Everything about social media is meant to keep you on the platform.
The network effects, the vanity metrics, the fomo.
That's why most of these platforms (like insta and tiktok) don't allow hyperlinks, the point is to stay ON social media, not to use it as a bridge between different sites, or a database etc.
"... what makes TikTok and Instagram and whatever else special is the sociality."
Here is where I think your thinking goes wrong. You're taking the "social" part of social media literally, without interrogating it. "Parasocial" was a term that was popular there for a minute, and I think that's a much better descriptor for what Tiktok and Instagram actually are.
Not too be rude about these guys and their ilk but one thing I am frequently annoyed by (to put it mildly) is that the people who most often comment on “kids these days” and society’s ills in general are almost always freakishly inhuman robots.
Without fail they all appear to have no understanding of how actual living human beings operate. They talk about people the way entomologist talk about the mating rituals of bees.
Exhibit A: “Well, Tyler, you’re talking as an intellectual who has probably the highest reading throughput rate of any human being I’ve ever heard of.”
Who talks like this! If this dude actually spent time around other kids growing up he would’ve either been rightfully beaten or berated into being less of a dork.
TL;DR the people who spend the most time talking about other humans do so because humanity is completely alien to them.
Haidt's work is brilliant (particularly The Righeous Mind), he's married with a couple of kids, and while I don't know him beyond reading his work and listening to him speak, he seems like a perfectly normal guy.
Of course social psychologists are going to talk to about people in the same way that etymologists talk about bees when discussing their work. That is literally what the job is. It's like criticizing football coaches in a film room for talking about football in a different way than fans do.
And while I'd agree that "throughput rate" comment is a little awkward, it's also not a bad way to describe to Tyler Cowen why the way he would use AI and social media is likely to atypical.
Something I'd really love to know is why it seems like all the pro-screen-time, pro-social-media takes are coming from the people I read that could be categorized as progressive and/or on the left.
I expect conservatives to carry water for giant corporations, to see so many liberals/leftists essentially doing so is more than a bit disappointing.
How is the WORLD can you condemn The Coddling of the American Mind without reading it? It is a very sensible survey of the changes I myself watched from my "free range childhood" in the 50s to the increasing criticism of letting your children explore (physically or mentally) when my kids were young in the 70s and 80s to the current situations where parents can be prosecuted for "child abuse" because they let their children play in a nearby park.
His argument is that increasing restriction on childhood learning from experience, and the confusion of physical safety with intellectual safety has resulted in the rash of over PC attitudes in the college students of the time of his book. His suggestions are completely sensible and boil down to "let your children learn from experience as well as from your teachings and don't scare them to death about people who disagree with them."
I found the book by his co-author ( Greg Lukianoff), the Cancelling of the American Mind, much less convincing because it was rife with overgeneralizations about college students, but I wouldn't have known that had I not read it.
To the extent that the book is about the damage caused by the loss of “free-range parenting”, it’s likely correct. But trying to tie that societal misstep in with stuff like trigger warnings and colleges canceling speakers because of an outcry by the students (the two cornerstones of complaining about “PC attitudes in college students”) is both a dramatic overreach and an argument that everyone has already heard a million times and can rebut with a single Simpsons quote (“Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong.”)
what DOES over-PCing tie to? What has caused the rise in not just boycotting speakers you don't think you'll agree with, but demanding they not be allowed to talk at all? Particularly when the reason they think the speaker is "wrong" about everything is due to one or two things said in the past, but not recently? That has happened.
I can see refusing to book Fuentes. Maybe event Milo, though he is so off the wall that it would be a good exercise to listen and refute in you head as he goes on. But if you don't like a speaker, just don't go--or hold a teach in outside the lecture hall if you have reasons to object. Or just a peaceful protest, preferably with leaflets.
I was in college during Vietnam. There were a LOT of speakers we thought were traitorous. We had teach ins to explain our position. Some went in, others went to the teach ins.
I am afraid that I don't support intolerance or refusal to use one's critical reasoning to determine whether or not one agrees with anyone with different views or even views that one might THINK are different , particularly when the actual speech is something extraneous to the basis of your objection.--when that involves completely silencing the voices you don't like. Sorry, I don't think Homer rebuts that. I want college to be a place where you explore ideas so that you KNOW whether you accept or reject them, or somewhere in between.
