Gotta love it when older people freak out about young people never looking up from their screens and yet never stop to think about what they actually have to look up to around them.
We trashed the planet for this and you think sensitive young humans raised in this environment are going to be okay?
Surely all the microplastic in our brains are helping keep us healthy.
It worked for the sea turtles right!?
You think the entire planet looks like this?
A large portion of the planet does indeed appear to be covered in this “concrete” with little metal things moving around on them.
We’re gonna need photos from everywhere on the planet to reach a conclusion.
I think North America looks like this. I also think that “societal problems are unfixable because rich people profit off of those problems and will kill to keep those problems unsolved and unsolvable” permeating both real life and the internet is the informational equivalent of stroads.
Kids need to stop staring at screens and go climb trees. Evidence:
- Screens. Did you hear me? SCREENS. Screens bad.
- When did anything bad ever happen to someone climbing a tree? There is literally no possible bad outcome.
- Jobs: Compare the number of high-paying jobs that involve tree climbing with the number that involve staring at screens. It’s clear that if we want kids to be employable when they grow up, we need to keep them away from screens.
Edit: I forgot to tell you how to determine if a screen is good or bad. Is the screen at home? Bad, naughty screen. Is the screen in a non-home office? Good screen. Commercial buildings are known to counteract the harmful effects of screens.
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.
Parents are the first step to blame. Kids are spending too much time on “a screen”? Well, why are the parents leaving “the screen” to do their job? Oh, right, because both have to work their asses off in order to provide the bare minimum for a single child and anything remotely like a “community” or “safety net” have slowly been eroded by capitalist greed, something that one can allude from the following paragraph
The onset and development of mental disorders, such as anxiety and depression, are driven by a complex set of genetic and environmental factors. Suicide rates among people in most age groups have been increasing steadily for the past 20 years in the United States. Researchers cite access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, the opioid epidemic, economic hardship and social isolation as leading contributors
In a way, social media is like TV in the 80s and videogames in the late 80s, early 90s, that despicable thing rotting children’s brains. The main difference is that they didn’t have the means to spy on you in order to more effectively “serve content you may like” and keep you “engaged”, because you clearly enjoy spending all day in pointless arguments with trolls, otherwise why would you spend so much time arguing?
As back then as now, those screens are our escapism. If we feel such a big urge to escape reality, chances are that reality fucking sucks. In 10 years we’ll probably have a better idea of the harms done to current teenagers.
