Socrates bemoaned those young’ns who had the audacity to read their Homer, instead of memorizing it.
Eh, there is sufficient evidence to recommend children and teenagers having limited internet and social media access during their formative years at this point.
The tiktok algorithm of mindless doomscrolling funny little bits all short and digestible for a decaying attention span is just the most egregious example why restrictions should at least be considered.
You could say that about a lot of things, though. Video games and TV were commonly criticized this way. And it was a popular meme on Reddit that people would be so addicted to the site that they’d spend hours scrolling it.
Criticizing tik tok is just popular on sites like this because people here really don’t like tik tok.
At any rate, parents can already try to restrict their children’s access. But governments are gonna have a hard time doing so without hurting everyone as a whole (eg, see the attempts of some US states to require giving your ID to porn sites). Dunno if you remember being a kid, but I found my way around every restriction my parents set and I just disliked them for it.
Red Dead Redepmption 2 is not a video game.
“That’s not a game at all. That’s like fucking Shakespeare.”
-Tenacious D
deleted by creator
You realize that’s still true, right? You’re posting this as some big own as though it’s somehow not harmful to mindlessly consume any form of media to an extreme extent, especially in the learning years.
Somebody been watching too many tik toks?
Somebody been watching too many tik toks
What a ridiculous logical leap.
Erm ackchually it’s called an insult and it wasn’t meant to convey a logical point
deleted by creator
How is it hypocrisy if the previous forms of media were also bad for you, Tik-Tok is just more efficient at funneling meaningless drivel down your throat?
Such generalizing statements are blatantly untrue, hypocritical, and harmful. People don’t use social media without a reason. Everything a human does is meet their needs, both psychological and physiological. When humans resort to social media it means they resort to social interaction and whatever other needs they may have like having feelings validated, visual/audio/etc. stimulation, but that doesn’t sound sensational enough, that’s not enough to scapegoat a group of people
Ok but research indicates that it fails to actually meet their long-term needs. This is actually a really confusing take, if humans always do what meets their needs then we wouldn’t have any issues at all? We TRY to do what we think will meet them, but we’re often mistaken, and this is an example of that.
Also no. Addiction happens exactly when the needs are met more than usual, hence “social media addiction”, and it’s not the social media’s fault, it’s not “TikTok Instagram bad”. It’s weaponized misconceptions about mental health that are creating this issue in the first place
Edit: PSA - more than usual does not mean enough
Did I say that it does meet needs long term? What was the sample? What was the methodology? What communities were they participating in? How were they participating? What were the needs? Did they have a neurodivergency? What were their surroundings like? What was their childhood like? Do they go to therapy? What therapeutic practice did they do in therapy?
deleted by creator
I think that’s generally a good argument, however the rate and level of dopamine hits from TikTok and YouTube Shorts may far surpass that of prior mediums and so actually warrant additional considerations and precautions.
But then, I may just be an old man.
Do you know anything about the reward system and addiction apart from the words “serotonin” and “dopamine”? /gen
deleted by creator
It may be hypocritical, but have you considered that all of these forms of entertainment are unhealthy? The only difference is that they get more and more efficient with each generation, causing increasing levels of concern from each generation. That’s indicative of a rising trend
This is a rather interesting viewpoint and I can’t really find any fault with it.
@STUPIDVIPGUY @aCosmicWave I’m trying and eliminating are sources of entertainment from these websites since the saturation of entertainment content is much more than educational ones now.
Fwiw I actively believe that reddit is responsible for shortening my attention span.
It is not hypocritical to call out tik tok for doing the same.
What situations your short attention span makes uncomfortable for you apart from things related to some sort of achievement (as perceived by your workplace, school, family, friends, etc)
The media technologies are not comparable, thats where your argument falls apart.
What if I found the type content that my generation absorbed to be a problem as well?
“I’m not saying it’s true I just wanted to imply it’s true to drive
enragementengagement”
TikTok, Social media, video games, rock and metal music, rap music, Dungeons and Dragons, Rock ‘n’ Roll, movies, phones, bikes, novels, older generations will always chose a scapegoat to focus on
Eventually it will be our turn
They’re not wrong. Screen time is known to be harmful to children. And radio time may have been as well: hard to say, because kids aren’t listening to that kind of radio anymore. Two things can be true at once: pointing fingers at something that doesn’t apply anymore (when’s the last time you listened to a radio serial?) doesn’t invalidate the harms today.