I developed a fairly nuanced view of Marxism, which politically I don't agree with (there's a lot of stuff that isn't political that I do). And that was because I had to read Marx and think about him and learned to think for myself.
On trigger warnings, mostly I agree with you. They seem to me to be superfluous. I think they are not nearly as common now as once they were, as some sort of "required" part of college readings. When I returned to audit classes under a senior program, one professor in English simply said "I don't do trigger warnings. If you come across something that really recalls a past trauma, come talk to me. But otherwise I expect you to read the assigned books and, if they distress you, that can be part of one of your papers.
My own take is "The only trigger warning I want to see is "the dog dies."
If you've got a reason for why this sort of this is/was happening, I'd love to hear it.
I think the cause of college students getting speakers cancelled is simple: they’re using the power they have to punish individuals that they see as doing or having done a great deal of harm without any meaningful consequences. It just so happens that the only real power college students have is “college administrators have become fawning and obsequious over time and therefore at least sometimes bend to student demands” and so the only punishment they can enforce is “getting speaking engagements at colleges cancelled”.
if it were only "people doing a great deal of harm" I might buy this. But in fact speakers have been cancelled simply for voicing an opinion in the past that a group of students disagrees with, with no particular evidence as to why that causes harm. That strikes me more as a refusal to listen than punishment.
I am far from seeing college campuses as "hotbeds of liberalism." In fact, I think they should be more so, insofar as facts and reasoned arguments nowadays have a distinct liberal bias. It is not "liberal" to refuse to listen to opposing views on issues one cares about. (For issues one doesn't care about, just don't bother to go. ) A vocal minority restricting the rights of others is no more positive than the vocal minority in Congress known as the Freedom Caucus.
1. Whether or not they’re *right* about those individuals having done great harm is almost irrelevant—I’m just arguing that their behavior pattern fits “punishing perceived wrongdoing” better than it does “not wanting to listen”
2. That said, it’s worth pointing out that people can do or contribute to Actual Physical Harm simply by “voicing an opinion”. There’s this whole concept called “stochastic terrorism”—here’s a surprisingly good explanation (considering it’s from dictionary.com): https://www.dictionary.com/e/what-is-stochastic-terrorism/
3. (Warning : contains snark) I’d argue that refusal to listen to opposing views is actually a pretty fundamental liberal belief (see: the constant shutting-down and demonization of Socialists and Anarchists).
4. Also, let’s be real: a lot of those speakers are just going to be repeating old arguments for known positions. There’s a pretty big difference between “I refuse to even hear the argument” and “I’ve heard all this before and I refuse to listen to it again”. Maybe there is a bit of entitlement in the latter, but that entitlement seems to me to flow from “service-oriented” college administrators.
we will just have to agree to disagree. And I have ALWAYS taken the position that on some issues both Right and Left sin in terms cognitive errors. One of those errors most prevalent is overgeneralization from a few example. "Republicans are stupid" is just as bad as "Democrats are communists." It seems likely that BOTH refusal and revenge are reasons behind any particular individual's support of actual cancellation.
I've read a good deal about both socialism and anarchism. It does seem to me that the "demonization" comes mostly from the right, overwhelmingly, actually. But no one is immune from the mistake of overgeneralized labeling
The philosophical question is: which would you rather the next generation--or ANY group-- be characterized as being: unwilling to listen to another side or bent on punishing the other side? Which attitude has more dire consequences for democracy?
The practical question: If you have "heard it all before" isn't the solution simply to not attend?
I don't think Max was condemning the book as much as dismissing it because there's only so much time in this life. I mean, the title alone is just begging to be not read. Seems like you've supported his instinct with your tldr, so thanks for that.
so you don't really KNOW whether what he records is accurate. You are just spouting. Is that correct?
I guess you must agree with trump that we should not accept evidence that we have actually SEEN but just listen to him/you? And that it is perfect fine for people to insist on bans of books they haven't read?
When I first saw what this post was about, I was excited to read it, but it turned out to be pretty disappointing.
