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Having heard this call for years, I've come to the conclusion that this is the 21st century's "TV rots your brain." We've replaced channel surfing with doom scr

by madrox 5y ago

Having heard this call for years, I've come to the conclusion that this is the 21st century's "TV rots your brain." We've replaced channel surfing with doom scrolling. TV stations are mostly run by white men, too. At best, I can say that there's a fundamental human need to stare into space for a while. We could delete all technology tomorrow, and we wouldn't magically be less distracted. At least now, there's a hope of seeing things we care about, instead of what we got in the 80s that was designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Sitting through toilet paper commercials are actually the worst.

solaceb 5y ago
I think you’re conflating cultural phenomenon (people like to dissociate by losing themselves in consumption) with biological fact. Humans 10,000 years ago may have spaced out and daydreamed. But this daydreaming was probably very different in psychological effect from scrolling feeds. The two are not even close to the same
- madrox 5y ago
  I don't think I'm conflating them at all. One definitely drives the other.
acituan 5y ago
> I've come to the conclusion that this is the 21st century's "TV rots your brain." We've replaced channel surfing with doom scrolling. The difference with the TV is that TV didn't have individual, high granularity demographic and usage data to conform to its users' most exploitable side that ultimately drives mindless "engagement". TV ratings had coarsely sampled data at household levels and whatever broadcast was what everyone saw. > I can say that there's a fundamental human need to stare into space for a while. We could delete all technology tomorrow, and we wouldn't magically be less distracted. You're right that mild distraction is conducive to insight generation and as such can be thought as a need, but not all distraction is equal. Unlike a walk in the nature which has low-key wonder, expansiveness with a degree of indifference, youtube doesn't want you to be too indifferent at the risk of losing "engagement" and is pretty damn opinionated about what will keep you hooked. The latter is more like the mindless obsessive shuffling of zombies towards brains. In other words, it would be like saying humans always consumed food for pleasure, and equivocating our modern, hyper-palatable industrial food that drives the obesity epidemic with a 14th century invention like kebabs of the Levant.
- madrox 5y ago
  > The difference with the TV is that TV didn't have individual, high granularity demographic and usage data to conform to its users' most exploitable side that ultimately drives mindless "engagement". TV ratings had coarsely sampled data at household levels and whatever broadcast was what everyone saw. I agree. I fail to see how what we have now is inherently worse...especially for cultural minorities. Exploiting psychological weakness to keep people's attention goes back a long, long way. That's never going away. I also find your analogy to be a bit of a straw man. For it to work, there would have to be evidence of mental "obesity" that somehow began with social media and did not exist before. I don't see it, and you'd have to give me more than anecdote to change my own anecdotal views at this point. If you're saying it did exist before, but now we've crossed some line and now it's too much...well, we're back to what our grandparents said about television again.
  - acituan 5y ago
    > I fail to see how what we have now is inherently worse...especially for cultural minorities. Exploiting psychological weakness to keep people's attention goes back a long, long way. That's never going away The "attack surface", so to speak, is larger with individualized content consumption. With TV at max we have N channels that can broadcast N different viewpoints with the intention to rile M people up, at most in N different ways. Youtube can rile M people up in M different ways. M is orders of magnitude larger than N. There is an economical model somewhat analogous to this; price discrimination. Charging the absolute highest price every individual consumer would individually pay yields the absolute maximum profit. In contrast, having a visible price tag that makes everyone pay the same price leaves a lot of those profits on the table. In youtube's case, riling everyone up individually with their particularized content maximizes the engagement. Trying to rile groups of people with the same content doesn't yield the same engagement. > There would have to be evidence of mental "obesity" that somehow began with social media and did not exist before. You're right, references to information obesity goes back to Baudrillard. That said keep in mind absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence, even if our grandparents were complaining about a similar phenomena it doesn't mean our intuition about it is as inflated nor the phenomenon are in comparable scales. Not only that, credibility of past grievances go both ways; it took a long while to get cigarettes classified properly carcinogenic. As for hard evidence, we could use non-work screen time as a proxy, which increases especially in younger demographics. It is still not a perfect comparison because different screens have different information densities and user interaction modalities. As an indirect evidence I would suggest an increase in intensity and multi-valency of culture wars. Current phase of the internet is at best a decade old, so there is also going to be an availability bias when looking for evidence. I also couldn't help noticing you working in high profile media companies like Disney and Twitch in the past, I don't think you would assert it wouldn't ever affect your neutrality on this matter.
bruce343434 5y ago
> TV stations are mostly run by white men, too. Your point?