Here’s what the actual experts say:
Talk radio still rots a lot of brains of all ages. It’s insidious as a lot of folks still have that on in the background while driving to work or cooking etc, as compared to video and TV where you have to look directly at it and think about the message received with your whole brain.
Removed by mod
Tiktok is not comparable to these other technologies, as TikTok uses an individualized algorithm to manipulate its users.
I hope we can all agree that media, like drugs, exists on a spectrum of less harmful (books / weed) to very harmful (torture porn / bath salts). As time passes and more things are added to our lists we should no longer generalize and say everything in our once very small category is all good or all bad.
I feel like the actual danger is too much of a single kind of stimulation. So if you ONLY sit around and read books, literally never go outside, never take a walk, never go out with friends, stop working… Is your contention that people were wrong to warn against doing that?
Now, have you seen how some people consume TikTok? They will literally do almost precisely what I’ve described above. Just sit and stare and scroll for hours. Neglect other life activities.
If you scroll TT for an hour per day, you’re never going to experience negative effects from it. If you scroll it for 14 hours a day, you will probably become a vegetable. Find a happy medium (for me it’s 0 hours per day but everyone is different), eat, go outside sometimes, spend time with real life people, go to work or school, etc.
As always the issue is loneliness. This has been proven since the 1970’s with the rat park experiment.
Counterpoint: They used to be able to memorise the works of Homer.
and now they’re able to memorize all the dances/emotes from a specific influencer/streamer. Almost the same, no?
No.
Like not even close. Even if we aren’t judging each on the difficulty of memorizing a two second emote or dance versus an entire novel, things that are physical are more easily learned.
Ask yourself this, did they have to commit themselves to memorizing all of if? No, they casually memorized them all through watching it. No one has ever casually memorized a novel on accident.
Plus memorizing literature is unquestionably more valuable than learning what some micro-celebrity that doesn’t fucking matter is making faces about.
Yeah I was being sarcastic
deleted by creator
Who did?
I don’t know. It’s probably apocryphal, but I just stole what he had said in the title.
Social media in general and TikTok specifically have had major impacts to both our attention span as well as things like anxiety disorders.
Everything else in this list from reading to videogames is a different way to absorb a story, but social media isn’t built for that. Its designed on FOMO, and the idea that you have to keep posting and engaging or you’ll disappear. The algorithms are also toxic and designed like a gambling addiction. Books don’t do that, even TV can’t really do that. Videogames can, but not all are. Social media absolutely is, though. Everytime.
Youtube shorts, TikTok, Facebook Story, Snapchat Reel: they are all the same. If you block TikTok, then you need to block others as well.
Legal wise, it’s very hard to target a very specific type of media consumed. How can you really restrict that? IMHO, the only thing that might have better effects is educating people.
Same for drugs, alcool and tobacco. They are a all addictives at different levels, and they have different consequences as well that neeeds to be taken account.
Worth pointing out here is that many of these criticisms all along have been totally on-target. The printing press brought on wars of religion and a multitude of poorly-thought out, often racist/hate-filled screeds along with advances in learning and science. Radio has brought us Father Coughlin and Limbaugh along with democratizing politics the way printed pamphlets couldn’t. I’m sure I don’t have to point out that both TV and the internet have their brain-rotting sides as well.
The fact that something won doesn’t mean it’s better. The fact that it’s better doesn’t mean it doesn’t have serious flaws.
The fact that people have been concerned about this for generations doesn’t automatically nullify the point. Attention and focus are skills which children must develop through boredom and long-form focus. TikTok brain is making that harder and harder for children to learn.
They’re all mediums. The content on them can be anything from mindless to informative.It’s all up to who’s curating it. Do you leave it up to the algos and advertisers or actually provide something to your kids? Up to a certain age letting them do whatever on the internet is idiotic like letting them run around a bookshop that carries porn and mein Kampf.
Just so you know, newspapers used to be pretty terrible in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were ripe with exaggerations and sometimes downright lies. The issue with TikTok and social media in general is how easy it is for absolute idiots to spread lies and harmful information to children (and naïve adults).
Here’s an article on the topic from the New York Public Library.
newspapers used to be pretty terrible in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Periodism is still terrible, not in the form of newspapers, but the internet, and it’s why you usually end your searches with a ‘reddit’ at the end (hopefully lemmy will fully replace that soon)
Is that even unique to social media? We have “news” sites that do the same thing (like the various alt right ones). If the goal is to tackle misinformation, we should tackle misinformation directly.
Social media amplifies their voice.
