People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that. I think that the cultural changes that lead to that have been running for far more time than people give credit for, and that social media is just the proverbial canary on the mine that made things explicit. Those changes are multi-generational changes, and more probably there are a multitude of factors behind it. Family structure, economy f…
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The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
441–450 of 937 posts
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#442People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that. I think that the cultural changes that lead to that have been running for far more time than people give credit for, and that social media is just the proverbial canary on the mine that made things explicit. Those changes are multi-generational changes, and more probably there are a multitude of factors behind it. Family structure, economy f…
The only real constant I can see across all countries is increasing interconnectedness, human movement, and rate of change. Kids increasingly find themselves living in a world far different from their parents and even more radically different from their grandparents. Laws, culture, school, and parenting all can't adapt quickly enough. If social media is doing anything on its own, it's the same as what regular media was doing but bigger and faster. More information is coming at you from more directions, your parents and family don't know about it, it's increasingly less trustworthy (compare viral Tweet to Nighttime News to wisdom handed down from a grandparent), the perspectives are increasingly divorced and different from what your family or culture would have presented to you.
It's a lot. None of it is necessarily bad. But it's a lot. If dealing with anything at all presents a challenge, then dealing with more of it presents more of a challenge. The threats humans face are increasingly benign, threats to beliefs and identity even as health, hunger, and survival are mostly taken care of. But there are nonetheless more of them and they come at you faster, at least if you stay connected and pay attention, and the human psyche is not equipped to deal with that. We do well with one major threat every few days that is familiar. It may be a tiger lurking in the trees that can kill us, but we know they're there and there aren't a lot of them. Four mean kids at school can't kill you, but they may torment you every single day. A social media feed full of bad events, people telling you the world is terrible, people telling you your culture is terrible, whatever it is, may be "words" rather than sticks and stones, but even if they hurt less, they do hurt, and there are so many more of them. Think of differences in experience from living on an island with a few giant predators who might attack once a month on average, mostly in a specific season, and you're good all the rest of the time, compared to being perpetually covered in mosquitoes and rats. It's breaking a leg but healing compared to chronic pain that never goes away.
Modern life, first with newspapers and cities, then with schools and office politics and rat races, then with 24 hour news cycles and political horseraces, now with social media, and trending toward the latter. The threats are individually tiny but there are so damn many of them that people feel overwhelmed if they can't step back and disconnect.
This is true everywhere and has nothing to do with unions disappearing or the breakdown of family values in the US. These are just the manifestations of modernity as they happened here, but something analogous and equally anxiety inducing happened somewhere else.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the mechanism doesn't make much sense - the electromagnetic fields we are now subject to are absolutely tiny compared to the noise from the earth and the sun. How can a 0.1 W (right at the antenna) WiFi router disrupt our brains when the 1000 W/m^2 (hitting the ground, and only counting the visible spectrum) Sun doesn't?
Did we evolve with the polarized pulsed microwave radiation from man-made devices? Or Did we evolve with the non-polarized radiation from the sun? You cannot compare that. The proof of this is that the FCC has safety regulations against how close you are to the sources. But these were devised with two and 3G technologies. Also, most of the studies are not real world studies, and so they lack many of the key character…
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I grew up in Germany you were allowed to drink beer and wine at 16. It's hard to drink yourself into the hospital with those and you are still living with your parents. It provided a safe environment to experiment and learn how to deal with alcohol. At 18 you were able to get a driver's license and start drinking stronger drinks. However, you weren't as excited about the novelty of liquor. It's the only policy a…
"At 18 you were able to get a driver's license and start drinking stronger drinks" You must have lived in a different german reality then. For us it was always easy to get someone else to buy your booze, if it was not already given to you somehow by the older guys. Or if you looked slightly older(I was NEVER asked for ID while buying drinks). Many people in my age group developed a drinking habit - and big surprise,…
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Can you elaborate on this? From what I can tell, the outcome that you’re speaking of has occurred for the opposite reason. Looking at the data for the US, there seems to be an even more exponential curve between 2015-2020, which would imply that these trends could have been further exacerbated by the reduction of government regulation. The same is likely true for the concentration of wealth, the loss in small busines…
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is something I've been think about, what if social media wasn't designed to be addictive? There shouldn't be anything inherently wrong in keeping in contact with your high school buddies on Facebook, so what if all the doom scrolling, likes, and corporate profiles where removed from Facebook? Would it be safer? I think there's are huge risk that we are about to realize that either social media cannot be made saf…
Social media in the late 2000s was basically this. It was before they really figured out how to super-charge the addictiveness. I remember it and it was a lot less toxic.
BBSes were, once they exceeded a certain size threshold. Usenet had its toxic corners. Large IRC channels without strong moderators were a hellscape.
There are two ingredients to toxicity, as far as I can tell. One is sheer size of a group - you get a million people in a room, you have 1000 assholes of a 1-in-a-1000 caliber in there. It's a pure numbers game.
The second is strong moderation. Moderation that actively intercedes at the first sign of toxicity keeps group conversations less toxic. (For the free speech argument here: I believe we're better off with moderated groups as long as everybody is free to run their own moderated group. Everybody is free to speak, but the rest of the world must be free to choose to not listen - this is where big social media really fails)
Ask Metafilter made the point that possibly "cost of entry" might help as well, but I strongly believe that's ultimately the size argument combined with selection bias reducing the need for moderation.
So what you remember as "less toxic" might well just be "social media was smaller back then". Or more selective groups.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate on this? From what I can tell, the outcome that you’re speaking of has occurred for the opposite reason. Looking at the data for the US, there seems to be an even more exponential curve between 2015-2020, which would imply that these trends could have been further exacerbated by the reduction of government regulation. The same is likely true for the concentration of wealth, the loss in small busines…
I think a possible explanation would be that the increasing desire for more government regulation, or at least functional government, runs counter to the world, which is increasingly ruled by inhuman, (even anti-human) forces. This breeds a desperation in people as they realize that humanity is viewed as a resource, not an end in itself, for the inhuman forces (call it capital, technology, whatever) to consume and mo…
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#448People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that. I think that the cultural changes that lead to that have been running for far more time than people give credit for, and that social media is just the proverbial canary on the mine that made things explicit. Those changes are multi-generational changes, and more probably there are a multitude of factors behind it. Family structure, economy f…
People are quick to blame social media because there are exceedingly plausible mechanisms by which social media could cause such a phenomenon, and there is tremendous profit in doing so and not just of the money variety. State level actors run secret influence campaigns on facebook, and more recently, just create and control whole social media platforms without oversight. The time for skepticism about the scale of th…
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
Social media is like that because it was deliberately designed to be addictive and we have a decade of documentation to back that up.
That is something I've been think about, what if social media wasn't designed to be addictive? There shouldn't be anything inherently wrong in keeping in contact with your high school buddies on Facebook, so what if all the doom scrolling, likes, and corporate profiles where removed from Facebook? Would it be safer? I think there's are huge risk that we are about to realize that either social media cannot be made saf…