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For all of human history across every culture, parents would do what they could to keep their kids away from “bad influences”. You move to certain areas, go to

For all of human history across every culture, parents would do what they could to keep their kids away from “bad influences”. You move to certain areas, go to certain places, are members of certain organizations etc. which serve to socialize your kids with kids from families that have shared values. You don’t talk to strangers. With the internet and especially media like TikTok parents are exposing their kids to untold bad influences, etc. It’s no wonder so many kids think they have mental disorders or any of the other mind viruses going around.

szundi 4y ago
With good reason. After puberty starts, your only way to influence the culture your child absorbs is which culture you allow access to. This is proved by science, of course this is not easy to communicate to a child of that age that is a culture demonstration of yours how to handle.
brink 4y ago
- throw__away7391 4y ago
  15? I thought it was 5...
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> With the internet and especially media like TikTok parents are exposing their kids to untold bad influences Some parents. Elite schools in Manhattan and Palo Alto send home fliers that parents (or at least those I know) read. Screen time of all types is monitored. And the children have a somewhat hilarious self-protecting pride in their control over digital intake. (Most of them. Thinking of two brothers, one who eats his veggies because he, and I quote, doesn’t like his poop going soft, and self moderates cartoon watching and phone fucking around. The other who steals my phone to watch loud videos.)
- dimitrios1 4y ago
  You don't have to be elite to be an involved parent. You just have to be involved. I have 2 so I know how easy it is to break out the digital babysitter, but even with the small amount I give mine I can see the influence it has, and I don't like it. I grew up with unfettered access to the internet before social media and now see how much it damaged me, I can only imagine what it is doing to kids today.
  - raxxorraxor 4y ago
    How did it damage you? And what do you think was the most negative influence?
    - dimitrios1 4y ago
      General desensitivity to most terrible things that I once used to have empathy towards. I think it's the cause of a lot of our problems today actually. We can so easily just shrug off the plight of others and keep going on our own way.
      - raxxorraxor 4y ago
        A lot of very young people often try to be as cool and detached as possible. How foolish really. I think it is important to save some empathy for later but I believe part of it is just growing up and realizing you cannot change everything and not feeling empathy towards everything is a form of self defense. I believe it is difficult to attribute this to media consumption but there very well could be a part to that. It is intuitive at least. On the other hand I try to compare it to the empathy of people that were not exposed to anything like the free media on the internet. And often they don't show increased levels of empathy either, often quite to the contrary.
    - MaxHoppersGhost 4y ago
      Watching gore videos as a 12 year old probably isn’t good.
  - 4y ago
Ardon 4y ago
I think there's an interesting phenomenon where the lower bound of "bad influences" has gotten much lower in a lot of places that used to be safe. Previously, bad influences were limited to what your local neighborhood kids were telling your kid. This could be bad, they could be torturing cats or something, but that wasn't likely. And that floor could be raised by society as a whole improving. Now, with TikTok, the only limit is what TikTok will ban. Which isn't much. The population segment of kids who aren't supervised in any way used to have an inherent limit. Not any more. So I suspect there's not necessarily a decrease in parents keeping their kids from bad influences, and more that there's an increase in access to (and severity of) bad influences. Edit: I should be clear, I want to minimize banning stuff as a solution as much as possible. I think the goal should be to move kids back into supervision and teaching by their parents, and just real people in their life. Parents, friends, educators, etc. The problem is much of America (and much of the world) is completely boned on this front by living in places that just don't form a community, like suburbs, or just low-density non-walkable areas in general. Complicated by the fact that the vast majority of parents are getting non-work time squeezed out of them by increases in cost of living without any increase in pay. Banning more stuff is the single-line-item solution, the simple way, the just-get-biden-to-do-an-executive-order way. But I would be horrified if that's all we could manage. I hope we can do the real solutions, not the deeply flawed patch that banning stuff is.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  Well, other bad influences were reading Bukowski or Ginsberg too young but I mostly agree. This is the change that has never occurred in human history. Every thread brings up that all complaints about this new media were applied to past forms of media.
  - cpach 4y ago
