6 ms·

I think social media is like our generations tobacco, everyone uses it and it is considered fashionable and cool but eventually it will start to come to light h

by ayngg 4y ago

I think social media is like our generations tobacco, everyone uses it and it is considered fashionable and cool but eventually it will start to come to light how unhealthy and insidious all the data harvesting, time sinks and gamifying social interactions at scale can be, especially with children who have much of the spare time to dedicate to it.

cush 4y ago
It's much worse than tobacco. At least tobacco only kills people when they're older, whereas social media robs young people of their mental health while simultaneously threatening truth and democracy
- Clubber 4y ago
  >while simultaneously threatening ... democracy This seems to be the latest topic from the outrage machine. Can you explain how social media is an actual threat to the democracy or democratic process to a reasonable person?
  - system16 4y ago
    Roughly 50% of the population in the US have an absolute distrust of the media, election results, and science. But wrap something up in a meme and post in on Facebook and it's treated like Gospel.
    - Clubber 4y ago
      Here's something that's extremely disturbing to me. "Republicans have become the purveyors of misinformation, and when our two-party system is broken like that, democracy is seriously in trouble. The president acknowledged that it's time to actually start doing things and maybe taking some names and putting people in jail." https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/05/17/carl_cameron_maybe_its_time_to_start_taking_names_and_putting_people_in_jail_for_misinformation.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/05/17/carl_came... I would say jailing press for printing things the government doesn't like is way more obvious a threat to democracy than the information they publish. This is no longer a slippery slope if this guy would even consider uttering this on national TV. We would be going into pretty blatant authoritarianism.
  - antiframe 4y ago
    > Can you explain how social media is an actual threat to the democracy or democratic process to a reasonable person? The best explanation I've read of this is Tim Urban's "The Story of Us" series [1]. It builds up a model from individual behavior to societal behavior and how it's changed over the decades due to how online interactions have shifted behavior (both individual and societal). I don't know whether it's the right or wrong model and explanation, but he lays it out very clearly. [1]: https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html
    - Clubber 4y ago
      I read that series when it first came out, so it's been a while. Forgive me if it's hazy. I completely understand the political divide and how it started in the late 80s. Limbaugh was really the frontrunner of our modern version of it. Fox took his model and applied it to TV. Many traditional news companies adopted that model for the left, and here we are. Social media is really just an extension of that. I'm not sure how it's a threat to democracy though. I certainly don't believe it originated on social media either. People on both sides repeat some really dumb shit, but that's always been the case.
      - cush 4y ago
        > Social media is really just an extension of that This is true, however extensions are by their very nature different than the thing they're extending. Social media is an extension to traditional media at a scale, speed, and attack vector (friends, family, community) which humans are much more vulnerable to
        Clubber 4y ago
        People are pretty vulnerable to the garbage that passes for news in the last 20+ years. I'm not so sure "fixing" (read censoring) social media will solve any of this, even if it was possible. The outrage machine will still exist in traditional news media, but they won't have to worry about new technologies unseating them. I'm not sure that is a good thing. Social media, to me, seems like just a comment section to current events, most of which are presented from traditional media. FWIW, I haven't used social media since Snowden, so I don't know what it looks like today compared to 9 or so years ago.
  - cush 4y ago
    When you say reasonable person, do you mean layman? If so, watch the Social Dilemma. There was Cambridge Analytica and other countless misinformation campaign examples
  - Unearned5161 4y ago
    I was originally going to write a whole drawn out thing, but I realized it wasn't necessary. One interesting aspect to think about on how social media affects democracy is the aspect of education. I can't find the video right now, but I remember seeing or maybe reading a post that said how you watch all these videos on all these topics ranging from math to economics to civil engineering etc, and you build this false perception of "oh yeah I know this shit", but really you don't, you know one summary that was presented to you. Those channels: Tom Scott, Johnny Harris, 3B1B, etc. Are all amazing in the time they spend learning their material and then producing such high quality instruction, but even if you watched an hour long video on econ you still wouldn't be an economist. A lot of us know this, but there are a lot of us that don't, and we then go to vote on bills and politicians thinking we know the implications of our actions and how it might affect the country when we really don't. Of course this isn't just a conversation about social media and it can devolve into a conversation about the dangers of an uneducated democracy overall. But I feel that social media definitely contributes to this false sense of educated that a lot of people have, pair that with echo chambers, misinformation, and an addictive formula and you've got a troublesome future.
j7ake 4y ago
I think it’s like combining the addictiveness of tobacco with the time sink of television. Tobacco is addictive but I’m not sure if it is a time sink.
- majjam 4y ago
  I suppose if you take $10 as the price of a pack of cigarettes and $15/hr as the wage earned, then you could argue 2/3 of an hour of leisure time/personal life is lost per pack purchased/smoked.
  - varjag 4y ago
    The cigs were a much better price proposition before smoking was ostracised. Pennies on a dollar.
- arkey 4y ago
  You should see the wonders of the smoke breaks some 'senior' people had in the first consulting firm I worked for. One cigarette here, one cigarette there... aaand that wraps it up for the day, here's hoping the interns did some actual work.
- xmprt 4y ago
  I think you can substitute time sink with lower life expectancy for tobacco.
shrimpx 4y ago
To add to your idea, social media shares a deep property with tobacco: people know it’s bad and keep consuming it. Part of the reason is soft social pressure: nobody wants to be the odd one out by quitting.
- MikePlacid 4y ago
  > nobody wants to be the odd one out by quitting. Uhm… how do you know that?
basisword 4y ago
And much like non-smokers are effected by smokers (particularly when they were the majority) non-social media users are still affected in the sense that it has completely changed and polarised our politics, social/justice issues etc.
- watwut 4y ago
  If there were no social media, there would be no social issues. Only talk radio and 4chan, so we would all be radicalizing in the same direction.
somenameforme 4y ago
I'd argue it's more similar to cocaine. Tobacco is unhealthy, but the consequences were somewhat intuitive long before being proven (repeatedly cycling smoke through the lungs is intuitively unhealthy), and the real health effects aren't especially visible except over long time frames and with large samples. By contrast, the shifts in behavior, effects, and downsides, of cocaine become apparent extremely rapidly and it's consumed in a way that makes it less obvious of the dangers. Vin Mariani [1] was a popular wine created in the mid 19th century. It's advocates included royalty, Popes, Thomas Edison, Ulysses S Grant, and countless others. It was wine mixed with cocaine. That wine itself also served as the inspiration for Coca-Cola - Coke, whose name derived from its two primary ingredients: Cocaine + Kola Nut. Employers would give their workers cocaine to improve productivity, individuals themselves would use it (or various common products containing it) for similar ends, or just simple recreation. And we basically had a society where a large chunk of people were frequently coked out. But it was undoubtedly difficult to realize how absurd we all were because when something becomes ubiquitous, what do you have to compare it against? And I think that's much closer to the reality we now live in where the impacts of social media are rather extremely evident on both a micro and macro scale, yet not only is the vast majority of society already hooked on it - but the people in power with the capacity to curtail its ails are themselves just as addicted to it, or alternatively exploiting it for their own personal benefit. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin_Mariani https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin_Mariani

