Social media has ruined society, indeed, but only because the exploitability was always there to begin with. Just look at everyone in this thread opting for letting their kids cave in to peer pressure and dodging responsibility for their upbringing because "past a certain point" you can't do shit about it, and God forbid they try to develop themselves into a worthwhile adult without using any of those time-sinking, mindless apps, because then they will be "left out". Left out of what? A vile cesspool of shit in which everyone seems to bathe nowadays, at the expense of their potential?
Lack of impulse control, no critical thinking, laziness and general negligence have always been at the root cause of many of societal ailments like this one, and until a large enough group of people chooses to come up with healthier alternatives and sacrificing hedonistic and mindless tendencies, they will keep festering across the globe. In the meantime, I absolutely prefer to be "left out" and interacting solely with similar minded people.
Even if parents tried to be fully responsible for keeping their kids off social media, it wouldn't actually be possible for them. What you are proposing is akin to a world in which it is wholly the responsibility of parents to stop their kids from smoking cigarettes and drinking liquor, but whenever the parents weren't around kids could walk into a store and buy them legally. Do you expect 24/7 unceasing parental surveillance? Get real.
And as for technological means of surveillance and content control, parents here on HN struggle to make that work. The average parent with average tech skills stands virtually no chance of making it work. Kids have been known to do things like get old phones from somebody in school and use it on the neighbor's wifi. Trying to control their devices and access to the internet is basically impossible.
> keeping their kids off social media, it wouldn't actually be possible for them.
This is false binary thinking. I would argue that effortful attempts by parents would meaningfully reduce their kids social media usage. Social medias negative effects is a spectrum/sliding scale of effect based on amount of exposure.
Even if they cannot entirely keep their kids off social media, they can dampen the usage. Think about alcohol, as a society we focus on keeping kids off alcohol and in the main it works (until we give them free and full access and they experimentally binge, but most regain selfcontrol in short order).
> Just look at everyone in this thread opting for letting their kids cave in to peer pressure and dodging responsibility for their upbringing
It’s entirely reasonable to read this as implying that a key issue is parental management of access to social media.
And it might even be reasonable to assume you don’t actually care about this topic at levels beyond the self-gratification that comes from assuming a posture of easy contempt, given that’s the majority of what you’re offering by weight.
These type of comments almost always come from non-parents.
In a way, they are right. You can raise your kids without influence of social media but that is not easy or cheap. It would definitely require homeschooling. One of the parent will need to be stay at home parent. Probably need to avoid urban and suburban areas where kids can easily hangout with neighborhood kids. Avoid social gatherings where other kids will have access to social media. Basically, unrealistic for most of the people.
Or we as society can come together and regulate social media, just like how we do with alcohol, cigarettes, speed limits, etc. Yes, there is less freedom in this but living in societies always had some freedoms removed.
Or a kid? The parent comment is either forgetting what it was like being a kid and doing things behind their parents back, not out of disrespect, but because they're young and it's what young people do, they are their own people as much as one might try to control them.
Also, good luck ostracizing a child from their peers for their "benefit"? (I remember a time where not having the same brand of clothes would get you ostracized, much less not being in the known of the current gen media)
This argument that social media is destroying the youth is the same old tale as old as time. Everything has been destroying the youth and rotting their brains since before anyone on this page was born. The devil music, violence in media, pot, unorthodox romance, (or you know, being a nerdy teen who spent a bit too long on their PC growing up in the 90s and their parents complained it was rotting their brain, which I'm sure a lot of people here can relate to and have made it their professional life) literally everything is destroying children, which we all were once.
As a parent of young children, I'm trying hard not to be the "but this time is different" guy, but it sure feels like this time is different. Just look around any "real world" setting and almost every single person is staring at their little dopamine-releasing devices.
> This argument that social media is destroying the youth is the same old tale as old as time. Everything has been destroying the youth and rotting their brains since before anyone on this page was born.
So therefore nothing will ever truly destroy our youth?
Obviously not literally, but I can see how social media can have a much more measured negative impact on youth vs. all the things above.
I don’t think any of the other things you mention have ever been blamed for also “destroying“ adults, but I’d argue there is evidence that social media is having a measured negative impact on all of society. But especially youth.
