-few ways to ethically draw a six figure salary (inflation-adjusted for 2016 dollars) out of this economy. Giving up that illusion is going to be really difficult (perhaps impossible) for the people in our industry who were drawn here by that promise and have grown comfortable with the terms of the bargain.
There are very few young people today who dont value money and image as something to aspire to. IMO this is a really dangerous thing of which there is no way back.
That's not at all the same as TV, video games, or rock music.
With Video Games we had the introduction of the MMO and news stories of people forgetting to feed their kids, and even dying in their homes from not looking after themselves properly.
People are the problem, not the tech. As long as people are willing to be lazy and allow their brains to be subjected to a constant stream of repetetive digital content for entertainement, then we will have these issues.
Maybe things were already bad when radio achieved mass adoption and people couldn't get enough of it? Maybe in some ways today's unlimited aural stimulation, of having access to music and podcasts at any moment, is also unnatural and undesirable for mental health?
My girlfriend and some friends are captivated by doomscrolling tiktok/insta. They'll do it and let hours pass if left undisturbed.
They can't watch TV or play games for hours because that gets boring and samey.
On the other hand, my girlfriend will aspire to play a game she bought or watch a show she wants to watch, but then get immediately sabotaged by instagram shorts because it's so much more stimulating.
Its nothing like a book, however it is very similar to addiction on MMO games like World of warcraft and Roblox.
> They can't watch TV or play games for hours because that gets boring and samey.
I would argue that its not because its boring, its because it doesnt give as frequent rewards for engagement and so becomes less attractive for the user.
> get immediately sabotaged by instagram shorts because it's so much more stimulating
Its not stimulation, its lazyness. I guarantee that anybody would get more stimulation from investment in a decent story in a book, movie, or game, but it takes more effort to get there. Its much easier to get that tiny hit of dopamine from a 10 second video than it is to invest 2 hours into a story to get a decent payoff. Its this lazyness of wanting the easy hit instead of putting the time in that is making people put down that book and jump on Instagram.
There are a couple of differences here though. For example everybody has the same tiktok. The upper classes and lower classes are for the first time being subjected to the same issues simultaneously.
Also the modern medium of tiktok has proven so addictive that people are not showing any signs of rising up against it, and so it is taking legislation to protect people from themselves.
These are all new factors which will change the swing somewhat, Im with you in hoping that it all works out.
There's a reason why most teenagers are on tiktok, but believe that they would be better off if it never existed. [1] https://fortune.com/well/article/nearly-half-of-gen-zers-wis...
Governments around thwe world have had to tax sugary products to save people from themselves. You make it sound like there isnt currently an obesity epidemic because adults know enough to not eat too much sugary foods. In reality the vast majority eat way too much even though they know its not good for them, just like social media use. Its the same as alcohol and drug abuse etc. Humans are terrible at restricting themselves when it comes to stuff that makes them feel good. Tiktok scrolling is just an extension of that, not the cause.
The 80s would like to have a word
It's both. When I was growing up as a kid (and I'm now going back over 40 years instead of 20) you didn't take your cable TV with you in your pocket. (And not even your video games unless you consider Electronic Football a video game.)
(Okay, so the Walkman came along and I could take my music with me. Big sin!)
Entertainment, distractions in general had a specific time and place. There was a large part of every day when you were left to interact with the world that was right around you ... maybe even get bored from time to time.
Thats a good point I hadn't taken into consideration. Yes we had addictive MMOs and binging reality TV, but they werent portable. The outside world was a safe haven from visual media content.
Portability is definitely a major factor.
It always have been.
It was like that in the 80s as well. Probably the 90s, depending on your inner circle. Money and prestige (image) has always been prominent in the US. We probably inherited it from the UK before we existed.
Knowledge and skill were socially important in the US once Sputnik was launched and we viewed science and engineering as the battlefield against the Soviet Union.
You could get reprieve.
With TikTok on mobile, it's ubiquitous.
This type of hyper fixation on TikTok is pop science and self soothing. It springs from the generational anxiety that the kids are not okay and something must be wrong with them. TikTok can be that boogey man for boomers, gen x and millennials. Same as older generations felt about TV, video games, rock and roll music, and D&D.
1. The concerns about D&D were quite different. Most parents admired the creativity involved in role-playing. The concerns came from a relatively small subset of parents who were concerned about the morality of the subject matter (monsters, demons etc.). For the record, I thought at the time that these concerns were pretty silly and had little merit, and still do.
2. Just because there have been moral/social panics in the past, doesn't mean the concerns about social media today are invalid. Sometimes worries are wrong, sometimes they are right. Having been wrong before does not make it rational to never be concerned again.