by ayngg 4y ago

cush 4y ago

It's much worse than tobacco. At least tobacco only kills people when they're older, whereas social media robs young people of their mental health while simultaneously threatening truth and democracy

Clubber 4y ago
>while simultaneously threatening ... democracy This seems to be the latest topic from the outrage machine. Can you explain how social media is an actual threat to the democracy or democratic process to a reasonable person?
- system16 4y ago
  Roughly 50% of the population in the US have an absolute distrust of the media, election results, and science. But wrap something up in a meme and post in on Facebook and it's treated like Gospel.
  - Clubber 4y ago
    Here's something that's extremely disturbing to me. "Republicans have become the purveyors of misinformation, and when our two-party system is broken like that, democracy is seriously in trouble. The president acknowledged that it's time to actually start doing things and maybe taking some names and putting people in jail." https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/05/17/carl_cameron_maybe_its_time_to_start_taking_names_and_putting_people_in_jail_for_misinformation.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/05/17/carl_came... I would say jailing press for printing things the government doesn't like is way more obvious a threat to democracy than the information they publish. This is no longer a slippery slope if this guy would even consider uttering this on national TV. We would be going into pretty blatant authoritarianism.
- antiframe 4y ago
  > Can you explain how social media is an actual threat to the democracy or democratic process to a reasonable person? The best explanation I've read of this is Tim Urban's "The Story of Us" series [1]. It builds up a model from individual behavior to societal behavior and how it's changed over the decades due to how online interactions have shifted behavior (both individual and societal). I don't know whether it's the right or wrong model and explanation, but he lays it out very clearly. [1]: https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html
  - Clubber 4y ago
    I read that series when it first came out, so it's been a while. Forgive me if it's hazy. I completely understand the political divide and how it started in the late 80s. Limbaugh was really the frontrunner of our modern version of it. Fox took his model and applied it to TV. Many traditional news companies adopted that model for the left, and here we are. Social media is really just an extension of that. I'm not sure how it's a threat to democracy though. I certainly don't believe it originated on social media either. People on both sides repeat some really dumb shit, but that's always been the case.
    - cush 4y ago
      > Social media is really just an extension of that This is true, however extensions are by their very nature different than the thing they're extending. Social media is an extension to traditional media at a scale, speed, and attack vector (friends, family, community) which humans are much more vulnerable to
      - Clubber 4y ago
        People are pretty vulnerable to the garbage that passes for news in the last 20+ years. I'm not so sure "fixing" (read censoring) social media will solve any of this, even if it was possible. The outrage machine will still exist in traditional news media, but they won't have to worry about new technologies unseating them. I'm not sure that is a good thing. Social media, to me, seems like just a comment section to current events, most of which are presented from traditional media. FWIW, I haven't used social media since Snowden, so I don't know what it looks like today compared to 9 or so years ago.
- cush 4y ago
  When you say reasonable person, do you mean layman? If so, watch the Social Dilemma. There was Cambridge Analytica and other countless misinformation campaign examples
- Unearned5161 4y ago
  I was originally going to write a whole drawn out thing, but I realized it wasn't necessary. One interesting aspect to think about on how social media affects democracy is the aspect of education. I can't find the video right now, but I remember seeing or maybe reading a post that said how you watch all these videos on all these topics ranging from math to economics to civil engineering etc, and you build this false perception of "oh yeah I know this shit", but really you don't, you know one summary that was presented to you. Those channels: Tom Scott, Johnny Harris, 3B1B, etc. Are all amazing in the time they spend learning their material and then producing such high quality instruction, but even if you watched an hour long video on econ you still wouldn't be an economist. A lot of us know this, but there are a lot of us that don't, and we then go to vote on bills and politicians thinking we know the implications of our actions and how it might affect the country when we really don't. Of course this isn't just a conversation about social media and it can devolve into a conversation about the dangers of an uneducated democracy overall. But I feel that social media definitely contributes to this false sense of educated that a lot of people have, pair that with echo chambers, misinformation, and an addictive formula and you've got a troublesome future.

