The evidence is equivocal on whether screen time is to blame for rising levels of teen depression and anxiety — and rising hysteria could distract us from tackling the real causes.
Except yes, it is. Social media sites and apps are specifically designed to addict people to their usage in a way not seen in anything ever before. They target people so thoroughly and with such precision as to be cruel.
Children are especially prone to it. They see all these people online living lives they wish they had, with bodies they wish they had, and they spend all their time attached to the feeds. And they’re continuously targeted by it.
So were comic books, and rock n’ roll, and dancing, and DnD, and bikinis, and whatever new things the kids are into that scared parents didn’t understand.
None of those were built specifically with algorithms meant to keep people addicted to them. Nobody is arguing that cigarettes are bad for kids and social media is designed in a similar way: to keep people hooked and coming back for more.
If adults are struggling with it, why wouldn’t kids?
Worse, none of these relied solely on advertisement companies. There’s a reason the Matrix was associated with hopeless 90s office drone work but then became a superficially friendly, toxic, enabling crapsaccharine microcosm of the year 2021.
Just like the Fight Club reference from Robot Chicken informed the Barbie movie, the reference to the Matrix in Adam Ruins the Internet seems to have informed the extrapolatory writing; Advertisers farm people for their data and fatten us up with ads to get a higher profit.
Here’s where it gets really bad. All this comes down to the shareholder-based income stream; the ultra-wealthy have justified exploitation of people to themselves to continue living in extreme luxury, if an individual is not simply a sociopath or clinically narcissistic. They now bleed companies dry by demanding a 25% “Return on Investment” while fully aware that kills businesses because these assholes know they’re above the consequences of their actions.
I hate reality, please stop complaining about video games like they’re the same as social media, and polluting my feed with political stressmongering. It’s making the fediverse impossible for me to want to support, and I left reddit for exactly the reason everyone else who abandoned the Fediverse did.
No. It’s just the latest moral panic, like all the others that came before it.
Except yes, it is. Social media sites and apps are specifically designed to addict people to their usage in a way not seen in anything ever before. They target people so thoroughly and with such precision as to be cruel.
Children are especially prone to it. They see all these people online living lives they wish they had, with bodies they wish they had, and they spend all their time attached to the feeds. And they’re continuously targeted by it.
So were comic books, and rock n’ roll, and dancing, and DnD, and bikinis, and whatever new things the kids are into that scared parents didn’t understand.
None of those were built specifically with algorithms meant to keep people addicted to them. Nobody is arguing that cigarettes are bad for kids and social media is designed in a similar way: to keep people hooked and coming back for more.
If adults are struggling with it, why wouldn’t kids?
Worse, none of these relied solely on advertisement companies. There’s a reason the Matrix was associated with hopeless 90s office drone work but then became a superficially friendly, toxic, enabling crapsaccharine microcosm of the year 2021.
Just like the Fight Club reference from Robot Chicken informed the Barbie movie, the reference to the Matrix in Adam Ruins the Internet seems to have informed the extrapolatory writing; Advertisers farm people for their data and fatten us up with ads to get a higher profit.
Here’s where it gets really bad. All this comes down to the shareholder-based income stream; the ultra-wealthy have justified exploitation of people to themselves to continue living in extreme luxury, if an individual is not simply a sociopath or clinically narcissistic. They now bleed companies dry by demanding a 25% “Return on Investment” while fully aware that kills businesses because these assholes know they’re above the consequences of their actions.
I hate reality, please stop complaining about video games like they’re the same as social media, and polluting my feed with political stressmongering. It’s making the fediverse impossible for me to want to support, and I left reddit for exactly the reason everyone else who abandoned the Fediverse did.