While "The Coddling" certainly increased Haidt's visibility, he was well known long before that. "The Righteous Mind" (in my opinion, still his most best and most important work) was earning him recognition as one of the world's "top thinkers" years earlier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt#Reception).
Meanwhile, Haidt indeed does argue that social media and phones are one of the major causes of teen mental illness and depression. Not simply a symptom but an important cause (though not the only one) of those problems. And the evidence he gathers to make this case is impressive. It certainly isn't "anecdotal."
Which doesn't mean, of course, that everyone has to agree. I would be interested in reading a real argument for why Max believes it is "more productive, and more realistic, to imagine screen time as a symptom of those problems, and many others--a compounding symptom, maybe, but a symptom nonetheless."
That's a post that would be worth reading and engaging with. But Max doesn't make a compelling argument. In fact, he doesn't make any argument at all. He simply links to Nature's piece criticizing Haidt but doesn't even bother to explain why he finds it compelling or what is wrong with Haidt's recent post in response to it:
Thanks Bianca. Looking at at all Max's links again, I'm realizing he linked to this too (although again with zero commentary). I think the Platformer piece also came out before Haidt's response to Odger's Nature piece (as well as to Przybylski who the Platformer piece heavily leans on), which I link to above. And while Haidt's response seems convincing to me, I certainly haven't take the time to review all the studies in question to see which ones are methodologically stronger. So I definitely can't definitively say that Haidt's case for causation is stronger than the counter argument for correlation.
Having said that, Haidt makes a second point in his piece which I think is much harder to argue with, is that he does definitively show that there has been a widespread and significant increase in teen mental health issues. And that the rise of phones and teen use of social media better matches this increase than any other explanation (and certainly far better than Odger's alternative proposed cause of some combination of poverty, the opioid crisis, school shootings, and increasing unrest because of racial and sexual discrimination and violence).
"AI will cut screen time down to 1/3 of today for everyone because it will simply summarize what is on the internet." Summarize what then, Tyler? Summarize what?
Who is creating all this content that is being summarized if everyone is using AI to read us back the internet. This idea of the internet is one step more (or less) sophisticated than the "advances the plot" complainers of movies/TV. The goal isn't to enjoy or spend time, simply get to the conclusion.
Damn weird fuckin comment section on this one! Going to exit this "shared space" just like I did the "third places" of my "halcyon youth" whenever the whippets started.
whenever people wax incredulous about young people's social media use and I start to feel myself agreeing with it, I remind myself that most of these kids were not alive (or do not remember) a world where social media didn't exist. Just the other day my husband reminded me of the derogatory epithet "posting face"--used in the early-aughts to refer to online users who posted actual images of themselves. "posting face" was seen as indicative of wanting attention, having mental illness, or just having a sense of self-importance that wasn't warranted back then, because the Internet wasn't considered "important".
I think that's the part of problem folks run into when using this mental health crisis framing to talk about young people and social media: deep down they still don't think the Internet is important, because they can remember a time when it genuinely wasn't. That's not to say that a mental health crisis among the youth isn't the happening, or that the screen time isn't an exacerbating factor. But we also live in a world where the communities we build and relationships we foster on the internet do have tangible effects on the real world. So the fact that these young people are worried about "missing out" or "being left out" of happenings on the internet is a real and valid thing for them to feel. Would it be better for them to socialize in person? Well yeah, probably. But the real world isn't where everyone is most of the time. We're all "posting face" now.
""posting face" was seen as indicative of wanting attention, having mental illness, or just having a sense of self-importance that wasn't warranted back then, because the Internet wasn't considered "important"."
This is reborn as "main character syndrome", which is also part of working your way up towards whatever online achievement you might be pursuing.
Max I love your writing and insights, but by leaning exclusively on third party reviews of Haidt's book you ended up arguing against a strawman in this one. The social elements of social media aren't missing in his analysis. Haidt argues that the social needs are hijacked and redirected into harmful, addictive, and isolating versions of themselves.
I do agree with some of the criticism of the book. The claimed uniqueness of Gen Z on this front doesn't totally hold up, which isn't too surprising. Older generations might not have been born with social media, but they still actively use it in droves.
