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More than a mental health crisis or go outside more, the biggest harm that social+smartphone has ever done is end of creating things. The new generation is spen

• T7000 7y ago
  Depends what you mean by things. A lot of kids fancy themselves as YouTube celebs, creating video content. Sharing photos is also creative.
• anbop 7y ago
  A greater fraction of people are creating text, photos, and video to be seen by other people than at any previous time in human history.
  • fileeditview 7y ago
    I guess it depends a lot on the question whether you call a short message about your neighbor's hairstyle or a photo of the food you are currently eating as "creation".
    • MegaButts 7y ago
      Sounds like modern art without the pretension to me.
      • ericd 7y ago
        I personally wouldn’t set the bar for useful creation at modern art.
        • MegaButts 7y ago
          You might not, but others would. It's a completely subjective criterion.
    • Fnoord 7y ago
      It is a creation, without a doubt, because a better term is an expression. A better question is, is it art? Is a gift in the form of a drawn picture for Father's or Mother's day? Is Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? Is a laptop with a plethora of malware a work of art? It may not live up to your standards of quality, but that's up to everyone themselves to decide.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• ehnto 7y ago
  Playing devils advocate. The consumer group has to make money from work, and in theory that work has to provide value to society. I think the amount of people doing creative pursuits has always been a minority, not everyone was a painter, writer or musician in the past which was partly why the art had value in the first place.
• goldenchrome 7y ago
  Do you have a source for that? Young people have way more access to creation tools than ever before. Blogs (writing), memes (photo editing), vlogs (film creation), Instagram (photography)... Not to mention YouTube is the most incredible source of tutorials on just about every topic imaginable. The internet and smartphones have made all these cheaper/freer than ever before. Anyone with a creative itch has a ton of avenues to learn, share and monetize their creative interests. I find it hard to believe that young people are creating less than earlier generations.
  • TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    There's more creation but virtually all of it is ADHD-driven - shallow quick-hit micro-entertainment designed to drive analytics. And a lot of it is interchangeable and repetitive - like all those Instagram photos taken in the same popular locations with the same few stock poses. The same thing applies to music (generic watered-down techno with bass-drum-under-samples and maybe a bit of synth), visual art (digital paintings of pretty anime-influenced girls, lone heroic fantasy figures dwarfed by an impossibly huge menacing monster, relatively trivial generative code animations), and short movies (generic sci-fi settings and tropes, generic scripts, pro-quality CGI.) Unusual talent, deep mastery of a medium with some awareness of its history, non-trivial content, and an original voice are very rare. It's not that it's all terrible, but there's far more superficial trope mimicry than powerfully resonant original creative work.
    • danielbln 7y ago
      This reeks of "things were so much better in my day". 20 years ago teenagers would watch copious amounts of TV, anime tropes were already around, it was the decade of shitty superhero movies and trashy TV shows. I give you the gamefied dopamine releasers, but it was never so easy to participate in online communities, find maker spaces, set up a kickstarter/patreon and go nuts creating whatever you feel like.
    • dTal 7y ago
      Sturgeon's Law - 90% of everything is crap. This has always been the case. To make a compelling argument, you have to show that it's somehow worse than it used to be. For my money, the peak quality now attained by art is definitely better than it used to be. Why, even just in music, within the past decade the musical genres thoroughly burst their banks and now I find most new music defies classification - I can only listen in wonder. Not all of it is good, to be sure, but vast amounts of it are at least interesting.
• looeee 7y ago
  Do you have some statistics to back that up? Without statistics it's pretty just s much meaningless about how kids these days are lazy... A complaint which every generation has made since long before smartphones existed.
• jankotek 7y ago
  That is simply not true. All my generation could do was read (consume) books and create small useless projects that lead nowhere. There was no way to find likely minded people, cooperate and share. Kids today can create many things: mod games, work on scientific project even start businesses... Some voluntary work done by teenagers is surpassing professional companies in quality. Even taking pictures with phone creates something. And with niche hobbies one can get at some level (for hobbyst) just by watching a few hours of youtube videos. Again it is not "consumption" but learning. Gaming is the same thing, kids are learning cooperation, new skills, husttle etc. It is not just media consumption. Computers and internet do not work the way books or TV works. It is dialog, two way communication that takes user feedback.
• sideshowb 7y ago
  Look at the number of musicians, photographers etc complaining they can't make a living nowadays because someone else is willing to do the same thing for free. Nobody being creative you say? Though I share skepticism on smartphones. Off to read a book to my daughter now.
  • sideshowb 7y ago
    Article has got me thinking that when the little one is old enough, she can have a laptop with ableton, Photoshop, Python, office tools and access to (the sfw parts of) Wikipedia There isn't enough research out there that distinguishes between different types of screen time.
