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Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

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Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#141

Post by antattack »

titzer wrote: post #24

Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs. If you came up with a substance that caused young people by the millions to become totally addicted, cost them multiple hours per day, pushed them into depression and suicide, and contributed to inactivity, obesity, loss of attention span, and overall ennui, it would be banned almost immediately. Heck, if you proposed a tracking system th…

We become the product. Social media needs us in order to make a buck and they will do everything in their power that we need them. Some of it is to our benefit but many times it's a waste of time and trying to create a need where there was none. TL;DR yes, social media are drug dealers :)

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#142

Post by guerrilla »

titzer wrote: post #24

Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs. If you came up with a substance that caused young people by the millions to become totally addicted, cost them multiple hours per day, pushed them into depression and suicide, and contributed to inactivity, obesity, loss of attention span, and overall ennui, it would be banned almost immediately. Heck, if you proposed a tracking system th…

> Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs.

I hear what you're saying but I'm pretty sure drugs (like meth) are much worse, we just manage to keep kids away from them, whereas Internet is given to them.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#143

Post by Bakary »

titzer wrote: post #92
Bakary wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently saw a tweet that for once seemed insightful: "the internet did to boomers what boomers thought it would do to us", presumably posted by someone under the age of 25. Young people are vulnerable to social media, and your point still stands, but I am also under the impression that it has impacted previous generations to a far greater extent, breaking their link to reality altogether.

I'm 40, and grew up programming in my early teens, so I've seen the Web's entire arc. This social media stuff was fun for a time but it turned very dark, almost exactly in proportion to the money involved, like everything else on the Web, IMHO. Also, the gamification of many things. Even HN karma. The thrill of watching the upvotes roll in! (even now...)

Is it the money, or just society in general moving into the space? Darkness is an inherent part of human life, and the internet is now the agora. For a social animal, any aspect of existence will have been gamified from the start...

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#144

Post by agumonkey »

ChrisRR wrote: post #8

Social media damages everyone's mental health it seems. For some reason it seems to bring out the worst in so many people, and people think it's now acceptable to post online the awful thoughts that they would've kept to themselves

Thing I noticed is that teens are responding to the thinking fads with a lot of intensity. They'll overthink their issues, their sexuality, their identity. Internet amplifies the already amplifying mind ..

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#145

Post by tzs »

Xelbair wrote: post #66
daenz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The communities are too big. We're not meant to socialize frequently with people with whom there are rarely repercussions for how we treat them.

The size is just the symptom. Those services match you, with other who share similar views/preferences - putting you inside a bubble. Before social media radical views\moronic opinions etc. wouldn't spread so far- because others would point out flaws in your reasoning or outright laugh at it. Now? you have permanent access to enabling group - group who share views, and support each other - entrenching it. Flatearther…

The usual counterargument I see offered to that is that sure, it is great if we can impede the spread of some completely stupid belief like flat Earth, but sometimes those things that are crazy by conventional wisdom turn out to be true.

At that point, they usually mention Galileo and maybe some others, and they ask how do we avoid squashing the next Galileo with our measures to limit the spread of flat Earth theories?

The answer is that if flat Earth or whatever is actually correct it will eventually prevail as did Galileo and all the others they cite (and they faced much more severe measures than merely being denied use of their society's equivalent of mass media). It will just take longer as it will have to use slower more personal communication channels.

That's a good thing. Let's say there are dozens of radical theories circulating, and suppose one of them really is the next Galileo type situation, and the rest really are just utterly insane.

If they all have to spread by the slower more personal channels any given person will likely only be exposed to maybe two or three of them. They aren't overwhelmed by them, and that gives them a better chance of figuring out that the stupid ones are in fact stupid. It is usually much more work to refute a theory, even a stupid one, than to come up with it, and the slow spread gives time for the refutations to be developed and put out there.