3. It is entirely possible that concerns about high-volume TV watching were correct. Just because my generation (X) survived the TV era does not mean we came out of it unscathed. Much of the ignorance and obnoxiousness of our current age may very well be caused by today's middle aged people growing up watching television. (Or maybe it was the lead paint our parents grew up with?)
The damage from social media is widespread, well-studied, and unequivocally harmful to millions of people. There is no equivalence, it's a different technology with objectively worse impacts.
I'd be fine with that, if it means I never have to hear that robotic argument ever again.
Forgetting the adults in the room who still want to lean into all kinds of disingenuous what-aboutism for a moment, and just considering kids who are understandably self-interested in defense of their addictions.. really now. How could a generation of people who grew up wanting to be influencers actually be ignorant of the effectiveness of algorithmic manipulation? It's a contradiction. So why the insistence on some absurd comparison to old media? I'm all for nuance but there's not much of that to be had. I'd settle for a little reflection, sincerity, and logical consistency.
The same is true of the second call. If we dismiss the need to explain why this case is different as just disingenuous what-aboutism to be ignored the argument is left as "if one takes this as problematic then it's clear how it'll be problematic to counter". There's still no persuasion of why it's differently problematic if you don't already see reasons why yourself, just the assertion it is if one thinks enough (which could be asserted about anything true or false).
I think the biggest things that make this problem unique from the media context GP provided are:
- The individualized and targeted nature of the algorithmic feed being a different type of influence concern than content for mass or group consumption.
- The above individualized nature leading into much stronger "echo chamber" polarization, especially when combined with the endless and always on nature of the feeds.
- The content itself is delivered in many more technological layers of dark patterns than traditional mass/group media ever carried.
The only argument I hear a lot which I exclude from my list is the quality/type of content. I think, if you remove the above problems, the content would really not be as different from typical content as we'd like to think. I know others disagree and say it's the short nature itself which is harmful but I don't think that's actually a new unique argument to why people are worried about this latest media trend.
> I think it is a very good thing that alarms were rung about teen smoking, teen pregnancy, drunk driving, and the exposure of children to sex and violence on TV. The lesson of The Boy Who Cried Wolf is not that after two false alarms we should disconnect the alarm system. In that story, the wolf does eventually come.
That page also shows some graphs that to this day still surprise me, namely, the way in which rates of depression and psychological stress among teens explode around 2010. Unlike TV and DnD, this time we do have data, and it looks bad.
[1] https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
Everyone on every point of the political spectrum claims that the basic principle is true. That we can be manipulated to believe untrue things and to behave inappropriately and in maladaptive manners. We just tend to disagree on which media and which content does so.
College lit professors are now saying they get kids in their class who've never read a book from cover to cover. Those that have, say their favorite book is a YA book like Percy Jackson. Most can't even focus on something like a sonnet. This was described by a professor at Columbia, and they say that this is a recent phenomena and it's the majority of their students now.
Something has fundamentally changed, and there's evidence that points to kids missing key developmental windows. It's not just them on social media either, it's probably also their parents who are on their phones and not interacting with their kids who need that to develop normally.
Have you ever considered that maybe people were right about all that stuff? The problem so many people have is they either aren't forward thinking enough or only look back a few years at most when arguing against "moral crusaders."
Take for example violence in movies and videogames. Back in the 80s, the MPAA came down hard on the Friday the 13th movies, and the violence level in those movies absolutely pales in comparison to what you see now in Saw X, a mainstream R-rated horror movie. In the early 90s, there were federal hearings about violence in video games, Mortal Kombat being the prime example. Compare what gave people heart attacks back then to what the latest Mortal Kombat game features. Maybe those people were right all along, and we should have done something other than just laugh at their concerns?
With the benefit of decades of hindsight, there's a lot of issues in society where the "slippery slope"-ists turned out to be right.
It was something like "The Japanese plan is to make our children stupid with their animations to overtake us"
It might be true but also you don't put your child in front of the TV at 3 years old...
It is like serving them beer and then blaming the Belgians for turning our kids into alcoholics.
However Tiktok is banned in China; the domestic app Douyin promotes content differently.
I mean if you look at how some of those 40-50 year olds are behaving in public and voting maybe they were right?
Censorship is often justified by comparisons to physical substances like this - chemicals can irreparably harm your body, therefore ideas can irreparably harm your brain. I don't believe that these are the same. There's no way to really prove it, but there is a way to prove that censorship (which is what banning social media amounts to) _is_ objectively bad.
Kids are gonna be able to once in a while get their hand on porn, a beer, a cigarette or whatever.
The problem is the lack of supervision and parents who use devices to avoid having to take care of their children.
And what would happen in another 20 years? What exactly would prevent this from happening again?
Maybe instead of just knee-jerk reactions like "Ugh stupid social media, let's ban it" we should think it through and solve the underlying issues.