    I started reading Bukowski when I was around 13 or so. Many of the titles were available at the local library. I don’t think it was bad though. If anything, it was a cautionary tale of what substance abuse can lead too. And his poems were great.
sam0x17 4y ago
I for one will be giving my child unfettered and unmonitored access to the internet as I had growing up. I will be suplementing that experience with plenty of education on how to avoid some of the pitfalls, but I find the best way to learn that stuff is to experience it yourself.
- na85 4y ago
  Not sure how old you are but the internet of today is not the same as it was when I was growing up.
  - hardware2win 4y ago
    Indeed, it probably had more hardcore content
    - CapricornNoble 4y ago
      I dunno, I grew up when StileProject, Rotten.com, and Ogrish were in their heyday.....theync is just as bad, and IMO more accessible.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    Yes, today's internet is far tamer. You need to go on tor to find half the stuff I'd see daily on forum around 1999.
  - sam0x17 4y ago
    I find the opposite is true. There used to be WAY more easy access to straight up illegal stuff right out of google search.
- Angostura 4y ago
  Will you also be taking them to MacDonalds 3 times a day, but with warnings about the need for healthy eating?
  - actionablefiber 4y ago
irjustin 4y ago
> It’s no wonder so many kids think they have mental disorders or any of the other mind viruses going around. Every older generation has said this about the incoming generation - without fail. I'll take the flip side. There are so many great social medias about loving yourself, loving your kids, crying is okay for dudes, and men don't have to be a certain way (i'm a dude). It's okay not to know how to change your oil or shoot a gun, better to hug someone, allowed/proud to be gay, black, etc etc.
- api 4y ago
  I guess how it turns out for your kids will depend on which rabbit hole the social media algorithm stuffs them down.
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  I sympathize with everyone who looks at tiktok and starts to cry. That said I think this "you are allowed to show feelings" is extremely out of place and out of time. And not good general advice at all. You should not show your feelings to just anyone. You should have self worth and share with those you trust. There is a reason why PR exists for people in the public sphere. Most people will treat you kindly and it is important to remember that, but a good lesson for the internet would be to be keenly aware of the pitfalls of sharing too much and that includes your feelings very often.
  - watwut 4y ago
    Why is being visibly sad or happy something that should lower your self worth?
    - aliqot 4y ago
      Shows a lack of self control
      - actionablefiber 4y ago
        That implies that the inverse, bottling up your feelings, demonstrates self-control, and that self-control is always a desirable trait. I disagree with both. Expressing your feelings is a part of good communication, and feeling free to express sadness or frustration as needed is how you stave off the kinds of arguments and blowups that have much more severe consequences.
Angostura 4y ago
From the opening chapter of 'Three Men in a Boat', published 1889: I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it. I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too,—began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee. I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid’s knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me. I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to “walk the hospitals,” if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  The modern-day analogy is browsing WebMD. Specifically targeting young people and telling them misleading things is different.
AlexandrB 4y ago
> For all of human history across every culture, parents would do what they could to keep their kids away from “bad influences”. Not to be pedantic, but is this actually true? Parents used to send their kids to work in the factory at 10. Was that "keeping them away from bad influences"? If you're saying something is "across every culture", I think some citation is required.
- amelius 4y ago
  I bet it was better than TikTok challenges that went wrong.
  - watwut 4y ago
    Totally, photos of street kids: - https://sk.pinterest.com/pin/6544361950034985/ https://sk.pinterest.com/pin/6544361950034985/ - https://sk.pinterest.com/pin/2392606043703676/ https://sk.pinterest.com/pin/2392606043703676/ - https://sk.pinterest.com/pin/340725528070828317/ https://sk.pinterest.com/pin/340725528070828317/ - https://sk.pinterest.com/pin/824158800572041820/ https://sk.pinterest.com/pin/824158800572041820/ and so on
    - amelius 4y ago
      At least these kids were still alive.
- krona 4y ago
  It was keeping them away from starvation and the lucky were given the rudiments of a christian education (which otherwise was unheard of) as part of their 'employment'.
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  Pretty much always when people say things like this, they are talking about few % of ruling class (whether they were bureaucratic, capitalist, feudal lords or whatever), and imagine themselves as part of this class.
marcodiego 4y ago
> You move to certain areas, go to certain places, are members of certain organizations etc. which serve to socialize your kids with kids from families that have shared values. You don’t talk to strangers. This is also a good recipe to plant prejudice. I'm glad parents no longer have such a strong influence.
- DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
  This is an absolutely abhorrent take.
  - RealityVoid 4y ago
    Is it though? If anything, education is precisely this, cultivating a baseline of cultural understanding. It can be weaker or better than the education in the family, but it sets a bar for at least yee good. Of course, TikTok is not vetted and you can have a lot of bad stuff there (I think, I didn't use it a whole lot) but surely this whole thing is moral panic.
  - marcodiego 4y ago
    You have to consider how things are on underdeveloped countries: people live their whole life without ever laving their city, cities have small populations and many are relatives, people develop wrong concepts that they just don't want to question because "everybody they know has been do it that way forever". Populations develop bad habits and keep them, the lack of contact with other cultures makes them think everything different from what they are used to is wrong. That is how you get a significant population of a country to be unashamedly homophobic, atheophobic, xenophobic and develop religion-related prejudices.
xwdv 4y ago
- voidfunc 4y ago
  - foldr 4y ago
    - RealityVoid 4y ago
      I think there is a kernel of truth here in that I feel there is a lack of healthy male role models and there is a lack of support for mental health for men. Women also have their difficulties, but society is, in my perception, overall, much more supportive for female problems than male problems. In this aspect, I get where the manosfere is coming from. But I think _a lot_ of these communities come at this from a wrong direction. I will agree that "Jumping on the LGBTQ train gives them some protection and upward social-political trajectory." is kiiiind of hilarious. Just the kind of talking points that unhealthy communities make you believe.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - jimmaswell 4y ago
    It's very alluring to escape the difficulties and expectations of being a man in society. I don't feel any gender dysphoria, merely ambivalence towards it, but if the process was faster and I wouldn't have to deal with social backlash I'd do it myself. I'd certainly choose to have been born a woman if I could since my main difficulties in life have been in sex and romance, and the difficulty would drop to 0. The extra scholarship opportunities etc. would just be icing.
    - xwdv 4y ago
Biologist123 4y ago
A community that does not control the narrative its members hear, will cease to be a community. A massively dystopian reality I feel we are only beginning to understand. As an aside, a TikTok employee told me TikTok is known to trigger old maladies like anorexia etc. I was told this after mentioning that trying TikTok gave me my first nicotine cravings in several years.
- rvz 4y ago
  That sounds worse than all the other social networks put together as TikTok needs more addictive content and users to continue the addiction and profit from bad habits and cravings mentioned in other comments. It is no different and is in fact worse. A dystopia that the many have chosen to believe in who's goal is to only worsen the digital crack cocaine addiction which that is already just as bad and present in society. We do not need society to regress any further with platforms like TikTok.
- marcodiego 4y ago
  > A community that does not control the narrative its members hear, will cease to be a community. A community that controls the narrative its members hear, will very likely turn into a a society full of prejudices imposed dogmas.
  - Biologist123 4y ago
    I think you’re right. And - ick feeling - wonder if that’s where we are.
    - marcodiego 4y ago
      I think the society is still adapting to the new available media. People point at problems teenagers have with social network but it must be considered that they much more immune to problems that affect adults related to social networks: biases and beliefs in fake news. So, we'll suffer a bit but I think we'll be fine in the time-span of one generation; that is 20 years, I think.
bilsbie 4y ago
A tale as old as time.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  So yeah, I struggle with that too. Here's the difference with it as compared to all of history: scale. We live in a different world as it is radically connected like never before. Taleb refers to our current age as "Extremeistan" and the previous world history as "Mediocrastan". It's about power lawn distributions and this happens overnight now across vast swaths of the population. [1] [1] https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html
jimmaswell 4y ago
I've joked that Tik Tok is a Chinese psyop meant to weaken the next generation of the west (it's banned in China itself), but it looks less like a joke all the time.
- piggybox 4y ago
  In some sense, it's no accessible just like Google and Facebook in China. Or you can say Tiktok does not operate inside China because there's another China specific version Douyin (from the same company).
- skc 4y ago
  Indeed. From what I've read, Chinese Tik Tok looks nothing at all like what gets served up in the West. I'd imagine that for China, US/Western Tik Tok is a literal treasure trove of useful information on the state of practically every facet of US/Western life and culture. Oh the subtle and untraceable mischief you could get up to by just turning a few knobs.