If they were all on the fast mass audience channels, people get exposed to so many of them that they don't have time to really figure out if they make sense, and (2) even if a good refutation is out it is easy to miss it in all the noise.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#146

Post by vonwoodson »

linuxftw wrote: post #89
titzer wrote: post #24

Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs. If you came up with a substance that caused young people by the millions to become totally addicted, cost them multiple hours per day, pushed them into depression and suicide, and contributed to inactivity, obesity, loss of attention span, and overall ennui, it would be banned almost immediately. Heck, if you proposed a tracking system th…

It's called "parenting" which is not in vogue right now. Currently, people treat children like adults, expecting them to navigate the world as an adult would, and that's dumb. Reject a failed society. It's okay to be an individual, you don't need to be part of the collective.

This is called victim blaming.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#147

Post by throwaway894345 »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #129
throwaway894345 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between something being available somewhere on the Internet (when Internet access was 56K from a desktop computer featuring prominently in your family room) and having it shared with you specifically to your smartphone.

I never get anything gore shared to me, but I think it's also because I wouldn't stay friends with anyone who sends me that. I think it's weird that, as a society, we're more OK with violence than sex.

Consider how many people saw the shooting of the Trump supporter storming the capitol or the killing of George Floyd. I can't imagine that level of exposure in 2005 or earlier. And this is just gore; we're not talking about sex (also, we don't have to choose between the two, so I don't understand the dichotomous argument).

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#148

Post by reaperducer »

devlopr wrote: post #130
kibwen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather than alluding to vague upsides, can you list what upsides you want to assert that social media provides, so that we can do as you say and perform a cost/benefit analysis? As both an early adopter and former user of both Facebook and Twitter, my eventual conclusion was that whatever benefits they offered were vastly outweighed by the mental toll they took on me.

There are upsides. From providing self estem from a different source from the local. It has raised awareness like never before. It has provided an income for some. It allows new peer groups not available locally It provides a safer space to interact with strangers. Where we got it wrong was connecting these profiles to real life names. That has ruined people's lives.

None of the things you list are unique to social media. They all existed before the rise of the socials. Many of them existed before the internet.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#149

Post by conradev »

simias wrote: post #65
titzer wrote: post #24

Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs. If you came up with a substance that caused young people by the millions to become totally addicted, cost them multiple hours per day, pushed them into depression and suicide, and contributed to inactivity, obesity, loss of attention span, and overall ennui, it would be banned almost immediately. Heck, if you proposed a tracking system th…

I've always been a bit extreme on this but I more than ever believe that it's insane that we consider that leaving teenagers with unsupervised internet access is reasonable. Maybe I'm prude or naive but I remember vividly when I first saw a pornographic movie at like around 17. It really shook me at the time. I wasn't traumatized or anything but it made a strong impact on me. These days I expect that most teens exper…

It is this weird balance because I owe literally everything I know about programming to unsupervised internet access: asking questions in IRC rooms, finding random programs on random websites, posting on obscure forums, etc.

I was able to find some wonderful communities, like the iPhone jailbreaking community on IRC, which completely changed my life and put me on the path I am on now. I was also on Twitter in the early days, too, which was the primary way that the iOS development community communicated. Facebook allowed me to connect with my high school robotics community, as well.

Communities like this existed before my time with Flash games, Neopets, MySpace, etc. and continue to this day, with the Minecraft modding community, Roblox game building community, etc.

But at the same time I also agree that social media has become incredibly toxic and addictive, and we don’t give anyone any tools to navigate it. I ultimately quit social media entirely, but my younger sister spends 3.5 hours a day on social media. I think this is a relatively new beast, and not inherent to the internet itself.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#150

Post by superkuh »

tgv wrote: post #28
bjt2n3904 wrote: post #15

There are entire subreddits dedicated to mocking this point, like /r/PhonesAreBad, and /r/InsaneParents. I doubt half the screenshots they post of text message conversations are even real -- but the point gets across. Phones are the most wonderful thing that keep us connected to each other, and only crude luddites living in the dark ages who don't understand the benefit they provide would take them away from a kid do…

It's an addiction. People leaving the circle are directly taking away the addict's stimulus.

Please don't use words that have a real medical meaning in such an inaccurate and casual way. Calling things addictive has real consequences in terms of legislators taking these confused public sentiments as fact and then trying to use force against the groups that are "addicted". Addiction has never been proven in this context.

Addiction is a a real, serious problem with drugs that effect the brains reward system (opioids) or prediction of reward (amphetamines). It is not a real problem associated with using online forums using a computer.

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