4 ms·

I am not disagreeing but I am interested to know which specific factors make it so different from things in the past. I remember growing up and the boogeyman wa

by voisin 5y ago

I am not disagreeing but I am interested to know which specific factors make it so different from things in the past. I remember growing up and the boogeyman was sexualized videos on MTV and violent video games. I didn’t believe it then and I don’t quite believe it now. Not to say I don’t believe social media has negative impacts but this is a pretty sharp rise. It also coincided with the post-2009 financial crisis. Could be more financially unstable households. Could be a feeling if being left behind as pressure to excel academically and socially increased due to a desire to get into better schools for some financial security. I don’t know. Just throwing out other hypotheses.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
If you really want to see "who" is most affected by this, divide it up by state and income. If we see that most states align with this, we could attribute it to your statement. However, if it's solely based on income, then higher income states will outweigh lower income ones and we'd be able to pinpoint it to affluence and the pressures of innadequacy.
lotsofpulp 5y ago
I am sure there are myriad reasons, and surely the underlying fact of income/wealth/security gap widening plays a role in all of the change we are seeing. But I would posit that it is possible that constant exposure to people in your network's achievements (or appearances thereof) can elicit emotions that have negative consequences over long periods of time. I think tribal species probably have an innate function of trying to sort and rank members for various purposes, and maybe that program can get overloaded.
- craig131 5y ago
  I think a lot of this might be projection from the HN community. How is this even relevant to schools opening? It seems obvious that forcing kids to wake up at 7:30 to go to a conveniently free and "safe" underfunded facility so both parents can work yet still not make ends meet is the actual culprit. The gender difference is notable, but kids and young girls are very cruel to each other, especially when packed together in close proximity.
retrac 5y ago
> I remember growing up and the boogeyman was sexualized videos on MTV and violent video games Ironically, I think that generation may have been more or less right about the imagery being a negative, but wrong about the mechanism by which it works on us negatively. Sexualized imagery does not turn boys into rapists. But it does seem to promote body image insecurity, social status worries, and general anxiety, in those who see it, particularly those of the same sex, and where the person is seen as desirable to emulate. Violence in the media, also, probably doesn't make us violent. But it may well skew how accurately we estimate the likelihood of interpersonal violence. Quite a few studies hint at a link between how terrified someone is of being murdered and how much gory TV they watch, basically. t;ldr: instead of turning us into sex-crazed impulsives like feared, it turned us into sex-hating neurotics.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  You don't need old school MTV to find this. Just go to a grocery store and see all the women's magazines that promote insecurities. It's an entire business model. Female editors are presumably highly represented at these magazines and they don't seem to have a problem with the destruction they wreak.
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    > Female editors are presumably highly represented at these magazines and they don't seem to have a problem with the destruction they wreak. Regardless of gender, the people that rise to the top tend to be sociopathic…
    - lugged 5y ago
      All 1-4% of them... The insinuation that anyone who rises to the top of an organisation must be sociopathic is dillusional. Yes, there is a higher incidence at the CEO level, traits that help you in a role also help you get there, go figure, but the idea all leaders are sociopaths is a huge stretch based off nothing but your own bias and distain for anyone high up in a power structure, that seems to be going around right now.
rubyn00bie 5y ago
Previously, media showed others who were severely removed from the reality of one’s day. Today, media shows you people closer to you, its a presentation of who you know. No longer is it disconnected from your reality, but it is your reality. Social media has sort of changed media consumption from a window into a mirror... and staring at oneself all day long is either gonna make you a narcissist or absolutely hate yourself. Now take the world of a teenager, which is already small, and blast it at them 24/7 full force. Imagine the insane bullshit you see from adults on social media trying to distort reality... now imagine how extreme a child could be imitating those same adults. The big difference being we (adults) don’t then have to go spend eight hours around some crazy asshole. These kids do. It’s haunting. Social media seems less social the long we have it. I think “petty media” would have been a better term and communicated its relative importance in our lives much better.
ayngg 5y ago
