OK let's ban social media and roll back to 20 years ago. I'm perfectly happy with that. With social media it's so easy to manipulate than emails, websites and phones.
Technological advancement is not always good (for ordinary people).
I often wonder if we (the tech industry) have come up with anything actually good since about 2005 or so, in terms of being a net win for society or something people actually need.
Increasingly, we seem to provide solutions in search of a problem, or worse, substitutes for much healthier activities. The power we have to do so is staggering; we are changing the parameters and modes of how people relate to each other on a daily basis.
I feel a strong urge to have more "ok, so where do we go from here?" and "what does a tech industry that promotes net good actually look like?" internal discourse in the community of practice, and some sort of ethical social contract for software engineering.
The open source movement has been fabulous and sometimes adjacent to or one aspect of these concerns, but really we need a movement for socially conscious and responsible software.
Maps/GPS navigation is really nice. But it also is a crutch. If I get somewhere with maps, I probably can't find my way back without maps. When I used to plan in advance using a paper map, that was less often the case.
I like online banking, shopping, bill-paying.
Everything else is sort of bleh. I'm as guilty as anyone of killing a few hours on YouTube but don't think I would really miss it.
Yeah that is very true. Used to go to the library and get books on home repair for that sort of thing, but it's not as convenient, and for some things nothing beats watching a video. If a picture can say 1,000 words a good video can amplify that 10x or more.
> Maps/GPS navigation is really nice. But it also is a crutch.
This is a really interesting point which can be extrapolated to many different areas. If something is more convinient, but causes us to lose a useful manual skill, should it be classed as good or not?
I too feel this urge. It's a difficult path to go down, and an even more difficult path to lead others down.
Mainly because the destination is an alternate economy where "companies" are smaller, returns are not concentrated to "founders" or investors or even shareholders, and so on.
The tech industry has become "evil" because it has put on social blinders while pursuing profits. To give up that path and choose another path is to choose more prosperity for "we" and less prosperity for "me". It's not a difficult choice in the abstract, but it's a very difficult for people with (oftentimes spurious, but still) bills to pay.
There are vanishingly-few ways to ethically draw a six figure salary (inflation-adjusted for 2016 dollars) out of this economy. Giving up that illusion is going to be really difficult (perhaps impossible) for the people in our industry who were drawn here by that promise and have grown comfortable with the terms of the bargain.
I think we do, and many of them are excellent candidates. But social media + big data + algorithm is really "evil" (use quotes because many may not agree), plus it is often exposed to teens and younger kids. It's like mindless TV channel switching with 1) way more channels, 2) way less information for each program and 3) recommendations.
I really like the positivity of your post. This is an attitude I hope more of us (myself included) can adopt going forward in the world of tech we are creating around us.
How would you say they’re solutions in search of a problem? I engage LLMs more than 50 times a week to solve problems at work, in my personal projects, and in my personal life. I respect your opinion but thoroughly disagree.
Just for my own context and perspective, do you use generative AI or not?
20 years ago we had reality TV, video games, and rock music which were the perveyor of body issues and FOMO etc. The issue is not technology, but popular culture. Pre the end of the 20th century most people considered knowledge and skill to be the peak of human progression. Now it is money and image. As money and image can easily be given/bestowed whilst knowledge and skill cannot, I believe the general population has become much easier to manipulate by using these traits.
There are very few young people today who dont value money and image as something to aspire to. IMO this is a really dangerous thing of which there is no way back.
Vanity and greed are called deadly sins for a reason. It is clear these are afflictions humans have always had to deal with. Unfortunately, culture isn't built from the top down and takes generations to change. I am sure we will see a swing back toward traditional values as people learn the hard way that not all things old should be thrown out.
I do agree, and we have seen this in the past with things like the punk movement, which was a purely creative output from the working class in response to poor social conditions. Hopefully there is a similar movement against similar modern technological conditions at some point.
There are a couple of differences here though. For example everybody has the same tiktok. The upper classes and lower classes are for the first time being subjected to the same issues simultaneously.
Also the modern medium of tiktok has proven so addictive that people are not showing any signs of rising up against it, and so it is taking legislation to protect people from themselves.
These are all new factors which will change the swing somewhat, Im with you in hoping that it all works out.
I believe it is. We saw the same thing with the rise of cable and reality TV and teenagers watching endless reruns of the Kardashians and the Osbournes as it was the first time you could watch shows back to back for days on end.
With Video Games we had the introduction of the MMO and news stories of people forgetting to feed their kids, and even dying in their homes from not looking after themselves properly.
