161–170 of 333 posts
Now force all of culture and the most basic forms of social interactions through this digitally mediated funnel. You get the worst aspects of pre-literate and literate civilizations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube Most of the people I’ve known who struggled with doomscrolling had established a similar set of social media sites at their worst point. I think we’ve seen so many articles about how social media is bad that reference mainstream sites like Facebook and Instag…
I have a predisposition for that, and Reddit is indeed poison for some of us. I blocked it with pihole, along with most other social media sites, years ago. Just the friction of a dns record (that yes, I can easily override) was enough to keep myself away from all of it. And when I need the rare bit of practical information from one of them, I can hit the 5m override from a widget on the phone. It’s ultimately self c…
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I used to enjoy Imgur and Reddit, but both "communities" have become increasingly hostile and less inclusive. So now I avoid both and I mentally feel much more positive about people in general.
I can tell, usually within a few minutes of meeting them, who’s really into social media. There’s a little bit of frenetic emotional dysregulation, and then they say the weirdest stuff to me. I don’t think you could have made a similar argument about heavy trash tv watchers. They may have had less to talk about, you may have found them less interesting, but it didn’t literally alter their personalities. We have a big…
Before social media I remember people who had entire conversations just quoting tv shows, movies, and commercials. Which shows they quoted was their personality. I think it is much worse with social media, the content is a lot more niche and the algorithms a lot more addictive. It's not so much the weird stuff they say, I think that is fairly normal, especially the younger you go. It's the inability to do anything in…
So weird/eerie to go into an In-N-Out Burger or something, and see a table full of teenagers just sitting there silently scrolling their phones. Feels like we're in an episode of the Twilight Zone sometimes.
Not just teenagers, too. You'll see grown ass adults sitting there, technically together but totally absorbed into their phones.
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> I quit all social media! > No for real! Even YouTube! And yet here you are
Might be nit-picking but forum != social media (to me).
I've abandoned all forms of media outside of HN, GitHub, Steam, Spotify and the occasional visit to a pirate streaming site.
Hm, comparing developments spanning from the 12th century up to now with stuff that is happening in the last decade. Just give social media about 5 or 6 centuries to develop, and then check back to see if the arguments of this article are sound. Edit: sorry for being so dismissive, but I just can't stand rhetoric that says something about "us" and "we". There were seriously stupid people back when we supposedly had l…
I used to think the same way, that people have always overreacted to new technology. But over time I’ve started to feel there’s at least a bit of truth to some of those moral panics, and it's not correct to dismiss all. I remember laughing at an old article about “calcu-holism,” basically the idea of becoming too dependent on calculators. At the time it sounded ridiculous, but looking back, the point wasn’t that bad.…
Writing has been around for thousands of years. But it caught on extremely slowly. It took thousands of years to spread across the globe. For thousands of years being literate was rare. The printing press changed things a lot, but books and the education needed to use them remained uncommon. Until pretty recently, a person’s daily life looked a lot like their grandparents’ did.
Things started picking up. Electricity went from zero to ubiquitous in a few generations. So did mechanized transport, radio, TV, and telephones.
It’s faster than that today. Most people today communicate using systems that didn’t exist at all when I was a child. At work, we’re all using tools that didn’t exist just a few years ago.
The “check back in a few centuries” doesn’t work, because we’re not going to be using the same stuff in a few centuries. We’re probably not going to be using the same stuff in a few decades. We didn’t have time to figure out the ramifications of doomscrolling before it became ubiquitous, and we’ll probably have even less time to figure out the next thing.
I recognise that it’s easier to establish these habits early. Our children are still toddlers, so we haven’t yet faced the challenges of parenting teenagers, but they rarely have access to screens because we deliberately restrict it. Even Steve Jobs limited his children’s use of technology at home. Recognising the problem ought to lead to setting and enforcing limits, not treating our children’s access to these devices as inevitable.
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> Hm, comparing developments spanning from the 12th century up to now with stuff that is happening in the last decade. Just give social media about 5 or 6 centuries to develop, and then check back to see if the arguments of this article are sound. For most of time, until the industrial revolution, technology didn't really advance that quickly. The world you were born into would be technologically near identical to th…
While I agree with your sentiment, I doubt that we can really judge that properly without some objective distance in time. The invention of the printing press, canals, gunpowder, sailing, may have changed lives quite a bit. Consider also the people who were "discovered" by the Europeans [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...
I can tell, usually within a few minutes of meeting them, who’s really into social media. There’s a little bit of frenetic emotional dysregulation, and then they say the weirdest stuff to me. I don’t think you could have made a similar argument about heavy trash tv watchers. They may have had less to talk about, you may have found them less interesting, but it didn’t literally alter their personalities. We have a big…
Before social media I remember people who had entire conversations just quoting tv shows, movies, and commercials. Which shows they quoted was their personality. I think it is much worse with social media, the content is a lot more niche and the algorithms a lot more addictive. It's not so much the weird stuff they say, I think that is fairly normal, especially the younger you go. It's the inability to do anything in…
I want a TikTok-era Bowling Along examining the impact modern single feed social media has had on group participation in the new generations...
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Never heard that this is stopping anyone from reading recent books. Maybe someone whose only method of selecting books is to scroll through Kindle and look at the titles, maybe they need to pay attention to publication dates. But the rest of the world picks books because they get a recommendation, they look at reviews, they know the author, etc. NYTimes said that the new Marlon James book might be the book of the cen…
It is not so unusual to read books that have stood the test of time at least somewhat. Newness is not really a valuable quality when it comes to books, barring some exceptions like books on subjects that change frequently and meaningfully. Diminished quality however is a meaningful signal, and would give most serious readers pause.