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Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

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Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#781

Post by squigglydonut »

worldsayshi wrote: post #495
randomdata wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> She doesn't share her actual thoughts That's where social media has been most damaging. You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility. No longer can you just throw something out there, no matter how stupid. These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that i…

This is touching on something very important but I feel there's a lot more to it. There's a lot of mystery around this for me. Like why is social media inspiring us to such hostile nit picking on behaviour and ideals?

I think the reddit upvote downvote design is just one example of BAD UI that doesn't take into account the human element of the interface. Imagine if when you spoke with someone in real life, you added an upvote/downvote every sentence they said. This is why product designers need to be way more concerned with ethics than they are and companies need to give more respect to the product design role it is not just drawing pretty pictures you are shaping someones psyche.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#782

Post by klntsky »

skilled wrote: post #337

I'm no saint when it comes to addiction and being on my phone for more than I should be, but I have a sister who is in her mid 20s right now, and for the last couple of years she has slowly isolated herself from life and her family, she spends most of her time in her room on the phone and does weird things like get cosmetic surgeries, ordering cosmetics, etc. It's bizarre. She does this and all the while never leaves…

> It's her life so I leave her alone, not my place to tell her what to do, and the emotional upheaval from her isn't worth it either.

You are a part of the problem.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#783

Post by nonrandomstring »

wepple wrote: post #641
nonrandomstring wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two kinds of freedom [0]. What we are missing in our society today is some essential negative freedoms. Most of us follow J.S. Mill's idea on restricting the influence of the state. See the many comments in this thread decrying government intervention to ban social media. That's a negative freedom, from tyranny. Mostly, we tend to emphasise positive freedoms, freedom to ; run a business, share speech, own t…

Very well written > No services for government, schools, health available only on proprietary and "smart" platforms I wish this were a movement, I feel very strongly about this.

Whatever would we call a movement like that?

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#784

Post by speff »

spxneo wrote: post #97
mrob wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mobile devices, not electronics in general. Social networking was around before widespread mobile computing, e.g. MySpace, but it was a supplement to offline social interaction, not a replacement. Back then, you had to make a conscious decision to use the computer and log in. Having the device in your pocket at all times drastically changes how it's used.

100% and the people who created Facebook, Instagram all know exactly what they were doing. This is why many people hate Mark Zuckerberg and the Instagram founders and they need to be protected at all times by armed guards.

Every big corp c-suite executive has armed guards. It's not related to the ire they draw, but rather the board weighing the risk of someone taking them hostage vs the cost of the guards.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#785

Post by carlosjobim »

jajko wrote: post #182
rgbrenner wrote: post #145

The author had it right in the first paragraph. In the 90s version of this hysteria, Congress passed a law that would have prevented access to education medical information, dirty curse words, and other filth from being published on the internet to protect the children. The federal government fought a case all the way to the Supreme Court to enforce it. If they had won that case, the internet would look very differen…

You dont have kids, do you. Seeing them being pushed out of entire school community due to higher principles is heartbreaking to say at least, this is place from which teen suicides come from. Parents usually cave in the pressure. I would go and even claim I would ban all current social media platforms below 18. Ther are simply not enough protections, consistently, its place ripe for abuse and tons abuse is happening…

Parents have to get together for common rules on these kind of things. You can't push the responsibility onto somebody else.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#786

Post by kayodelycaon »

criddell wrote: post #532
HlessClaudesman wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She may not be aware that there is a problem. My understanding is that game / social media addiction is an attempt to not think about real life things, including acknowledging that so much time has been wasted staring into the black mirror. My advice is to let her know that you think she has a media addiction, then at least she has some level of awareness.

Jonathan Swift supposedly said: You cannot reason someone out of something he or she was not reasoned into. I think that's typically true but I also would try anyway.

I don't think that's true with mental illness. He's referring to emotions being the source of a person's beliefs rather than reason.

People can learn coping skills to deal with things they can't control. Reasoning can override emotion.

For myself, learning I was bipolar allowed me to understand what was happening and be able to put things in context. I still need medication but I don't need as much of it.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#787

Post by vlachen »

BadHumans wrote: post #623
runamuck wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a good rule. I NEVER reply to someone who comments on my comment w/ hostile intent. For example: I made an innocent comment on a YouTube video, and someone completely misread the comment and posted a hostile reply. I wanted to explain to him that he misread my comment but I just let it go. You never need to defend yourself. If you want to post a comment, post it. If someone misunderstands or mocks you, let the…

> If someone misunderstands or mocks you, let them. Very easy to say when you aren't going viral and 100,000+ people aren't trying to get you fired or hurling insults at you ranging from calling you an idiot to telling you to die. I'm not saying you're wrong but it's much easier said than done.