People are the problem, not the tech. As long as people are willing to be lazy and allow their brains to be subjected to a constant stream of repetetive digital content for entertainement, then we will have these issues.
I think the tech has raised stimulation levels exponentially, which feeds people's desire to consume in ways that was impossible in the past. But, I also think your examples are quite valid, and what we're seeing here now is probably only marginally worse than Neil Postman days back in the '80s and '70s when TV was the big boogeyman. Meaning that our society has already been screwed for half a century, and we should probably try to look at the problem through this lens rather than just trying to turn back the clock by a mere decade or two.
Maybe things were already bad when radio achieved mass adoption and people couldn't get enough of it? Maybe in some ways today's unlimited aural stimulation, of having access to music and podcasts at any moment, is also unnatural and undesirable for mental health?
Yes I like the idea that we need to go back about 50 years to really see the root of this. IMO it is visual media in general which is causing these issues (TV/Games/Social Media) which started probably in the 70s.
The difference is so obvious. I think the people who deny it either haven't seen the tech's impact on people or they are coping as an addict themself. It's totally the same as a good book you guys!!
My girlfriend and some friends are captivated by doomscrolling tiktok/insta. They'll do it and let hours pass if left undisturbed.
They can't watch TV or play games for hours because that gets boring and samey.
On the other hand, my girlfriend will aspire to play a game she bought or watch a show she wants to watch, but then get immediately sabotaged by instagram shorts because it's so much more stimulating.
Its nothing like a book, however it is very similar to addiction on MMO games like World of warcraft and Roblox.
> They can't watch TV or play games for hours because that gets boring and samey.
I would argue that its not because its boring, its because it doesnt give as frequent rewards for engagement and so becomes less attractive for the user.
> get immediately sabotaged by instagram shorts because it's so much more stimulating
Its not stimulation, its lazyness. I guarantee that anybody would get more stimulation from investment in a decent story in a book, movie, or game, but it takes more effort to get there. Its much easier to get that tiny hit of dopamine from a 10 second video than it is to invest 2 hours into a story to get a decent payoff. Its this lazyness of wanting the easy hit instead of putting the time in that is making people put down that book and jump on Instagram.
Sure, the culture is the content and human drive behind it, but the technology has made it so that we cannot avoid it and cannot easily practice good hygiene when it comes to social engagement. Or another metaphor, food, imagine if you had candy/sugar laying around everywhere and that was placed in front of whole foods everywhere you looked, such that you technically could choose a better option, but you were always fighting your human instincts to prioritize fast/cheap energy. As an adult, you know that you need to override these base instincts, and have evidence from your childhood where you encountered the structure of choosing healthy options even when you probably wanted something more sugary/fatty. The argument is that kids are not getting the opportunity to develop this healthy digital content diet because their parents either do not have the technical ability nor the actual functional ability to do anything about it.
I see your point, but I dont agree with your metaphors at all.
Governments around thwe world have had to tax sugary products to save people from themselves. You make it sound like there isnt currently an obesity epidemic because adults know enough to not eat too much sugary foods. In reality the vast majority eat way too much even though they know its not good for them, just like social media use. Its the same as alcohol and drug abuse etc. Humans are terrible at restricting themselves when it comes to stuff that makes them feel good. Tiktok scrolling is just an extension of that, not the cause.
I actually think I communicated my point incorrectly, I also agree with you, I meant more that at least if you had some guidance as a child and your environment wasn't so antagonistic, you might have a fighting chance, not even that you will definitely succeed. We see it now with food deserts, etc. It's a challenging environment to navigate when you have all of this "freedom". :p
>Pre the end of the 20th century most people considered knowledge and skill to be the peak of human progression. Now it is money and image. As money and image can easily be given/bestowed whilst knowledge and skill cannot, I believe the general population has become much easier to manipulate by using these traits.
It was like that in the 80s as well. Probably the 90s, depending on your inner circle. Money and prestige (image) has always been prominent in the US. We probably inherited it from the UK before we existed.
Knowledge and skill were socially important in the US once Sputnik was launched and we viewed science and engineering as the battlefield against the Soviet Union.
> The issue is not technology, but popular culture.
It's both. When I was growing up as a kid (and I'm now going back over 40 years instead of 20) you didn't take your cable TV with you in your pocket. (And not even your video games unless you consider Electronic Football a video game.)
(Okay, so the Walkman came along and I could take my music with me. Big sin!)
Entertainment, distractions in general had a specific time and place. There was a large part of every day when you were left to interact with the world that was right around you ... maybe even get bored from time to time.
> you didn't take your cable TV with you in your pocket
Thats a good point I hadn't taken into consideration. Yes we had addictive MMOs and binging reality TV, but they werent portable. The outside world was a safe haven from visual media content.