That said, we can all agree Cowen's take in the interview is a bog-stupid misunderstanding of the entire mechanism. Even if AI could effectively summarize all the social media people currently consume, the digest would not actually provide any of the psychological stimulation which makes social media addictive.
> Where does that appear in Cowen and Haidt’s model?
Uhm, the social part is all over the place in Haidts book, and when he says that students say that "everyone else is on it" or that they'll miss what others are talking about, that is not an informational dimension, but a social dimension. (One key to human sociality is knowing "what others are talking about".)
From this 70s child perspective, we never came to terms with a reasonable TV screentime and then....so many more screens became available. The tech is never to fault, its our use and abuse of it that are. Not blaming the user but would really love more intentionality. Watching tik tok gain maddening traction from abroad during the epidemic was breathtaking. More. Conscious. Choices. And teaching next generations good screen and social humaning. This is what we need.
"Multi-player online video games are the Ivy League of learning how to deal with difficult people." In terms of "random people get along to do objective"? Usually. In terms of handling conflict and failure? We must have played different games, then. The only healthy multiplayer interaction I saw was between people who had some connection besides the game; a forum, a community, some RL connection. Everything else is passive-aggression, throwing, ragequitting, /gquitting, drama, and more proofs of the G.I.F. theorem. Not certain how anyone could learn healthy human interaction strictly from the Internet.
How about social media is designed to be addictive to maximize scroll time and ad revenue? It’s just capitalism, y’all.
Yes, the idea of “AI digests” misses the point, but even more fundamentally: there’s no profit motive to reduce screen time.
Everything about social media is meant to keep you on the platform.
The network effects, the vanity metrics, the fomo.
That's why most of these platforms (like insta and tiktok) don't allow hyperlinks, the point is to stay ON social media, not to use it as a bridge between different sites, or a database etc.
"... what makes TikTok and Instagram and whatever else special is the sociality."
Here is where I think your thinking goes wrong. You're taking the "social" part of social media literally, without interrogating it. "Parasocial" was a term that was popular there for a minute, and I think that's a much better descriptor for what Tiktok and Instagram actually are.
Not too be rude about these guys and their ilk but one thing I am frequently annoyed by (to put it mildly) is that the people who most often comment on “kids these days” and society’s ills in general are almost always freakishly inhuman robots.
Without fail they all appear to have no understanding of how actual living human beings operate. They talk about people the way entomologist talk about the mating rituals of bees.
Exhibit A: “Well, Tyler, you’re talking as an intellectual who has probably the highest reading throughput rate of any human being I’ve ever heard of.”
Who talks like this! If this dude actually spent time around other kids growing up he would’ve either been rightfully beaten or berated into being less of a dork.
TL;DR the people who spend the most time talking about other humans do so because humanity is completely alien to them.
Haidt's work is brilliant (particularly The Righeous Mind), he's married with a couple of kids, and while I don't know him beyond reading his work and listening to him speak, he seems like a perfectly normal guy.
Of course social psychologists are going to talk to about people in the same way that etymologists talk about bees when discussing their work. That is literally what the job is. It's like criticizing football coaches in a film room for talking about football in a different way than fans do.
And while I'd agree that "throughput rate" comment is a little awkward, it's also not a bad way to describe to Tyler Cowen why the way he would use AI and social media is likely to atypical.
It's almost as if to say "if only they made video games more 'efficient' then kids would stop playing for so many hours"
Playing video games for hours on end is not a bug, it's a feature.
Same with social media.
Something I'd really love to know is why it seems like all the pro-screen-time, pro-social-media takes are coming from the people I read that could be categorized as progressive and/or on the left.
I expect conservatives to carry water for giant corporations, to see so many liberals/leftists essentially doing so is more than a bit disappointing.
How is the WORLD can you condemn The Coddling of the American Mind without reading it? It is a very sensible survey of the changes I myself watched from my "free range childhood" in the 50s to the increasing criticism of letting your children explore (physically or mentally) when my kids were young in the 70s and 80s to the current situations where parents can be prosecuted for "child abuse" because they let their children play in a nearby park.