  - woweoe 4y ago
    This is what a variety of outlets like Reddit and Wikipedia have descended into though. The people on the establishment side will say its "open" but the people being discriminated against will say it's biased.
- oldsklgdfth 4y ago
  > it's banned in China itself My understanding is that TikTok is the international version of Douyin. There maybe be some technical reasons for this. But feeding into the psyops narrative, it's good practice to separate your intelligence gathering into domestic and international. Ex. CIA and FBI
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
hi5eyes 4y ago
Very evidently exposing children to toxicity like 4chan/racist gaming chatrooms is harmful to development, why would it be any different when letting them watch anything on their phones Normalize keeping children away from the obscene and stop letting grown adults normalize exposing weird shit to children, should be obvious innit
- DoctorNick 4y ago
  >everything abnormal is celebrated as cultural progress That is a very curious statement.
  - hi5eyes 4y ago
    rite! normalize everything abnormal and awful, celebrate it as cultural progress. normalize letting the algorithms and bad actors manipulate and radicalize the youth. yup this is progress
    - DoctorNick 4y ago
      What, pray tell, do you think is "abnormal and awful"?
      - nemo44x 4y ago
        How about men dressed as over the top caricatures of women that want to read books to children and dance around for them?
- hi5eyes 4y ago
  It used to be frowned upon to let them watch violent movies, hence the rating system for media, as it was common sense that more exposure to violence has a bad influence and normalizes it.. but now we live in clown world
another_poster 4y ago
As an example of “bad influences” being an ancient topic, in the 1st century CE, the orator and educator Quintilian gave advice to parents in the Roman Empire wondering whether public schools would be a bad influence on their kids. Although Quintilian agreed that public schools can be a bad influence, he argued that parents were the worst influence on their own kids. “If only we did not ourselves damage our children’s characters! We ruin their infancy by spoiling them from the start. That soft upbringing which we call indulgence destroys the sinews of mind and body. If a toddler crawls around in purple, what will he not want when he grows up? […] No wonder [why children have bad character]: it was we who taught them, they heard it all from us. They see our mistresses, our male lovers; every dinner party echoes with obscene songs; things are to be seen which it is shameful to name. […] The wretched children learn these things before they know they are wrong. This is what makes them dissolute and spineless: they do not get these vices from the schools, they import them [vices] into them [the schools].”
fritztastic 4y ago
Anecdotally my teen brother, the youngest (born over a decade after the rest of us), is remarkably even-tempered and not prone to fall for bad influences. He does spend a lot of time on IG, mostly looking at cars and making informative posts on automobiles. He watches a lot of documentary-like material on YouTube about engineering, physics, and sociology. He isn't likely to get these wild ideas his peers seem to fall for. My parents though, will fall for all manners of internet misinformation- the phenomena of believing nonsense online isn't exclusive to children and young adults. With my brother I've found that if you treat younger adults and children with seriousness and listen to them as though their POV is valid, you build a trust there where they have a sense of where to discuss their doubts and insecurities so they don't fall prey to hypes and misinformation. I mention this because I had a huge amount of influence on him growing up, almost the opposite of my experience with my parents dismissing and ridiculing my concerns. Although when I was a teen social media was mostly all chat rooms, forums, myspace, and then facebook (YouTube barely existed until the end of my adolescence) where I found people who listened- and there was the potential for them to have an influence which may have led to something very similar to this article. Although social media now is vastly more powerful and common, it is not the sole variable. For many of these children it is filling a gap where a solid foundation of reality and context should be- with family members and social support structures who can be trusted to provide a reality check. I can see why many young ones listen to online personalities (many adults do, too) and although the medium through which they're getting these concepts (tiktok) plays a large part, it is not the root nor is avoiding tiktok the solution. I would add, my parents moved us far from the town with the intent to take us away from bad influences of kids who hung out downtown- what this actually did is prevent me from being able to walk to the library, while my sister still found a way to get in trouble because lo and behold, her friends had cars or knew older kids with cars. The isolation they thought might be a solution proved ineffective, but I think if their parenting had been more nutruring and less abuse/neglect she might have avoided a lot of the trouble she got into.