Yes, that's big. When we have a family reunion, outdoors in a park, half the family (and all the kids) are staring at their phones, effectively alone. That didn't really exist even 10 years ago. We had phones and social media then, but only the most addicted needed to be active on them so consistently like that.
And I'd still disagree with you. There's a long line of fops, dandies, social climbers, hangers-on and aspirants however far you choose to look back in history. We may be in a particularly acute period right now but the desire to be wealthy and admired didn't just appear 50 years ago.
Well if it helps, just think that today we have a 2000's reality-TV star as POTUS, so within a short few years, we'll have a TikTok influencer instead :-)
Lets ban TV, video games, rock and roll music and dungeons and dragons, too. When I was growing up, those were what was harming children at an industrial scale.
The author has addressed that point before [1] in an article worth reading in its entirety:
> I think it is a very good thing that alarms were rung about teen smoking, teen pregnancy, drunk driving, and the exposure of children to sex and violence on TV. The lesson of The Boy Who Cried Wolf is not that after two false alarms we should disconnect the alarm system. In that story, the wolf does eventually come.
That page also shows some graphs that to this day still surprise me, namely, the way in which rates of depression and psychological stress among teens explode around 2010. Unlike TV and DnD, this time we do have data, and it looks bad.
Censorship is often justified by comparisons to physical substances like this - chemicals can irreparably harm your body, therefore ideas can irreparably harm your brain. I don't believe that these are the same. There's no way to really prove it, but there is a way to prove that censorship (which is what banning social media amounts to) _is_ objectively bad.
Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death is probably worth a read. The problem is with the medium, and how it strips away critical information. Television stripped that information away from typography, TikTok strips away even more. It's fundamentally still the same problem.
Since everyone banning anything is exactly the same level of pointless are you also in favor of bringing back more asbestos, lead, and child labor as well? Or would you say that context matters, evidence matters, and critical thinking about the actual circumstances under discussion is often necessary?
The context provided by GP seems to be "media". I think there are some things about short-form video platforms that form a bit of a different argument than the traditional "new media bad" stance but just jumping into why chemical poisons and forced labor were bad isn't going to help drive that nuance.
It sounds like you're agreeing that context matters and just underlining my point for me. Comparing chemical poisons to media is every bit as ridiculous as comparing pre-algorithmic media to social media.. I think everyone who is interested in serious conversation with nuance already knows that.
Forgetting the adults in the room who still want to lean into all kinds of disingenuous what-aboutism for a moment, and just considering kids who are understandably self-interested in defense of their addictions.. really now. How could a generation of people who grew up wanting to be influencers actually be ignorant of the effectiveness of algorithmic manipulation? It's a contradiction. So why the insistence on some absurd comparison to old media? I'm all for nuance but there's not much of that to be had. I'd settle for a little reflection, sincerity, and logical consistency.
Yes, I'm agreeing with your (core) point through and through - the nuance came into play with the way you tried to argue the point. It sorta made sense if you already saw things the same way, otherwise it came across as completely ignoring the context GP provided to demand GP consider context without further example of why their context was incomplete. At the end of the day, a part saying "and this is why it's actually different in that context" is still unanswered and you're just telling them to ignore that.
The same is true of the second call. If we dismiss the need to explain why this case is different as just disingenuous what-aboutism to be ignored the argument is left as "if one takes this as problematic then it's clear how it'll be problematic to counter". There's still no persuasion of why it's differently problematic if you don't already see reasons why yourself, just the assertion it is if one thinks enough (which could be asserted about anything true or false).
I think the biggest things that make this problem unique from the media context GP provided are:
- The individualized and targeted nature of the algorithmic feed being a different type of influence concern than content for mass or group consumption.
- The above individualized nature leading into much stronger "echo chamber" polarization, especially when combined with the endless and always on nature of the feeds.
- The content itself is delivered in many more technological layers of dark patterns than traditional mass/group media ever carried.
The only argument I hear a lot which I exclude from my list is the quality/type of content. I think, if you remove the above problems, the content would really not be as different from typical content as we'd like to think. I know others disagree and say it's the short nature itself which is harmful but I don't think that's actually a new unique argument to why people are worried about this latest media trend.
In all seriousness, television has almost certainly harmed some not-insignificant fraction of our population. Nothing is more toxic than a bad idea, a malmeme, and some of them can be so subtle that they go unnoticed for years or decades. Ironically, music is probably less pathogenic, there's just less bandwidth for these memes to make use of. Lyrics, moods, and a single picture of album art? Compare that to a half-hour time slot with complex depictions of social interactions that humans model their own internal mental state from.