I think you brush across a couple of the important things to note about social media:

1) The disconnect between people that allows for such othering. Anecdotally, I can't imagine but a small handful of people I've met who would be willing to walk up to someone and verbally wish for the other person's death. I know we can point to many times in history where that attitude has resulted in the death of many people, but I view those as exceptions to everyday life. Not saying my view is correct, but only explaining my approach with this statement.

2) Scale. Imagine a group of 100,000 people showing up in the real world to yell, scream, and chant death threats at one person. That would be a massive event. Even gathering 1,000 people against a single person would be noteworthy in many locations.

So the The Internet, which is mostly comprised of Social Media at this point, has moved to be able to allow people to disconnect others from humanity and gather in vitriol spewing hordes, and a single individual would be hard pressed to deal with such force against them while still trying to engage with their reason for being there.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#788

Post by lazide »

zarathustreal wrote: post #769
Anotheroneagain wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is full of people who disagree with you, Don't you think it's worrisome that we can't agree on anything? And that includes things that are supposed to have objective answers. Why can't we find the truth? We now have instant global communication available almost 24/7, shouldn't it bring the period of unprecedented unity?

The notion of truth is an illusion, this has been a philosophical debate since the beginning of time. The fact is, every person occupies unique physical space and thus has unique life experiences and a unique perspective of each “event”. It’s the standard multi-sided coin phenomenon. Ask two people standing on opposite sides what is on the face and they’ll give you two different answers and both be right and both be…

That’s a cop out that allows obvious delusion to spread.

If what someone is saying is 90% reality based and verifiable, and 10% subjective experiences/unverifiable, that doesn’t make what they say equivalent to someone who says something that is 90% falsified by verifiable reality and 10% subjective experiences/unverifiable.

The second person is just delusional or lying, full stop. Any other approach is just cowardice.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#789

Post by noemit »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #768
randomdata wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> She doesn't share her actual thoughts That's where social media has been most damaging. You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility. No longer can you just throw something out there, no matter how stupid. These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that i…

> You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility I’ll add that people addicted to social media become insufferable to share novel (often silly) thoughts around because the focus becomes dropping a zinger versus meaningfully engaging with what was said.

thanks for articulating this. I've encountered a lot of Gen z who do this and while they are well-meaning, smart kids, I find it so difficult to have a nice conversation because of this

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#790

Post by gnramires »

randomdata wrote: post #486
skilled wrote: post #337

I'm no saint when it comes to addiction and being on my phone for more than I should be, but I have a sister who is in her mid 20s right now, and for the last couple of years she has slowly isolated herself from life and her family, she spends most of her time in her room on the phone and does weird things like get cosmetic surgeries, ordering cosmetics, etc. It's bizarre. She does this and all the while never leaves…

> She doesn't share her actual thoughts That's where social media has been most damaging. You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility. No longer can you just throw something out there, no matter how stupid. These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that i…

Edit: Now before commenting, I see there's an overarching theme of: sure, there is a bunch of unhealthy stuff about social media, but meanwhile there are some things you can do to make your interaction with it better.

> That's where social media has been most damaging. You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility. No longer can you just throw something out there, no matter how stupid. These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that isn't deemed 100% perfect by those listening, the social scorn will fall upon you.

I think that's an important point, that I think is partly due to culture of the spaces. For example, I almost never downvote anyone, and in particular not for them being wrong, unless it's something particularly harmful whose visibility would be damaging, or just a troll (quite rare usually). The downvote button seems important for those rare situations (maybe just a mod button would be enough?), but in general it should rarely be used.

Not only I've come to believe asking questions is important for beginners to learn, but also it's an important medium for everyone else (and in particular experts or more advanced learners) to exercise their knowledge by teaching stuff and learning to fill gaps in their knowledge.

I actually think reddit is pretty good in this regard, specially w.r.t. what we had before and other media like StackExchange. In SE, you're expected to search the site and often questions are met with arrogance. In oldschool forums, which I do like, there was (in almost every case I remember) an even greater air of elitism; although, on the other hand, it created a healthy eagerness to learn the norms and participate in a careful way. I tend to prefer the lower-stakes communication of HN-style boards though.

I think as with everything massification is a significant problem. I encourage everyone to participate in communities whose size feels 'just right'. Also, at least some of your interactions should be highly participative, and not just mindless consumption.

I think a final problem is that any activity of too narrow scope can be dangerous. If people are confined into extremely narrow interests and spend all their time on that, as opposed to learning everything about life, that can (and probably will in most cases) paint a distorted picture of reality and be very unhealthy. Broaden your curiosity :)

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