I think the difference is that the MTV sexuality scare was predicated on the belief that sexualized videos would normalize sexualization in youth with negative consequences, whereas in social media applications create the incentive structures for that behavior to thrive. I assume the fear was girls would sexualize themselves because of what they saw was popular on MTV, which they believed would make them popular as well. I guess the big difference is that girls that sexualized themselves at that time never had an access to large audiences without perceived consequences like girls do on social media today. I don't think depicting violence in video games is similar because I would say the violent aspect of games isn't the defining aspect of the content that people want to emulate. For example all the video game streamers and influencers, like girls who sexualize themselves, generally want the popularity, and the popularity is derived from being good at the games (or being the entertainer), not by being violent or emulating the violence from games, whereas the popularity of sex symbols is inherently their sexuality. It was starting with internet chat rooms, but there was really no way to broadcast your sexuality to thousands of people back then without exposing yourself to risks like doing it in the public. Social media both removed these risks by creating a physical separation between the audience and the person sexualizing themselves, and provided an audience that provides the attention that those sexualizing themselves desire. It sort of created the missing pieces for the incentive structures that reinforce the behaviors. It isn't just sexualization too, social media has allowed many communities that were either too niche or 'undesirable' to thrive in offline communities to flourish and become normalized over time.
- slowmovintarget 5y ago
  The problem now is the feedback and amplification provided by the social media platforms. It is an actual slippery slope as opposed to a fallacious one. People are pushed to go further and further to gratify the urges of others for validation proxies in the form of internet points. (Followers, likes, and eventually money.) There's a reason that the execs at most of those social media companies don't let their kids use their own product. Something we've seen from tobacco execs in the past.
  - ayngg 5y ago
wonnage 5y ago
The self-esteem movement many of us millennials grew up with feels like it has largely the same motivations as all the corporate-sponsored mindfulness initiatives that are in vogue now. It's a way to shift responsibility for dealing with a shitty environment to individuals, instead of fixing the environment. If you have low self-esteem it becomes your problem to fix, maybe you should try these SSRIs, surely it can't be the fact that everything costs 5x what it used to and wages have stayed flat. The new buzzword in private school now is "resilience", which I feel like is tacit acknowledgement that kids need to deal with things sucking in the future. Self esteem (1990 - 2000s) = denial: "I don't feel bad!" Resilience (2010 -) = anger: "I feel bad, but I'll fight and come back stronger!" Maybe the future pattern will be as follows: "Solution-driven" = bargaining: "I feel bad and here's what you can do so I feel better" "Pragmatic" = depression: "I feel bad and I should feel bad" "Peaceful warrior" = acceptance: "I feel bad and that's normal when the world is a post-apocalyptic nightmare in 2060"
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
TV and other media is easy to tell fact from fiction. TV is obviously fake. Social media blurs the line. Ordinary but attractive humans curate, stage, and edit snippets of perfect lives. Bleeding edge algorithms inject these false realities into our subconscious.
- oceanghost 5y ago
  This. My friends 16-year-old daughter posts photos from a completely different reality if you didn't know her personally. She posts glamour shots of her and her friends doing all the silly Instagram model stuff you see, in locations like beaches, in front of Disneyland (She just took a picture in front of it, it wasn't even OPEN) etc. And somehow she always looks thin. The reality is, her family was pretty hard hit financially by COVID-- and that she's a kinda dumpy teenager whose flunking out of High school. Literally a D and F student. But she has 700 followers on instagram. EDIT: I just remembered I have a friend whose a minor fitness celebrity and its the same thing with him. He posts photos of him doing all this wonderful stuff, driving an expensive car (which I know is a rental). I help him with his website sometimes and he questions me about his hosting costs (less than $200/yr) and asks if its necessary it cost that much. So he can't really have much money or glamour in his life.
mjfl 5y ago
> Could be more financially unstable households. In my schooling experience I don't think I remember there being a correlation between household wealth and mental health issues. There were poor kids who didn't engage at all with the stress of preparing for the future and therefore had a great time in middle / high school (their suffering came later...) and many kids with richer parents who put them through grueling schooling regimens, with very high standards and conditional love, which led to lots of problems with anxiety / depression. I think a lot of problems came from the remote schooling being really bad for time management. Kids got bad grades, felt like their lives were ruined. This is something I think is happening a lot.