j7ake 4y ago

I think it’s like combining the addictiveness of tobacco with the time sink of television. Tobacco is addictive but I’m not sure if it is a time sink.

majjam 4y ago
I suppose if you take $10 as the price of a pack of cigarettes and $15/hr as the wage earned, then you could argue 2/3 of an hour of leisure time/personal life is lost per pack purchased/smoked.
- varjag 4y ago
  The cigs were a much better price proposition before smoking was ostracised. Pennies on a dollar.
arkey 4y ago
You should see the wonders of the smoke breaks some 'senior' people had in the first consulting firm I worked for. One cigarette here, one cigarette there... aaand that wraps it up for the day, here's hoping the interns did some actual work.
xmprt 4y ago
I think you can substitute time sink with lower life expectancy for tobacco.

shrimpx 4y ago

To add to your idea, social media shares a deep property with tobacco: people know it’s bad and keep consuming it. Part of the reason is soft social pressure: nobody wants to be the odd one out by quitting.

MikePlacid 4y ago
> nobody wants to be the odd one out by quitting. Uhm… how do you know that?

basisword 4y ago

And much like non-smokers are effected by smokers (particularly when they were the majority) non-social media users are still affected in the sense that it has completely changed and polarised our politics, social/justice issues etc.

watwut 4y ago
If there were no social media, there would be no social issues. Only talk radio and 4chan, so we would all be radicalizing in the same direction.

somenameforme 4y ago

I'd argue it's more similar to cocaine. Tobacco is unhealthy, but the consequences were somewhat intuitive long before being proven (repeatedly cycling smoke through the lungs is intuitively unhealthy), and the real health effects aren't especially visible except over long time frames and with large samples. By contrast, the shifts in behavior, effects, and downsides, of cocaine become apparent extremely rapidly and it's consumed in a way that makes it less obvious of the dangers. Vin Mariani [1] was a popular wine created in the mid 19th century. It's advocates included royalty, Popes, Thomas Edison, Ulysses S Grant, and countless others. It was wine mixed with cocaine. That wine itself also served as the inspiration for Coca-Cola - Coke, whose name derived from its two primary ingredients: Cocaine + Kola Nut. Employers would give their workers cocaine to improve productivity, individuals themselves would use it (or various common products containing it) for similar ends, or just simple recreation. And we basically had a society where a large chunk of people were frequently coked out. But it was undoubtedly difficult to realize how absurd we all were because when something becomes ubiquitous, what do you have to compare it against? And I think that's much closer to the reality we now live in where the impacts of social media are rather extremely evident on both a micro and macro scale, yet not only is the vast majority of society already hooked on it - but the people in power with the capacity to curtail its ails are themselves just as addicted to it, or alternatively exploiting it for their own personal benefit. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin_Mariani https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin_Mariani