His argument is that increasing restriction on childhood learning from experience, and the confusion of physical safety with intellectual safety has resulted in the rash of over PC attitudes in the college students of the time of his book. His suggestions are completely sensible and boil down to "let your children learn from experience as well as from your teachings and don't scare them to death about people who disagree with them."
I found the book by his co-author ( Greg Lukianoff), the Cancelling of the American Mind, much less convincing because it was rife with overgeneralizations about college students, but I wouldn't have known that had I not read it.
To the extent that the book is about the damage caused by the loss of “free-range parenting”, it’s likely correct. But trying to tie that societal misstep in with stuff like trigger warnings and colleges canceling speakers because of an outcry by the students (the two cornerstones of complaining about “PC attitudes in college students”) is both a dramatic overreach and an argument that everyone has already heard a million times and can rebut with a single Simpsons quote (“Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong.”)
what DOES over-PCing tie to? What has caused the rise in not just boycotting speakers you don't think you'll agree with, but demanding they not be allowed to talk at all? Particularly when the reason they think the speaker is "wrong" about everything is due to one or two things said in the past, but not recently? That has happened.
I can see refusing to book Fuentes. Maybe event Milo, though he is so off the wall that it would be a good exercise to listen and refute in you head as he goes on. But if you don't like a speaker, just don't go--or hold a teach in outside the lecture hall if you have reasons to object. Or just a peaceful protest, preferably with leaflets.
I was in college during Vietnam. There were a LOT of speakers we thought were traitorous. We had teach ins to explain our position. Some went in, others went to the teach ins.
I am afraid that I don't support intolerance or refusal to use one's critical reasoning to determine whether or not one agrees with anyone with different views or even views that one might THINK are different , particularly when the actual speech is something extraneous to the basis of your objection.--when that involves completely silencing the voices you don't like. Sorry, I don't think Homer rebuts that. I want college to be a place where you explore ideas so that you KNOW whether you accept or reject them, or somewhere in between.
I developed a fairly nuanced view of Marxism, which politically I don't agree with (there's a lot of stuff that isn't political that I do). And that was because I had to read Marx and think about him and learned to think for myself.
On trigger warnings, mostly I agree with you. They seem to me to be superfluous. I think they are not nearly as common now as once they were, as some sort of "required" part of college readings. When I returned to audit classes under a senior program, one professor in English simply said "I don't do trigger warnings. If you come across something that really recalls a past trauma, come talk to me. But otherwise I expect you to read the assigned books and, if they distress you, that can be part of one of your papers.
My own take is "The only trigger warning I want to see is "the dog dies."
If you've got a reason for why this sort of this is/was happening, I'd love to hear it.
I think the cause of college students getting speakers cancelled is simple: they’re using the power they have to punish individuals that they see as doing or having done a great deal of harm without any meaningful consequences. It just so happens that the only real power college students have is “college administrators have become fawning and obsequious over time and therefore at least sometimes bend to student demands” and so the only punishment they can enforce is “getting speaking engagements at colleges cancelled”.
if it were only "people doing a great deal of harm" I might buy this. But in fact speakers have been cancelled simply for voicing an opinion in the past that a group of students disagrees with, with no particular evidence as to why that causes harm. That strikes me more as a refusal to listen than punishment.
I am far from seeing college campuses as "hotbeds of liberalism." In fact, I think they should be more so, insofar as facts and reasoned arguments nowadays have a distinct liberal bias. It is not "liberal" to refuse to listen to opposing views on issues one cares about. (For issues one doesn't care about, just don't bother to go. ) A vocal minority restricting the rights of others is no more positive than the vocal minority in Congress known as the Freedom Caucus.
1. Whether or not they’re *right* about those individuals having done great harm is almost irrelevant—I’m just arguing that their behavior pattern fits “punishing perceived wrongdoing” better than it does “not wanting to listen”
2. That said, it’s worth pointing out that people can do or contribute to Actual Physical Harm simply by “voicing an opinion”. There’s this whole concept called “stochastic terrorism”—here’s a surprisingly good explanation (considering it’s from dictionary.com): https://www.dictionary.com/e/what-is-stochastic-terrorism/
3. (Warning : contains snark) I’d argue that refusal to listen to opposing views is actually a pretty fundamental liberal belief (see: the constant shutting-down and demonization of Socialists and Anarchists).