by voisin 5y ago

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

If you really want to see "who" is most affected by this, divide it up by state and income. If we see that most states align with this, we could attribute it to your statement. However, if it's solely based on income, then higher income states will outweigh lower income ones and we'd be able to pinpoint it to affluence and the pressures of innadequacy.

lotsofpulp 5y ago

I am sure there are myriad reasons, and surely the underlying fact of income/wealth/security gap widening plays a role in all of the change we are seeing. But I would posit that it is possible that constant exposure to people in your network's achievements (or appearances thereof) can elicit emotions that have negative consequences over long periods of time. I think tribal species probably have an innate function of trying to sort and rank members for various purposes, and maybe that program can get overloaded.

craig131 5y ago
I think a lot of this might be projection from the HN community. How is this even relevant to schools opening? It seems obvious that forcing kids to wake up at 7:30 to go to a conveniently free and "safe" underfunded facility so both parents can work yet still not make ends meet is the actual culprit. The gender difference is notable, but kids and young girls are very cruel to each other, especially when packed together in close proximity.

retrac 5y ago

> I remember growing up and the boogeyman was sexualized videos on MTV and violent video games Ironically, I think that generation may have been more or less right about the imagery being a negative, but wrong about the mechanism by which it works on us negatively. Sexualized imagery does not turn boys into rapists. But it does seem to promote body image insecurity, social status worries, and general anxiety, in those who see it, particularly those of the same sex, and where the person is seen as desirable to emulate. Violence in the media, also, probably doesn't make us violent. But it may well skew how accurately we estimate the likelihood of interpersonal violence. Quite a few studies hint at a link between how terrified someone is of being murdered and how much gory TV they watch, basically. t;ldr: instead of turning us into sex-crazed impulsives like feared, it turned us into sex-hating neurotics.

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
You don't need old school MTV to find this. Just go to a grocery store and see all the women's magazines that promote insecurities. It's an entire business model. Female editors are presumably highly represented at these magazines and they don't seem to have a problem with the destruction they wreak.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  > Female editors are presumably highly represented at these magazines and they don't seem to have a problem with the destruction they wreak. Regardless of gender, the people that rise to the top tend to be sociopathic…
  - lugged 5y ago
    All 1-4% of them... The insinuation that anyone who rises to the top of an organisation must be sociopathic is dillusional. Yes, there is a higher incidence at the CEO level, traits that help you in a role also help you get there, go figure, but the idea all leaders are sociopaths is a huge stretch based off nothing but your own bias and distain for anyone high up in a power structure, that seems to be going around right now.

rubyn00bie 5y ago

Previously, media showed others who were severely removed from the reality of one’s day. Today, media shows you people closer to you, its a presentation of who you know. No longer is it disconnected from your reality, but it is your reality. Social media has sort of changed media consumption from a window into a mirror... and staring at oneself all day long is either gonna make you a narcissist or absolutely hate yourself. Now take the world of a teenager, which is already small, and blast it at them 24/7 full force. Imagine the insane bullshit you see from adults on social media trying to distort reality... now imagine how extreme a child could be imitating those same adults. The big difference being we (adults) don’t then have to go spend eight hours around some crazy asshole. These kids do. It’s haunting. Social media seems less social the long we have it. I think “petty media” would have been a better term and communicated its relative importance in our lives much better.