by madrox 5y ago

solaceb 5y ago

I think you’re conflating cultural phenomenon (people like to dissociate by losing themselves in consumption) with biological fact. Humans 10,000 years ago may have spaced out and daydreamed. But this daydreaming was probably very different in psychological effect from scrolling feeds. The two are not even close to the same

madrox 5y ago
I don't think I'm conflating them at all. One definitely drives the other.

acituan 5y ago

> I've come to the conclusion that this is the 21st century's "TV rots your brain." We've replaced channel surfing with doom scrolling. The difference with the TV is that TV didn't have individual, high granularity demographic and usage data to conform to its users' most exploitable side that ultimately drives mindless "engagement". TV ratings had coarsely sampled data at household levels and whatever broadcast was what everyone saw. > I can say that there's a fundamental human need to stare into space for a while. We could delete all technology tomorrow, and we wouldn't magically be less distracted. You're right that mild distraction is conducive to insight generation and as such can be thought as a need, but not all distraction is equal. Unlike a walk in the nature which has low-key wonder, expansiveness with a degree of indifference, youtube doesn't want you to be too indifferent at the risk of losing "engagement" and is pretty damn opinionated about what will keep you hooked. The latter is more like the mindless obsessive shuffling of zombies towards brains. In other words, it would be like saying humans always consumed food for pleasure, and equivocating our modern, hyper-palatable industrial food that drives the obesity epidemic with a 14th century invention like kebabs of the Levant.

madrox 5y ago
> The difference with the TV is that TV didn't have individual, high granularity demographic and usage data to conform to its users' most exploitable side that ultimately drives mindless "engagement". TV ratings had coarsely sampled data at household levels and whatever broadcast was what everyone saw. I agree. I fail to see how what we have now is inherently worse...especially for cultural minorities. Exploiting psychological weakness to keep people's attention goes back a long, long way. That's never going away. I also find your analogy to be a bit of a straw man. For it to work, there would have to be evidence of mental "obesity" that somehow began with social media and did not exist before. I don't see it, and you'd have to give me more than anecdote to change my own anecdotal views at this point. If you're saying it did exist before, but now we've crossed some line and now it's too much...well, we're back to what our grandparents said about television again.
- acituan 5y ago
  > I fail to see how what we have now is inherently worse...especially for cultural minorities. Exploiting psychological weakness to keep people's attention goes back a long, long way. That's never going away The "attack surface", so to speak, is larger with individualized content consumption. With TV at max we have N channels that can broadcast N different viewpoints with the intention to rile M people up, at most in N different ways. Youtube can rile M people up in M different ways. M is orders of magnitude larger than N. There is an economical model somewhat analogous to this; price discrimination. Charging the absolute highest price every individual consumer would individually pay yields the absolute maximum profit. In contrast, having a visible price tag that makes everyone pay the same price leaves a lot of those profits on the table. In youtube's case, riling everyone up individually with their particularized content maximizes the engagement. Trying to rile groups of people with the same content doesn't yield the same engagement. > There would have to be evidence of mental "obesity" that somehow began with social media and did not exist before. You're right, references to information obesity goes back to Baudrillard. That said keep in mind absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence, even if our grandparents were complaining about a similar phenomena it doesn't mean our intuition about it is as inflated nor the phenomenon are in comparable scales. Not only that, credibility of past grievances go both ways; it took a long while to get cigarettes classified properly carcinogenic. As for hard evidence, we could use non-work screen time as a proxy, which increases especially in younger demographics. It is still not a perfect comparison because different screens have different information densities and user interaction modalities. As an indirect evidence I would suggest an increase in intensity and multi-valency of culture wars. Current phase of the internet is at best a decade old, so there is also going to be an availability bias when looking for evidence. I also couldn't help noticing you working in high profile media companies like Disney and Twitch in the past, I don't think you would assert it wouldn't ever affect your neutrality on this matter.

bruce343434 5y ago

> TV stations are mostly run by white men, too. Your point?