szundi 4y ago

With good reason. After puberty starts, your only way to influence the culture your child absorbs is which culture you allow access to. This is proved by science, of course this is not easy to communicate to a child of that age that is a culture demonstration of yours how to handle.

brink 4y ago

throw__away7391 4y ago
15? I thought it was 5...

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> With the internet and especially media like TikTok parents are exposing their kids to untold bad influences Some parents. Elite schools in Manhattan and Palo Alto send home fliers that parents (or at least those I know) read. Screen time of all types is monitored. And the children have a somewhat hilarious self-protecting pride in their control over digital intake. (Most of them. Thinking of two brothers, one who eats his veggies because he, and I quote, doesn’t like his poop going soft, and self moderates cartoon watching and phone fucking around. The other who steals my phone to watch loud videos.)

dimitrios1 4y ago
You don't have to be elite to be an involved parent. You just have to be involved. I have 2 so I know how easy it is to break out the digital babysitter, but even with the small amount I give mine I can see the influence it has, and I don't like it. I grew up with unfettered access to the internet before social media and now see how much it damaged me, I can only imagine what it is doing to kids today.
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  How did it damage you? And what do you think was the most negative influence?
  - dimitrios1 4y ago
    General desensitivity to most terrible things that I once used to have empathy towards. I think it's the cause of a lot of our problems today actually. We can so easily just shrug off the plight of others and keep going on our own way.
    - raxxorraxor 4y ago
      A lot of very young people often try to be as cool and detached as possible. How foolish really. I think it is important to save some empathy for later but I believe part of it is just growing up and realizing you cannot change everything and not feeling empathy towards everything is a form of self defense. I believe it is difficult to attribute this to media consumption but there very well could be a part to that. It is intuitive at least. On the other hand I try to compare it to the empathy of people that were not exposed to anything like the free media on the internet. And often they don't show increased levels of empathy either, often quite to the contrary.
  - MaxHoppersGhost 4y ago
    Watching gore videos as a 12 year old probably isn’t good.
- 4y ago

Ardon 4y ago

I think there's an interesting phenomenon where the lower bound of "bad influences" has gotten much lower in a lot of places that used to be safe. Previously, bad influences were limited to what your local neighborhood kids were telling your kid. This could be bad, they could be torturing cats or something, but that wasn't likely. And that floor could be raised by society as a whole improving. Now, with TikTok, the only limit is what TikTok will ban. Which isn't much. The population segment of kids who aren't supervised in any way used to have an inherent limit. Not any more. So I suspect there's not necessarily a decrease in parents keeping their kids from bad influences, and more that there's an increase in access to (and severity of) bad influences. Edit: I should be clear, I want to minimize banning stuff as a solution as much as possible. I think the goal should be to move kids back into supervision and teaching by their parents, and just real people in their life. Parents, friends, educators, etc. The problem is much of America (and much of the world) is completely boned on this front by living in places that just don't form a community, like suburbs, or just low-density non-walkable areas in general. Complicated by the fact that the vast majority of parents are getting non-work time squeezed out of them by increases in cost of living without any increase in pay. Banning more stuff is the single-line-item solution, the simple way, the just-get-biden-to-do-an-executive-order way. But I would be horrified if that's all we could manage. I hope we can do the real solutions, not the deeply flawed patch that banning stuff is.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Well, other bad influences were reading Bukowski or Ginsberg too young but I mostly agree. This is the change that has never occurred in human history. Every thread brings up that all complaints about this new media were applied to past forms of media.
- cpach 4y ago
  I started reading Bukowski when I was around 13 or so. Many of the titles were available at the local library. I don’t think it was bad though. If anything, it was a cautionary tale of what substance abuse can lead too. And his poems were great.

