I think society will eventually need to reevaluate the growing addiction to social media. Especially how it completely captures the attention of our young children.
I spend too much time on social media and the internet. I’ve been gradually reducing consumption for the past few months. Rediscovering the joy of reading books and playing music.
This is a fascinating read. Sean explains their thought process in creating Facebook. Creating instant gratification features that draw people to the platform.
This photo was published in an article featuring kids making messes and doing funny stuff.
I was deeply disturbed by this photo. That hunched over, staring at the screen pose is all too familiar. We’ve all done it day after day.
This kid is in diapers and already hopelessly fascinated by the web. IMHO this can’t be good. I can see that kid doing the same thing. Year after year for the rest of his life. Substituting coffee for milk.
Photo taken from this article of humorous kids photos.
I missed the news about Tristan Harris and Justin Rosenstein’s comments. Their comments about social media and smart phones are also quite interesting.
If it wasn’t this, it would be something else. If there wasn’t anything new for people to be all “but what about the children?” then society itself would have ended. You can go back hundreds of years and there are parents worried that their 15 year old daughter will be a spinster, or their 12 year old son isn’t cleaning chimneys like he was.
Like anything else, social media can be misused and cause problems, but that doesn’t make it inherently bad. It’s still a very early technology and social situation that we\re still negotiating. Eventually it will fall into a regularity, like vaudeville, radio, movies, and TV have done. And then it’s part of the natural fabric of our reality that will barely be questioned.
Sure it should be monitored and regulated, but lets not panic or jump to too many extreme conclusions just yet.
Facebook and Google and other services are inherently bad because they have taken over normal, non-profit, human interaction and turned it into a cash cow.
And the overwhelming majority do not realize they are being manipulated every time they use these services.
Facebook can figure out when you’re going to the bathroom and display ads accordingly. But not just ads – it controls everything you see in the stream it presents you.
Do you like turnips? Facebook will show you pro-turnip articles all the livelong day, so many that you will eventually not realize that disliking turnips is normal for most people, and will grow angry when people suggest such a thing.
Are you a foreign farmer trying to convince people to eat more turnips? Facebook will target your ads to convince fence-sitters to come buy your superior turnips. And do it so discreetly that turnip haters and domestic turnip growers will never know.
Google and Facebook are deceptive because they present themselves as being objective and neutral as a librarian, but they’re not, not at all.
They are, quite simply, the two largest advertising companies in the world.
There are enough studies to support the theory that Facebook diminishes mental health. I left not to be “cool” but because I was fucking miserable. Then when you get outside it… Holy shit, it almost looks like cult. The tribalism, the lack of critical thinking, the isolation from intellectual discomfort, it’s no wonder we’re all miserable. I’m speaking mostly about millennials like myself. I find older generations don’t take it as seriously and are better at using it in moderation.
In The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing your Brain, the author, who is by no means a luddite, examines some research indicating our brains have changed in how we process information, and in many ways, not for the better. We’re better at hunting for and finding stuff to back up our arguments but there’s been a general decline in overall reading comprehension and an increasing difficulty in contextualizing information and grasping its relevance. In fact, eye tracking studies indicate that we don’t even truly read the the stuff we look at, we just skim it until we find the thing that we’re looking for and discount the context. I wasn’t totally sold on the author’s ambitious premise by the end of his book, but I left convinced there is something to it. He is certainly correct that brain plasticity is a well established science and we do have evidence that cultural changes in information media (oral to written, for example) influence said plasticity. He just tried to do too many things with that book. I think it’s a good starting point though if you’re in any sort of skeptical place about social media.
I gave up Facebook for Lent a few years ago and never went back. There are all those studies about how social media makes people less happy, and it was definitely true for me.
It’s not hard to stay in touch with the people I actually care about being in touch with. Maybe every few months someone asks me about connecting on facebook and I just say I don’t have an account. Whatever.
It’s not that hard. Delete your account. You won’t miss it.
The New York Times published an article on August 1, 1948 that is famous among people like me, who teach 20th century American history. It was called “Family Life, 1948 A.T. (After Television)”.
I’m sure television contributed significantly to obesity so it’s arguably a net loss. But I’m not really speculating in the case of social media, I’m making an honest attempt to evaluate the existing evidence.
Can you point not to op-ed pieces but research in making the case for, or against, social media? Should research pointing to neurological and behavioral changes in data processing be ignored because some people once thought TV was a problem?
I think you’re reading a little bit too much into my post.
I was making no claim about the broad, sociological effects of TV, or of social media. And i certainly wasn’t making any claims about neurological and behavioral changes, about either medium. I was simply making an observation about some people’s sociological attitudes and responses to new technology, in the context of aceplace57 claiming to be “disturbed” by a picture of a baby in front of a TV screen.
FWIW, from the reading i’ve done, i think there’s a case to be made that social media and the proliferation of connected devices are changing the ways that people exist in the world, the ways they connect with one another, and the ways that they process information. Whether this ends up as a net loss or gain is probably something that will take longer to figure out.
I know that students in my university-level history classes have no trouble spending hours on their phones, but many of them find difficulty maintaining their concentration long enough to read 8 or 10 pages of complex historical ideas and rigorous historical arguments. Whether this is a cause-and-effect thing, however, is not completely clear to me.
Mhendo I have difficulty focusing on reading for extended periods of time also. I read voraciously as a child and I still read, but it’s increasingly a struggle. The social media era started about when I hit college so I didn’t grow up on it. I’d theorize that reading doesn’t affect the reward center of our brains the way clicking links does, which makes reading less interesting, neurologically. But I don’t know. I just find it fascinating.
I’m hardly panicking. I don’t give a rip how long other people spend on the Net or social media.
I do think it’s unhealthy for a toddler in diapers to already be using a PC. They are still learning language and social skills. They don’t need the social isolation of being on a PC or tablet all day. Toddlers learn language by observing people in their environment. That’s my opinion. What other parents do with their kids is up to them.
I’ve made a decision for myself to cut back on my online time. The current news is too depressing and it effects my ability to concentrate on my work and other real word activities. YMMV
