Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
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…
The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
481–490 of 937 posts
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#482People 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…
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#483People 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…
Social media is "adversarial" in the sense that yeah, most platforms want to maximize engagement, and maximized engagement might not be best for you. But that's also the relationship you have with companies selling you sugary food or expensive shoes. They're not your friends and they want you to spend money in ways that might not benefit you. We manage.
Ultimately, you have agency to shape your experience. You're not "addicted" to it any more than one gets "addicted" to chocolate or Louis Vuitton. Social media ended up replacing social life for many teens, and it's probably useful to ask why - this isn't Mark Zuckerberg's design.
At some point, adults in the developed world decided at some point that it's not OK for children to play unsupervised outdoors, walk to school on their own, and so on. It's probably a function of increasing standard of living and plummeting birth rates. Just 50-100 years ago, you had multiple children with the expectation that not all of them will make it to adulthood. Nowadays, most families will have one kid - their single most important "investment" - and they have the means to tightly monitor and control their physical environment. The internet is sort of the only place where you can meet with friends and have fun unsupervised. It's an escape hatch.
I don't see how banning or regulating TikTok or Facebook really solves this.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
FCC having safety regulations isn't actually proof of a problem, it's proof that there's concern there might be a problem.
If there might be a problem, then we should investigate it, correct? But instead, we’re just rolling it out more and more and faster faster. Whatever happened to the precautionary principal and health?
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
Social media didn't cause the problem, but it very much accelerated it. I think the media aspect of it is related to the uptick in 24-hour news that began with Ted Turner and CNN, and got its own acceleration with 9/11. Social media sort of piggybacked onto that and blew it wide open.
"The problem with capitalism is not that it creates problems for humans but that it exploits the problems that we would have regardless, drastically exacerbating the consequences." –Chris Cutrone
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is very unfair that your reply was flagged while the same level theory of OP comment is top ranked.
I’m not, I’ve been at this for a while. It’s very strong bias of those in the tech industry that there’s no problem with radio frequency electromagnetic radiation. I was the same way. I was a network engineer for Cisco Systems from 1996 to 2000. I would’ve said the same thing before I realized it affected me in the late 201Os. There’s been such strong propaganda from the telecommunications industry because of the mon…
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#487People 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…
This is like trying to dismiss cigarette/cancer links by pointing out that we have also built more power plants and have more cars and our lifestyles have changed and that must be why we have more lung cancer. No, it's cigarettes. I refer to social media companies as "tobacco companies of the mind."
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#488Most of the West lost its traditional values. If there are no values to build upon, if you have no reference, if everything and everyone is the same, if right and wrong, good and evil are confused, if you have no compass, then it's very easy to get lost and become mentally ill.
The USA in particular, changes pretty radically with every generation as a different group of immigrants comes and changes the culture
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
> reagonomics Now Reagan caused teen mental illness, too? What's next, Reagan caused Covid?
He's responsible for a ton of AIDS deaths, so we'll let him be with one pandemic.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#490Not just social media, but always online mentality. Spending all your time online gives you a skewed perception of the world and I believe being online always is a major negative. Spending time outside is good for you. Socializing with real people in front of you is good also. Not sure if we can ever go back to that without some major catastrophe.
We easily can. With the network effect, we can just encourage everyone we know that socializing with real people in real life is important and set up some coffees, lunches, dinners, walks, board games, etc, and then encourage those people to do the same with the people they know.
Won't take very many hops to reach everyone this way and get back on track.