4. Also, let’s be real: a lot of those speakers are just going to be repeating old arguments for known positions. There’s a pretty big difference between “I refuse to even hear the argument” and “I’ve heard all this before and I refuse to listen to it again”. Maybe there is a bit of entitlement in the latter, but that entitlement seems to me to flow from “service-oriented” college administrators.
we will just have to agree to disagree. And I have ALWAYS taken the position that on some issues both Right and Left sin in terms cognitive errors. One of those errors most prevalent is overgeneralization from a few example. "Republicans are stupid" is just as bad as "Democrats are communists." It seems likely that BOTH refusal and revenge are reasons behind any particular individual's support of actual cancellation.
I've read a good deal about both socialism and anarchism. It does seem to me that the "demonization" comes mostly from the right, overwhelmingly, actually. But no one is immune from the mistake of overgeneralized labeling
The philosophical question is: which would you rather the next generation--or ANY group-- be characterized as being: unwilling to listen to another side or bent on punishing the other side? Which attitude has more dire consequences for democracy?
The practical question: If you have "heard it all before" isn't the solution simply to not attend?
I don't think Max was condemning the book as much as dismissing it because there's only so much time in this life. I mean, the title alone is just begging to be not read. Seems like you've supported his instinct with your tldr, so thanks for that.
and you are how old? Do you speak from experience? Do you find the amazing restrictions on just being a kid "normal?"
I don't accept the premise. You are battling the wind.
so you don't really KNOW whether what he records is accurate. You are just spouting. Is that correct?
I guess you must agree with trump that we should not accept evidence that we have actually SEEN but just listen to him/you? And that it is perfect fine for people to insist on bans of books they haven't read?
Speaking of people begging not to be read...
I just LOVE the way you dictate. Can you run for president?
When I first saw what this post was about, I was excited to read it, but it turned out to be pretty disappointing.
While "The Coddling" certainly increased Haidt's visibility, he was well known long before that. "The Righteous Mind" (in my opinion, still his most best and most important work) was earning him recognition as one of the world's "top thinkers" years earlier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt#Reception).
Meanwhile, Haidt indeed does argue that social media and phones are one of the major causes of teen mental illness and depression. Not simply a symptom but an important cause (though not the only one) of those problems. And the evidence he gathers to make this case is impressive. It certainly isn't "anecdotal."
Which doesn't mean, of course, that everyone has to agree. I would be interested in reading a real argument for why Max believes it is "more productive, and more realistic, to imagine screen time as a symptom of those problems, and many others--a compounding symptom, maybe, but a symptom nonetheless."
That's a post that would be worth reading and engaging with. But Max doesn't make a compelling argument. In fact, he doesn't make any argument at all. He simply links to Nature's piece criticizing Haidt but doesn't even bother to explain why he finds it compelling or what is wrong with Haidt's recent post in response to it:
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epidemic
Disappointingly shallow post about what could have been an interesting subject.
Platformer put out a pretty in-depth post yesterday (the 12th)
https://www.platformer.news/anxious-generation-jonathan-haidt-debate-critique/?ref=platformer-newsletter
Thanks Bianca. Looking at at all Max's links again, I'm realizing he linked to this too (although again with zero commentary). I think the Platformer piece also came out before Haidt's response to Odger's Nature piece (as well as to Przybylski who the Platformer piece heavily leans on), which I link to above. And while Haidt's response seems convincing to me, I certainly haven't take the time to review all the studies in question to see which ones are methodologically stronger. So I definitely can't definitively say that Haidt's case for causation is stronger than the counter argument for correlation.
Having said that, Haidt makes a second point in his piece which I think is much harder to argue with, is that he does definitively show that there has been a widespread and significant increase in teen mental health issues. And that the rise of phones and teen use of social media better matches this increase than any other explanation (and certainly far better than Odger's alternative proposed cause of some combination of poverty, the opioid crisis, school shootings, and increasing unrest because of racial and sexual discrimination and violence).
"AI will cut screen time down to 1/3 of today for everyone because it will simply summarize what is on the internet." Summarize what then, Tyler? Summarize what?
