[lvoudour]

An excellent point. Abstention = social isolation, which for young people is far worse than exposure. Restricting your children's access is not an option (lets' be real, they'll find a way to circumvent your efforts anyway) and moving the burden of restriction from society to individuals is not fair.

So as a society do we let unrestrained exposure or do we take collective action? I lean on the second option, but I'm not sure what this action might be.

I'm on the internet ~30 years, I loved the total anarchy of the early web, the unrestrained access to all kinds of information - good, bad and evil. It's very hard for me to get behind heavy-handed regulation. But honestly, I feel oversaturated by the modern cataclysm of information. My bullshit filters are clogged, my defense mechanisms are failing to the point I let information flow through me without an ounce of critical thinking. I can't imagine what the effect is on young untrained minds.

[Mainan_Tagonist]

Same feeling here, I loved the early internet, it played a huge part in who i am actually! This said, this is not the early internet anymore, where content was mechanically regulated by a sort of egalitarian rule. Social Media applies a power law to content, so that 80% of the viewers are aware of the 20% that's available and human nature being what it is, lowest common denominator content gets pushed to the forefront.

Hence all the attention seekers on FacebInstaTok...

This is further compounded by the pervert effects generated by these platforms one of them being the mimetism and the general wolfpack behaviour that can surge out of the madness of crowds. Online Bullying is real.

My kids (11 and 14) are stuck on feature phones for now and i'd like, as much as possible to keep them off smartphones and their constant Notifications for the foreseeable future, until they are not kids.

[bigstrat2003]

> Abstention = social isolation, which for young people is far worse than exposure. Restricting your children's access is not an option...

"Everybody else is doing it" has never been, and still is not, a valid reason for anything. If other parents choose to let their kids ingest mental poison, that does not mean that one should allow their children to do the same. Abstention is not only an option, it is something which absolutely should be enforced by any parent who cares about their child's well being.

[lvoudour]

I'm not talking about kids, I'm talking about adolescents (as is the quoted paragraph). I strongly believe that an adolescent's well being is tightly coupled with social interactions. If a restriction is not protecting them from life threatening situations, then alienating them from their peers is probably worse.

[ryandrake]

So the choice is between social-media-induced mental illness and alienation/isolation? No wonder kids are so screwed up today: there is no winning move!

[ashyaspen]

It absolutely is a reason. Everyone else is doing it, meaning if you don't you feel isolated.

So, either you participate and feel isolated through your social connections by social media, or you don't participate and feel even more isolated because you don't have social connections.

[CaptArmchair]

30 years ago, you didn't live vicariously through the published perception of the world you friends held 24/7. Social interactions stopped when you put down the phone or went home for the day. If your friends went on a trip, while you couldn't, you'd only hear about their stories when they got back.

30 years ago, unrestrained access was still constrained to a desktop computer hooked to dial-up. Your access was constrained to a physical location.

Today, the big issue is the lure of having 24/7 mobile access to the Internet. At any moment, you can amend your own crafted online digital identity, meshing it with your real life, as you publish your location via Snapchat, Instagram or WhatsApp with your friends. Meanwhile, you can't but be confronted with notifications telling you where your friends are and what they are up to with who ("X has posted a photo, Y is currently at Z").

On a surface level, that lure has created a host of totally new social conventions and etiquette over the past 18 years, basically since the release of the iPhone. Social conventions to which one has to conform unless you don't want to lose out on social connections.

For instance, seeing whether a recipient of a PM has "read" a message and then "leaving you on read". Having that rather unrealistic expectation that one ought to respond instantly once a message has been read. At worst, friendships are put on tenterhooks as one ties value to the time between that "read" notice, and the moment a response follows.

In reality, the world 30 years ago wasn't more beautiful and people weren't more kind then they are today. In fact, if you weren't asked by your friends to hang out, or were left out when they went to a party and had all these in-group stories to tell, you felt socially isolated either way. That's not really new.

What's new is that this new lure of 24/7 connectivity creates a potential to be confronted with those feelings pretty much every waking hour. It must be anxiety inducing to scroll through your feed, not knowing if your friends did or didn't hang out last night without asking you.

To my mind, the answer isn't outright banning social media, or mobile devices. The answer is to keep having that difficult discussion about the value of the affordances - or lack thereof - the offer to foster healthy human relationships. It's about finding better ways to teach and empower young people on how to approach these tools, built by commercial enterprises, in healthy ways. And it's about being willing to properly publicly invest in aspects ranging from education to mental health support to enforcement and so on.

[GoblinSlayer]

If they find a workaround, they will still be unable to sit there around the clock, which is decent reduction of consumption. Also there won't be many, just like smoking schoolkids, so no social pressure. You can ban it completely or you can have your lovely bookface 1 hour per day, why not, it's dangerous when they spend there 10 hours per day.

[ljm]

Overall, I think the internet has basically been weaponised (intentionally or not) by big tech. People of every generation are being manipulated at a scale that has never before been possible, and what’s more is that the algorithms for targeting and engagement make it trivial to do this, either through propaganda, disinformation, or advertising in a way that skirts regulations on traditional media.

Will it change? I doubt it - Google and Facebook are likely too big to fail now, Twitter is still around as a bona-fide hate platform, TikTok is unlikely to go anywhere until something else replaces it…

[Mainan_Tagonist]

The term "Too Big To Fail" is probably inappropriate here (was it ever appropriate actually? banks should have been allowed to fail in 2008), indeed Facebook may well be replaced at some point (is Gen Z even on Facebook?), and AI might well replace Google's killer product: its search engine.

This said, I tend to agree with you, the power law exists and has to be maintained by big tech to control the content because a captive audience is soooo profitable.