  • Dumblydorr 7y ago
    As a gigging pianist who struggles to get performances, I often think back to before recorded music. There was a musician playing or there was no music. Think of all the functions and events that automation, via recordings, has eliminated. It is not surprising, therefore, that the careers of musicians have been hollowed out and I must code to pay the bills.
    • sideshowb 7y ago
      True, though the same thing applies even to DJing.
• toyg 7y ago
  Meh, you could argue the same about game consoles, all the way to the Atari 2600. At least, with phones, kids can talk to each other, write, take pictures, and eventually make apps. Try making an app on the Playstation.
• agumonkey 7y ago
  I say wait. I see this as a wave, and it's not only mainstream smartphone users. The whole world has seen decrease in craft. My father's generation did a lot more themselves, but large scale everything and offshore meant => buy everything at a store. For instance, IIRC, MIT or CMU reopened glass making factories that were retired. They too felt that people need some tangible work for their own good.
• mhandley 7y ago
  My 12 year old is very creative in Kerbal Space Program. And what he's trying to do is hard - things never work first time, and you have to spent a lot of time trying to figure out why. Sure, it's not how I learned, building go-karts and tree houses and simple electrical stuff, but it's still learning how to create and debug. A bigger problem for me is that today's generation have no hope in figuring out how things like a smartphone work from first principles. At least when I was growing up in the 1970s, I had the fiction that I could understand how things work, and so I didn't give up trying.
  • sapilla 7y ago
    Boy, is it hard to return to first principles for anyone now. Just my little student room contains thousands of laws I'm not familiar with yet vaguely dependent upon.
  • Aromasin 7y ago
    I would say they still do have ways of figuring these things out - even incredibly complicated things. It just takes a little longer. It also depends at what level of abstraction you want to look at things anyway. You probably didn't know the physics behind the stuff you built in the 70s; it was just an abstraction of it using capacitors, diodes and resistors. Or the biology of the wood you used for the tree house, at a cellular level. In my opinion it's the same premise. I'm on the younger end of the HN spectrum, so I grew up playing Minecraft pretty regularly. I remember stumbling into low-level hardware design with a thing in the game called Redstone. You could combine it in numerous ways to make various Boolean logic gates. That progressed into making memory, ALU's, and the like in said game. Fast forward 8 years and I'm a hardware engineer IRL. Once you understand the basic 'building blocks' of how something works you'll develop an interest in the rest of the abstraction generally. I suppose the best way to see it would be to think of it like a program. You can build a program from bunch of functions, not knowing how those individually "work", and have a finished product at the end. That's still an enjoyable process. You might enjoy it so much that you jump into the library and look at how the functions work. You might go further and look at how the code works at a lower-level language. Then down to machine code. Then at a part level (graphics card, processor, RAM etc). Then a component level. Then at an electro-dynamics level. You can keep going further and further into deeper levels of phsyics. A kid is still going to have a grand old time plugging in all the parts of their computer and having it turn on, as much as they do building tree-houses and go-karts.
• flukus 7y ago
  > The new generation is spending huge amount of time in consumption and very little in creation. I think that's true for the current generation, so many adults I know don't appear to have any hobbies (creative or otherwise) whatsoever and spend every second of their free time consuming and not creating, not even consuming good content but crappy reality shows. I do more than most people I know (less than I'd like and mostly coding stuff) but I still come up way short of my perception of my fathers generation, of an evening I could generally find them hacking away at something out in the shed.
  • Kye 7y ago
    Is that really new? Most adults I knew growing up didn't have hobbies. They sat around watching TV. Maybe people who see a decline had exceptional role models and weren't aware of how things were for other people. I got into all kinds of creative hobbies because everyone around me was so boring. We were always the exception. It's been true through human history. The weirdos who go out and build a plane or a car or start a movement were always mocked and pathologized before they were venerated.
• kalleboo 7y ago
  I don't think that's true for the new generation. I think it's true for the generation before - when I was a kid all we did was watch TV until we got kicked out then we biked around and played outdoors. Not so much creation going on. Kids these days OTOH want to become YouTubers... and they actually CAN and DO with free video editing apps, 4K cameras built into their phones, etc. They're making memes (just look at all the creativity coming out of something as inane as TikTok), and just look at Minecraft.
• jhanschoo 7y ago
  Isn't this just observation/ignorance bias? We have a generation raised on Minecraft, and on secondary and tertiary content around Minecraft. Even with Fortnite, children don't just want to play the game, they want to stream and make videos around Fortnite. Or take social media where creative decisions about expression (filters, gifs, memes) are made all the time. "Creative work" is far more accessible now than ever before and children are participating in it.