I think there’s a thread of truth here that it’s always “the kids are doing detrimental things” (which is kind of their duty in a way, to rebel and learn the lines of society)
But equally valid argument is the general moral decline we’ve seen in society over the last 80 years or so. Is it from a lack of spirituality/higher power belief? Is it just a byproduct of the Information Age?
It’s not just kids doing dangerous things, then growing up to have functionally healthy lives, we’re now seeing enormous levels of reported meaninglessness, even in higher age brackets.
Dating has become a crap shoot for many, especially after college.
For guys, if you’re not above average in looks, job, or life situation, you don’t attract average women. You essentially attract nothing. The apps are more zero-sum, and don’t follow a bell curve. You need to go to bars, or join a community of sorts (which have also been in decline outside of metro areas)
For women who want to start a family relatively young (mid 20’s let’s say), many of the men available are still living at home (housing affordability), without a stable career (expensive degrees that don’t produce jobs), or honestly haven’t grown up.
There are pieces for sure that resemble past generations, but layered on top is a multi-generational ailment that is culminating into a very dangerous societal discontent.
This argument that social media is destroying the youth is the same old tale as old as time. Everything has been destroying the youth and rotting their brains since before anyone on this page was born.
It's less than a cemtury old. Any older quote appears to be fake. It began with the boomers, who grew up on iron poisoned food, and it's been getting worse from the increasing lack of lead and other heavy metals. Similar events happened when an effective method of producing iron was discovered (people killed each other, and burnt almost the enrire civilization) and in late rome, when lead mining declined. High lead consumption was followed by eras of prosperity. You people really need to pull your heads out of your assess, and accept that the effects are too severe to be caused by some social bullshit trend, and the cause has to be biological (even if you disagree with me what the cause is)
yes but you a) had to be enterprising, and b) had pretty limited access to whatever was available in the recycled magazine bins and blurry TV channels (which wasn't much. I was also there), etc. Now it's 100% of anything you're told to desire, mainlined directly to your undeveloped brain with the flick of a finger.
It's hard enough convincing exploitable human nature to be thoughtful and empathetic and kind and generous and diligent in the absence of social media. It's like teaching kids to want to eat green vegetables.
Natural selection results in people and animals who are impulsive, selfish, greedy, and lazy, it's only by great effort that people can overcome this and be better animals. We naturally trend towards these base instincts like a child trends towards eating the bread and fruit on their dinner plate, ignoring their vegetables. Even children know that actions have consequences, and can demonstrate some self-control.
But social media is like a highly addictive candy bar. Completely unregulated, laden with high fructose corn syrup, MSG, and artificial flavors, and (for the sake of analogy) addictive drugs engineered with the only goal being maximum profit.
Human nature can only withstand so much! There's no reason to expect our brains to be strong enough to resist the machinations of millions of brilliant engineers with sophisticated technology trying to overcome our self control.
It sounds like you want to live in a digital version of a monastery. It's a nice ideal and can work for some, but the vast majority of us do need to live in the full world, with all its flaws, and even if we don't like it, we need to interact with it in order to improve it.
That's not at all what I said, and you know it. If you want to be trite and contribute nothing positive to the conversation, I would suggest you are in the wrong place
It's truly appalling the precision with which my experience here for the past five years can be summed up with these exact words you just wrote. And this thread seems but a reenactment of that.
>Lack of impulse control, no critical thinking, laziness
I agree with you, but I believe these qualities are a bit more fixed that people are willing to admit. I'm not suggesting that we can't do better than we're currently doing. Instead that the impulse control & maturity required to handle smart phones and social media responsibly escapes most of the general population in a way that other technologies have not previously.
In other words, you can rightly yell at folks that they need more impulse control, intelligence, etc. But you'll be yelling into the void. Most people lack the mental tools to deal with these things successfully, and will keep coming up short.
Lack of impulse control, no critical thinking, laziness and general negligence have always been at the root cause of many of societal ailments like this one, and until a large enough group of people chooses to come up with healthier alternatives and sacrificing hedonistic and mindless tendencies, they will keep festering across the globe. In the meantime, I absolutely prefer to be "left out" and interacting solely with similar minded people.