Who is creating all this content that is being summarized if everyone is using AI to read us back the internet. This idea of the internet is one step more (or less) sophisticated than the "advances the plot" complainers of movies/TV. The goal isn't to enjoy or spend time, simply get to the conclusion.
“ multi-player online video games are the Ivy League of learning how to deal with difficult people”
Amen! I was a WOW raid leader and a GM for about 10 years and it was definitely more taxing than my day job (consulting). There have even been studies done comparing raid and real life management styles. http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/10343.52340.pdf
Damn weird fuckin comment section on this one! Going to exit this "shared space" just like I did the "third places" of my "halcyon youth" whenever the whippets started.
whenever people wax incredulous about young people's social media use and I start to feel myself agreeing with it, I remind myself that most of these kids were not alive (or do not remember) a world where social media didn't exist. Just the other day my husband reminded me of the derogatory epithet "posting face"--used in the early-aughts to refer to online users who posted actual images of themselves. "posting face" was seen as indicative of wanting attention, having mental illness, or just having a sense of self-importance that wasn't warranted back then, because the Internet wasn't considered "important".
I think that's the part of problem folks run into when using this mental health crisis framing to talk about young people and social media: deep down they still don't think the Internet is important, because they can remember a time when it genuinely wasn't. That's not to say that a mental health crisis among the youth isn't the happening, or that the screen time isn't an exacerbating factor. But we also live in a world where the communities we build and relationships we foster on the internet do have tangible effects on the real world. So the fact that these young people are worried about "missing out" or "being left out" of happenings on the internet is a real and valid thing for them to feel. Would it be better for them to socialize in person? Well yeah, probably. But the real world isn't where everyone is most of the time. We're all "posting face" now.
""posting face" was seen as indicative of wanting attention, having mental illness, or just having a sense of self-importance that wasn't warranted back then, because the Internet wasn't considered "important"."
This is reborn as "main character syndrome", which is also part of working your way up towards whatever online achievement you might be pursuing.
I'm old enough to remember "internet famous" as a derogatory epithet.
Re: “ Would it be better for them to socialize in person? Well yeah, probably”
The important question is “would parents/society let these kids hang out in person without adult supervision?”
Max I love your writing and insights, but by leaning exclusively on third party reviews of Haidt's book you ended up arguing against a strawman in this one. The social elements of social media aren't missing in his analysis. Haidt argues that the social needs are hijacked and redirected into harmful, addictive, and isolating versions of themselves.
I do agree with some of the criticism of the book. The claimed uniqueness of Gen Z on this front doesn't totally hold up, which isn't too surprising. Older generations might not have been born with social media, but they still actively use it in droves.
That said, we can all agree Cowen's take in the interview is a bog-stupid misunderstanding of the entire mechanism. Even if AI could effectively summarize all the social media people currently consume, the digest would not actually provide any of the psychological stimulation which makes social media addictive.
> Where does that appear in Cowen and Haidt’s model?
Uhm, the social part is all over the place in Haidts book, and when he says that students say that "everyone else is on it" or that they'll miss what others are talking about, that is not an informational dimension, but a social dimension. (One key to human sociality is knowing "what others are talking about".)
From this 70s child perspective, we never came to terms with a reasonable TV screentime and then....so many more screens became available. The tech is never to fault, its our use and abuse of it that are. Not blaming the user but would really love more intentionality. Watching tik tok gain maddening traction from abroad during the epidemic was breathtaking. More. Conscious. Choices. And teaching next generations good screen and social humaning. This is what we need.
"Multi-player online video games are the Ivy League of learning how to deal with difficult people." In terms of "random people get along to do objective"? Usually. In terms of handling conflict and failure? We must have played different games, then. The only healthy multiplayer interaction I saw was between people who had some connection besides the game; a forum, a community, some RL connection. Everything else is passive-aggression, throwing, ragequitting, /gquitting, drama, and more proofs of the G.I.F. theorem. Not certain how anyone could learn healthy human interaction strictly from the Internet.
I think it definitely DOES depend on the games played, and to tiptoe further down that rabbit hole, how your character presents in the game as well.
I guess AI has one thing going for it: it could not be less out of touch with the lived experience of 'the youths' than these two dudes.