sam0x17 4y ago

I for one will be giving my child unfettered and unmonitored access to the internet as I had growing up. I will be suplementing that experience with plenty of education on how to avoid some of the pitfalls, but I find the best way to learn that stuff is to experience it yourself.

na85 4y ago
Not sure how old you are but the internet of today is not the same as it was when I was growing up.
- hardware2win 4y ago
  Indeed, it probably had more hardcore content
  - CapricornNoble 4y ago
    I dunno, I grew up when StileProject, Rotten.com, and Ogrish were in their heyday.....theync is just as bad, and IMO more accessible.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  Yes, today's internet is far tamer. You need to go on tor to find half the stuff I'd see daily on forum around 1999.
- sam0x17 4y ago
  I find the opposite is true. There used to be WAY more easy access to straight up illegal stuff right out of google search.
Angostura 4y ago
Will you also be taking them to MacDonalds 3 times a day, but with warnings about the need for healthy eating?
- actionablefiber 4y ago

irjustin 4y ago

> It’s no wonder so many kids think they have mental disorders or any of the other mind viruses going around. Every older generation has said this about the incoming generation - without fail. I'll take the flip side. There are so many great social medias about loving yourself, loving your kids, crying is okay for dudes, and men don't have to be a certain way (i'm a dude). It's okay not to know how to change your oil or shoot a gun, better to hug someone, allowed/proud to be gay, black, etc etc.

api 4y ago
I guess how it turns out for your kids will depend on which rabbit hole the social media algorithm stuffs them down.
raxxorraxor 4y ago
I sympathize with everyone who looks at tiktok and starts to cry. That said I think this "you are allowed to show feelings" is extremely out of place and out of time. And not good general advice at all. You should not show your feelings to just anyone. You should have self worth and share with those you trust. There is a reason why PR exists for people in the public sphere. Most people will treat you kindly and it is important to remember that, but a good lesson for the internet would be to be keenly aware of the pitfalls of sharing too much and that includes your feelings very often.
- watwut 4y ago
  Why is being visibly sad or happy something that should lower your self worth?
  - aliqot 4y ago
    Shows a lack of self control
    - actionablefiber 4y ago
      That implies that the inverse, bottling up your feelings, demonstrates self-control, and that self-control is always a desirable trait. I disagree with both. Expressing your feelings is a part of good communication, and feeling free to express sadness or frustration as needed is how you stave off the kinds of arguments and blowups that have much more severe consequences.

Angostura 4y ago

From the opening chapter of 'Three Men in a Boat', published 1889: I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it. I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too,—began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee. I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid’s knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me. I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to “walk the hospitals,” if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.

nerdponx 4y ago
The modern-day analogy is browsing WebMD. Specifically targeting young people and telling them misleading things is different.

AlexandrB 4y ago

> For all of human history across every culture, parents would do what they could to keep their kids away from “bad influences”. Not to be pedantic, but is this actually true? Parents used to send their kids to work in the factory at 10. Was that "keeping them away from bad influences"? If you're saying something is "across every culture", I think some citation is required.

amelius 4y ago
I bet it was better than TikTok challenges that went wrong.
- watwut 4y ago
  Totally, photos of street kids: - https://sk.pinterest.com/pin/6544361950034985/ https://sk.pinterest.com/pin/6544361950034985/ - https://sk.pinterest.com/pin/2392606043703676/ https://sk.pinterest.com/pin/2392606043703676/ - https://sk.pinterest.com/pin/340725528070828317/ https://sk.pinterest.com/pin/340725528070828317/ - https://sk.pinterest.com/pin/824158800572041820/ https://sk.pinterest.com/pin/824158800572041820/ and so on
  - amelius 4y ago
    At least these kids were still alive.
krona 4y ago
It was keeping them away from starvation and the lucky were given the rudiments of a christian education (which otherwise was unheard of) as part of their 'employment'.
KptMarchewa 4y ago
Pretty much always when people say things like this, they are talking about few % of ruling class (whether they were bureaucratic, capitalist, feudal lords or whatever), and imagine themselves as part of this class.

marcodiego 4y ago

> You move to certain areas, go to certain places, are members of certain organizations etc. which serve to socialize your kids with kids from families that have shared values. You don’t talk to strangers. This is also a good recipe to plant prejudice. I'm glad parents no longer have such a strong influence.

DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
This is an absolutely abhorrent take.
- RealityVoid 4y ago
  Is it though? If anything, education is precisely this, cultivating a baseline of cultural understanding. It can be weaker or better than the education in the family, but it sets a bar for at least yee good. Of course, TikTok is not vetted and you can have a lot of bad stuff there (I think, I didn't use it a whole lot) but surely this whole thing is moral panic.
- marcodiego 4y ago
  You have to consider how things are on underdeveloped countries: people live their whole life without ever laving their city, cities have small populations and many are relatives, people develop wrong concepts that they just don't want to question because "everybody they know has been do it that way forever". Populations develop bad habits and keep them, the lack of contact with other cultures makes them think everything different from what they are used to is wrong. That is how you get a significant population of a country to be unashamedly homophobic, atheophobic, xenophobic and develop religion-related prejudices.

xwdv 4y ago

voidfunc 4y ago
- foldr 4y ago
  - RealityVoid 4y ago
    I think there is a kernel of truth here in that I feel there is a lack of healthy male role models and there is a lack of support for mental health for men. Women also have their difficulties, but society is, in my perception, overall, much more supportive for female problems than male problems. In this aspect, I get where the manosfere is coming from. But I think _a lot_ of these communities come at this from a wrong direction. I will agree that "Jumping on the LGBTQ train gives them some protection and upward social-political trajectory." is kiiiind of hilarious. Just the kind of talking points that unhealthy communities make you believe.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- jimmaswell 4y ago
  It's very alluring to escape the difficulties and expectations of being a man in society. I don't feel any gender dysphoria, merely ambivalence towards it, but if the process was faster and I wouldn't have to deal with social backlash I'd do it myself. I'd certainly choose to have been born a woman if I could since my main difficulties in life have been in sex and romance, and the difficulty would drop to 0. The extra scholarship opportunities etc. would just be icing.
  - xwdv 4y ago

Biologist123 4y ago

A community that does not control the narrative its members hear, will cease to be a community. A massively dystopian reality I feel we are only beginning to understand. As an aside, a TikTok employee told me TikTok is known to trigger old maladies like anorexia etc. I was told this after mentioning that trying TikTok gave me my first nicotine cravings in several years.

rvz 4y ago
That sounds worse than all the other social networks put together as TikTok needs more addictive content and users to continue the addiction and profit from bad habits and cravings mentioned in other comments. It is no different and is in fact worse. A dystopia that the many have chosen to believe in who's goal is to only worsen the digital crack cocaine addiction which that is already just as bad and present in society. We do not need society to regress any further with platforms like TikTok.
marcodiego 4y ago
> A community that does not control the narrative its members hear, will cease to be a community. A community that controls the narrative its members hear, will very likely turn into a a society full of prejudices imposed dogmas.
- Biologist123 4y ago
  I think you’re right. And - ick feeling - wonder if that’s where we are.
  - marcodiego 4y ago
    I think the society is still adapting to the new available media. People point at problems teenagers have with social network but it must be considered that they much more immune to problems that affect adults related to social networks: biases and beliefs in fake news. So, we'll suffer a bit but I think we'll be fine in the time-span of one generation; that is 20 years, I think.

bilsbie 4y ago

A tale as old as time.

nemo44x 4y ago
So yeah, I struggle with that too. Here's the difference with it as compared to all of history: scale. We live in a different world as it is radically connected like never before. Taleb refers to our current age as "Extremeistan" and the previous world history as "Mediocrastan". It's about power lawn distributions and this happens overnight now across vast swaths of the population. [1] [1] https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html

jimmaswell 4y ago

I've joked that Tik Tok is a Chinese psyop meant to weaken the next generation of the west (it's banned in China itself), but it looks less like a joke all the time.

