For anyone not brain-dead: the scientific evidence that excessive exposure to social media garbage and “doom scrolling” is bad for you and especially bad for children is completely overwhelming. It’s something we’ve known for years. Jonathan Haidt is a douchebag who picks low hanging fruit.
Damn, I wonder how that happened in these intervening years to radicalize young men.
Does this mean we can’t have social media? No, it just means the way we are living, the hellscape of online abuse and concrete jungle we’ve created for the next generation is making us vulnerable to manipulation and misery. This isn’t about social media. It’s about the fact that most of you fuckers haven’t touched grass in years. That’s why our democracy is dying.
My comment was just meant as a joke on the other comment, but I appreciate your contribution. Of course social media is part of a larger problem. That's obvious to anyone with eyes.
Ah yes, we need special scientific evidence to figure out if playing outside with friends, fresh air and sunshine is better or worse than watching TikTok 5 hours a day.
Look I think even you should be able to understand that phones aren't actually the problem here. Look around at the world around you. Where are kids supposed to go? You can't walk anywhere. Are they supposed to just get chauffeured around by their parents until they can drive?
Social media is bad for everyone, that's not unique to kids. The only reasonable solution to this problem is to remove car dependency and unfuck our zoning laws. Give kids places to go and they'll go there. They love that shit but they hate being a burden and since the modern world removed those opportunities what else do you expect them to do?
I had a friend just the other day have this conversation with me about how Social Media is bad for kids, but he as a grown ass man is able to determine if what he reads and hears online is healthy and useful to his life. This same person has spent the last 13 months discussing his divorce and how a fortune teller at the RenFest told him he had a dark aura and was difficult to love, and has been basing real life decisions on this comment.
If you can’t disambiguate between culture-war fear-mongering and the actual prerequisites for human flourishing, you are as fucked in the head as any lead-addled boomer.
Which one of those is an actual prerequisite for human flourishing? Radio, TV, video games or phones? And which ones do you refuse to use because they are stopping you from flourishing? Apparently you're okay with the internet.
How are kids supposed to go outside and play when places for kids to play have disappeared, replaced with empty parking lots and record breaking temps every year?