Your television is not able to immediately reply to a photo you put up saying that you are ugly or that it is more attractive than you. It also can’t summon mobs of angry online teens to berate and harass you and tell you to kill yourself, etc etc.
I think the point is that TV enjoyers aren't depressed; dumb is another question. Ignorance is bliss I suppose.
Although say what you will about the boob tube, the days of broadcast media with a handful of channels at least meant everyone watched the same things. It contributed to a sense of shared culture, even if that culture was really stupid.
That's accurate. The social arena had already *started* to unravel with the arrival of game consoles which kept people mostly at home, so that in between the latest game, teens were pretty badly starved for things to watch. Even then, many would sit alone in front of anything, just like modern cell phone addicts.
But there was also a sizable pool of badly-taped movies, early anime, and British shows. Robotech may not have aged that well, but Monty Python & The Holy Grail was brilliant, MTV's The Maxx was very creative, and the BBC Robin Hood was like nothing else. Come to think of it, my wife and I still love Forever Knight, and we're planning to watch it again one of these days.
So it wasn't merely that everyone watched the same things, but rather, you had to put *effort* in to find out what was good, and where. Music was a lot the same. Good entertainment options were there, they just didn't tumble one after another on to your screen, begging you to tap on them so that you could continue your pathetic drip-feed of entertainment.
The political shift is interesting, and aligns with my suspicion that the algo is tuned (maybe accidentally, maybe not) to shift people left over time. That's based purely on observing people I know personally. Heavy FB users who started as vaguely liberal a decade ago have all gone woke. Reassuring to know that the brain damage is temporary.
Shit. I had a semi-liberal upbringing, drifted right in high school, then left afterward, and watched in the 2010s as everyone drifted to my left...but I never touched social media. During the whole Floyd thing I was surprised as everyone suddenly decided this episode of police brutality was going nuts over when these things had been going on for years. Spent a lot of time on blogs, sure, that way you can get different perspectives, but no Facebook and barely looked at Twitter. n=1, but I wonder...
My theory is that craziness is an infohazard for easy influenceable people and social media is just an channel for the mental illness acceptance that is part of wokeness. I had a girlfriend that unwillingly was mirroring the nervous tics and speech patterns of people we met. Now we see girls mirroring Tourette after watching TickTockers. There are also strong claims of social spreading of trans and non-binary identities.
One of the posts discussing this topic showed that social media has a correlation with bad mental health in the US, UK and Scandinavian countries, but not in less woke countries.
So I think that to blame is the message not the medium. On the other hand a message needs a medium to spread so supervising how your kids use internet and chat apps is a good idea.
Meh. The study is unblinded and as far as I can tell there's no active control, and as the researchers acknowledge, psychological interventions (which are all about as good as one another, since there's an expectancy/mere treatment effect) have about 3-4x the effect of the FB intervention.
I'm with you there, but I'm just not that worried about the quality of the evidence in this case. No matter how many studies you want to reject, you're still basically going to be left with "Is Facebook bad for you? Apple Pie says yes"
> We had TV for several decades and it doesn't seem particularly associated with bad mental health.
Not sure about this, the television addicts I know are completely retarded
Your television is not able to immediately reply to a photo you put up saying that you are ugly or that it is more attractive than you. It also can’t summon mobs of angry online teens to berate and harass you and tell you to kill yourself, etc etc.
It's probably nonlinear, just like drugs: https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/drug-users-vs-drug-abusers
I think the point is that TV enjoyers aren't depressed; dumb is another question. Ignorance is bliss I suppose.
Although say what you will about the boob tube, the days of broadcast media with a handful of channels at least meant everyone watched the same things. It contributed to a sense of shared culture, even if that culture was really stupid.
That's accurate. The social arena had already *started* to unravel with the arrival of game consoles which kept people mostly at home, so that in between the latest game, teens were pretty badly starved for things to watch. Even then, many would sit alone in front of anything, just like modern cell phone addicts.
But there was also a sizable pool of badly-taped movies, early anime, and British shows. Robotech may not have aged that well, but Monty Python & The Holy Grail was brilliant, MTV's The Maxx was very creative, and the BBC Robin Hood was like nothing else. Come to think of it, my wife and I still love Forever Knight, and we're planning to watch it again one of these days.
So it wasn't merely that everyone watched the same things, but rather, you had to put *effort* in to find out what was good, and where. Music was a lot the same. Good entertainment options were there, they just didn't tumble one after another on to your screen, begging you to tap on them so that you could continue your pathetic drip-feed of entertainment.
The political shift is interesting, and aligns with my suspicion that the algo is tuned (maybe accidentally, maybe not) to shift people left over time. That's based purely on observing people I know personally. Heavy FB users who started as vaguely liberal a decade ago have all gone woke. Reassuring to know that the brain damage is temporary.
Shit. I had a semi-liberal upbringing, drifted right in high school, then left afterward, and watched in the 2010s as everyone drifted to my left...but I never touched social media. During the whole Floyd thing I was surprised as everyone suddenly decided this episode of police brutality was going nuts over when these things had been going on for years. Spent a lot of time on blogs, sure, that way you can get different perspectives, but no Facebook and barely looked at Twitter. n=1, but I wonder...
If only the same could be said for the cultural damage.
My theory is that craziness is an infohazard for easy influenceable people and social media is just an channel for the mental illness acceptance that is part of wokeness. I had a girlfriend that unwillingly was mirroring the nervous tics and speech patterns of people we met. Now we see girls mirroring Tourette after watching TickTockers. There are also strong claims of social spreading of trans and non-binary identities.
One of the posts discussing this topic showed that social media has a correlation with bad mental health in the US, UK and Scandinavian countries, but not in less woke countries.
So I think that to blame is the message not the medium. On the other hand a message needs a medium to spread so supervising how your kids use internet and chat apps is a good idea.
Meh. The study is unblinded and as far as I can tell there's no active control, and as the researchers acknowledge, psychological interventions (which are all about as good as one another, since there's an expectancy/mere treatment effect) have about 3-4x the effect of the FB intervention.
I'm with you there, but I'm just not that worried about the quality of the evidence in this case. No matter how many studies you want to reject, you're still basically going to be left with "Is Facebook bad for you? Apple Pie says yes"
FB sucks, agreed.