Lets ban TV, video games, rock and roll music and dungeons and dragons, too. When I was growing up, those were what was harming children at an industrial scale.
The author has addressed that point before [1] in an article worth reading in its entirety:
> 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.
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.
Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death is probably worth a read. The problem is with the medium, and how it strips away critical information. Television stripped that information away from typography, TikTok strips away even more. It's fundamentally still the same problem.
Since everyone banning anything is exactly the same level of pointless are you also in favor of bringing back more asbestos, lead, and child labor as well? Or would you say that context matters, evidence matters, and critical thinking about the actual circumstances under discussion is often necessary?
The context provided by GP seems to be "media". I think there are some things about short-form video platforms that form a bit of a different argument than the traditional "new media bad" stance but just jumping into why chemical poisons and forced labor were bad isn't going to help drive that nuance.
It sounds like you're agreeing that context matters and just underlining my point for me. Comparing chemical poisons to media is every bit as ridiculous as comparing pre-algorithmic media to social media.. I think everyone who is interested in serious conversation with nuance already knows that.
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.
Yes, I'm agreeing with your (core) point through and through - the nuance came into play with the way you tried to argue the point. It sorta made sense if you already saw things the same way, otherwise it came across as completely ignoring the context GP provided to demand GP consider context without further example of why their context was incomplete. At the end of the day, a part saying "and this is why it's actually different in that context" is still unanswered and you're just telling them to ignore that.
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.
In all seriousness, television has almost certainly harmed some not-insignificant fraction of our population. Nothing is more toxic than a bad idea, a malmeme, and some of them can be so subtle that they go unnoticed for years or decades. Ironically, music is probably less pathogenic, there's just less bandwidth for these memes to make use of. Lyrics, moods, and a single picture of album art? Compare that to a half-hour time slot with complex depictions of social interactions that humans model their own internal mental state from.
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.
I think your comment, while not especially constructively formed, is a good warning about alarm-ism. However, I think you should at least consider a few things:
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?)
TV, video games, rock and roll music, nor dungeon and dragons were specifically designed for compulsory use, reduced the users' ability to focus, or exposed them to the kind (or sheer quantity) of harmful material that TikTok does.
TV, video games and rock and roll music is just as ubiquitous as TikTok. All of these things are on the same mobile device. They are also designed for compulsory use and can expose them to harmful material as well. Nobody writes a song you only want to listen to once or a game you only play for 10 minutes then never again.
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.
> When I was growing up, those were what was harming children at an industrial scale.
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.
You should talk to some teachers who've been teaching since before 2010. They almost all say that kids got noticeably dumber around the time smartphones became common. They also say that grading standards today don't resemble anything they used to; most kids today would fail a 2009 curriculum.
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.
This is only a counter if the standards to get those levels of attainment have stayed the same (or increased). The previous claim includes a claim of the standards dropping, meaning that the people who obtain them can increase even as the population average descends.
this is not a good measure because attainment is measured in graduation and not academic standards. the standards HAVE dropped and kids are forced through with relatively meaningless degrees.
I guess nothing can ever again harm us now that it turned out those things didn't, nice. Do you have a link to the studies that say those things didn't do any harm, btw?
That's what ignorant culture warriors claimed was harming children. There was never much evidence to support those claims; they were the ravings of clowns, not statements to be taken seriously.
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.
> Lets ban TV, video games, rock and roll music and dungeons and dragons, too. When I was growing up, those were what was harming children at an industrial scale.
I'd be fine with that, if it means I never have to hear that robotic argument ever again.