Everyone on every point of the political spectrum claims that the basic principle is true. That we can be manipulated to believe untrue things and to behave inappropriately and in maladaptive manners. We just tend to disagree on which media and which content does so.
I think your comment, while not especially constructively formed, is a good warning about alarm-ism. However, I think you should at least consider a few things:
1. The concerns about D&D were quite different. Most parents admired the creativity involved in role-playing. The concerns came from a relatively small subset of parents who were concerned about the morality of the subject matter (monsters, demons etc.). For the record, I thought at the time that these concerns were pretty silly and had little merit, and still do.
2. Just because there have been moral/social panics in the past, doesn't mean the concerns about social media today are invalid. Sometimes worries are wrong, sometimes they are right. Having been wrong before does not make it rational to never be concerned again.
3. It is entirely possible that concerns about high-volume TV watching were correct. Just because my generation (X) survived the TV era does not mean we came out of it unscathed. Much of the ignorance and obnoxiousness of our current age may very well be caused by today's middle aged people growing up watching television. (Or maybe it was the lead paint our parents grew up with?)
TV, video games, rock and roll music, nor dungeon and dragons were specifically designed for compulsory use, reduced the users' ability to focus, or exposed them to the kind (or sheer quantity) of harmful material that TikTok does.
TV, video games and rock and roll music is just as ubiquitous as TikTok. All of these things are on the same mobile device. They are also designed for compulsory use and can expose them to harmful material as well. Nobody writes a song you only want to listen to once or a game you only play for 10 minutes then never again.
This type of hyper fixation on TikTok is pop science and self soothing. It springs from the generational anxiety that the kids are not okay and something must be wrong with them. TikTok can be that boogey man for boomers, gen x and millennials. Same as older generations felt about TV, video games, rock and roll music, and D&D.
> When I was growing up, those were what was harming children at an industrial scale.
Have you ever considered that maybe people were right about all that stuff? The problem so many people have is they either aren't forward thinking enough or only look back a few years at most when arguing against "moral crusaders."
Take for example violence in movies and videogames. Back in the 80s, the MPAA came down hard on the Friday the 13th movies, and the violence level in those movies absolutely pales in comparison to what you see now in Saw X, a mainstream R-rated horror movie. In the early 90s, there were federal hearings about violence in video games, Mortal Kombat being the prime example. Compare what gave people heart attacks back then to what the latest Mortal Kombat game features. Maybe those people were right all along, and we should have done something other than just laugh at their concerns?
With the benefit of decades of hindsight, there's a lot of issues in society where the "slippery slope"-ists turned out to be right.
You should talk to some teachers who've been teaching since before 2010. They almost all say that kids got noticeably dumber around the time smartphones became common. They also say that grading standards today don't resemble anything they used to; most kids today would fail a 2009 curriculum.
College lit professors are now saying they get kids in their class who've never read a book from cover to cover. Those that have, say their favorite book is a YA book like Percy Jackson. Most can't even focus on something like a sonnet. This was described by a professor at Columbia, and they say that this is a recent phenomena and it's the majority of their students now.
Something has fundamentally changed, and there's evidence that points to kids missing key developmental windows. It's not just them on social media either, it's probably also their parents who are on their phones and not interacting with their kids who need that to develop normally.
This is only a counter if the standards to get those levels of attainment have stayed the same (or increased). The previous claim includes a claim of the standards dropping, meaning that the people who obtain them can increase even as the population average descends.
this is not a good measure because attainment is measured in graduation and not academic standards. the standards HAVE dropped and kids are forced through with relatively meaningless degrees.
I guess nothing can ever again harm us now that it turned out those things didn't, nice. Do you have a link to the studies that say those things didn't do any harm, btw?
That's what ignorant culture warriors claimed was harming children. There was never much evidence to support those claims; they were the ravings of clowns, not statements to be taken seriously.
The damage from social media is widespread, well-studied, and unequivocally harmful to millions of people. There is no equivalence, it's a different technology with objectively worse impacts.
> Lets ban TV, video games, rock and roll music and dungeons and dragons, too. When I was growing up, those were what was harming children at an industrial scale.
I'd be fine with that, if it means I never have to hear that robotic argument ever again.
You are correct, we had social media 20 years ago. What we did not have was advertising revenue based addiction generating algorithms manipulating the minds of the entire worlds population.
The core problem is media being a for-profit organization. As long as the primary goal is profits it will be focused on extracting as much as attention as possible. It's an insignificant issue that it also ruins our attention, spreads misinformation etc. as long as profits go up.
Technological advancement is not always good (for ordinary people).