ayngg 5y ago

I think the difference is that the MTV sexuality scare was predicated on the belief that sexualized videos would normalize sexualization in youth with negative consequences, whereas in social media applications create the incentive structures for that behavior to thrive. I assume the fear was girls would sexualize themselves because of what they saw was popular on MTV, which they believed would make them popular as well. I guess the big difference is that girls that sexualized themselves at that time never had an access to large audiences without perceived consequences like girls do on social media today. I don't think depicting violence in video games is similar because I would say the violent aspect of games isn't the defining aspect of the content that people want to emulate. For example all the video game streamers and influencers, like girls who sexualize themselves, generally want the popularity, and the popularity is derived from being good at the games (or being the entertainer), not by being violent or emulating the violence from games, whereas the popularity of sex symbols is inherently their sexuality. It was starting with internet chat rooms, but there was really no way to broadcast your sexuality to thousands of people back then without exposing yourself to risks like doing it in the public. Social media both removed these risks by creating a physical separation between the audience and the person sexualizing themselves, and provided an audience that provides the attention that those sexualizing themselves desire. It sort of created the missing pieces for the incentive structures that reinforce the behaviors. It isn't just sexualization too, social media has allowed many communities that were either too niche or 'undesirable' to thrive in offline communities to flourish and become normalized over time.

slowmovintarget 5y ago
The problem now is the feedback and amplification provided by the social media platforms. It is an actual slippery slope as opposed to a fallacious one. People are pushed to go further and further to gratify the urges of others for validation proxies in the form of internet points. (Followers, likes, and eventually money.) There's a reason that the execs at most of those social media companies don't let their kids use their own product. Something we've seen from tobacco execs in the past.
- ayngg 5y ago

wonnage 5y ago

The self-esteem movement many of us millennials grew up with feels like it has largely the same motivations as all the corporate-sponsored mindfulness initiatives that are in vogue now. It's a way to shift responsibility for dealing with a shitty environment to individuals, instead of fixing the environment. If you have low self-esteem it becomes your problem to fix, maybe you should try these SSRIs, surely it can't be the fact that everything costs 5x what it used to and wages have stayed flat. The new buzzword in private school now is "resilience", which I feel like is tacit acknowledgement that kids need to deal with things sucking in the future. Self esteem (1990 - 2000s) = denial: "I don't feel bad!" Resilience (2010 -) = anger: "I feel bad, but I'll fight and come back stronger!" Maybe the future pattern will be as follows: "Solution-driven" = bargaining: "I feel bad and here's what you can do so I feel better" "Pragmatic" = depression: "I feel bad and I should feel bad" "Peaceful warrior" = acceptance: "I feel bad and that's normal when the world is a post-apocalyptic nightmare in 2060"

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

TV and other media is easy to tell fact from fiction. TV is obviously fake. Social media blurs the line. Ordinary but attractive humans curate, stage, and edit snippets of perfect lives. Bleeding edge algorithms inject these false realities into our subconscious.

oceanghost 5y ago
This. My friends 16-year-old daughter posts photos from a completely different reality if you didn't know her personally. She posts glamour shots of her and her friends doing all the silly Instagram model stuff you see, in locations like beaches, in front of Disneyland (She just took a picture in front of it, it wasn't even OPEN) etc. And somehow she always looks thin. The reality is, her family was pretty hard hit financially by COVID-- and that she's a kinda dumpy teenager whose flunking out of High school. Literally a D and F student. But she has 700 followers on instagram. EDIT: I just remembered I have a friend whose a minor fitness celebrity and its the same thing with him. He posts photos of him doing all this wonderful stuff, driving an expensive car (which I know is a rental). I help him with his website sometimes and he questions me about his hosting costs (less than $200/yr) and asks if its necessary it cost that much. So he can't really have much money or glamour in his life.

mjfl 5y ago

> Could be more financially unstable households. In my schooling experience I don't think I remember there being a correlation between household wealth and mental health issues. There were poor kids who didn't engage at all with the stress of preparing for the future and therefore had a great time in middle / high school (their suffering came later...) and many kids with richer parents who put them through grueling schooling regimens, with very high standards and conditional love, which led to lots of problems with anxiety / depression. I think a lot of problems came from the remote schooling being really bad for time management. Kids got bad grades, felt like their lives were ruined. This is something I think is happening a lot.