piggybox 4y ago
In some sense, it's no accessible just like Google and Facebook in China. Or you can say Tiktok does not operate inside China because there's another China specific version Douyin (from the same company).
skc 4y ago
Indeed. From what I've read, Chinese Tik Tok looks nothing at all like what gets served up in the West. I'd imagine that for China, US/Western Tik Tok is a literal treasure trove of useful information on the state of practically every facet of US/Western life and culture. Oh the subtle and untraceable mischief you could get up to by just turning a few knobs.
- woweoe 4y ago
  This is what a variety of outlets like Reddit and Wikipedia have descended into though. The people on the establishment side will say its "open" but the people being discriminated against will say it's biased.
oldsklgdfth 4y ago
> it's banned in China itself My understanding is that TikTok is the international version of Douyin. There maybe be some technical reasons for this. But feeding into the psyops narrative, it's good practice to separate your intelligence gathering into domestic and international. Ex. CIA and FBI
deleted 4y ago
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hi5eyes 4y ago

Very evidently exposing children to toxicity like 4chan/racist gaming chatrooms is harmful to development, why would it be any different when letting them watch anything on their phones Normalize keeping children away from the obscene and stop letting grown adults normalize exposing weird shit to children, should be obvious innit

DoctorNick 4y ago
>everything abnormal is celebrated as cultural progress That is a very curious statement.
- hi5eyes 4y ago
  rite! normalize everything abnormal and awful, celebrate it as cultural progress. normalize letting the algorithms and bad actors manipulate and radicalize the youth. yup this is progress
  - DoctorNick 4y ago
    What, pray tell, do you think is "abnormal and awful"?
    - nemo44x 4y ago
      How about men dressed as over the top caricatures of women that want to read books to children and dance around for them?
hi5eyes 4y ago
It used to be frowned upon to let them watch violent movies, hence the rating system for media, as it was common sense that more exposure to violence has a bad influence and normalizes it.. but now we live in clown world

another_poster 4y ago

As an example of “bad influences” being an ancient topic, in the 1st century CE, the orator and educator Quintilian gave advice to parents in the Roman Empire wondering whether public schools would be a bad influence on their kids. Although Quintilian agreed that public schools can be a bad influence, he argued that parents were the worst influence on their own kids. “If only we did not ourselves damage our children’s characters! We ruin their infancy by spoiling them from the start. That soft upbringing which we call indulgence destroys the sinews of mind and body. If a toddler crawls around in purple, what will he not want when he grows up? […] No wonder [why children have bad character]: it was we who taught them, they heard it all from us. They see our mistresses, our male lovers; every dinner party echoes with obscene songs; things are to be seen which it is shameful to name. […] The wretched children learn these things before they know they are wrong. This is what makes them dissolute and spineless: they do not get these vices from the schools, they import them [vices] into them [the schools].”

fritztastic 4y ago

Anecdotally my teen brother, the youngest (born over a decade after the rest of us), is remarkably even-tempered and not prone to fall for bad influences. He does spend a lot of time on IG, mostly looking at cars and making informative posts on automobiles. He watches a lot of documentary-like material on YouTube about engineering, physics, and sociology. He isn't likely to get these wild ideas his peers seem to fall for. My parents though, will fall for all manners of internet misinformation- the phenomena of believing nonsense online isn't exclusive to children and young adults. With my brother I've found that if you treat younger adults and children with seriousness and listen to them as though their POV is valid, you build a trust there where they have a sense of where to discuss their doubts and insecurities so they don't fall prey to hypes and misinformation. I mention this because I had a huge amount of influence on him growing up, almost the opposite of my experience with my parents dismissing and ridiculing my concerns. Although when I was a teen social media was mostly all chat rooms, forums, myspace, and then facebook (YouTube barely existed until the end of my adolescence) where I found people who listened- and there was the potential for them to have an influence which may have led to something very similar to this article. Although social media now is vastly more powerful and common, it is not the sole variable. For many of these children it is filling a gap where a solid foundation of reality and context should be- with family members and social support structures who can be trusted to provide a reality check. I can see why many young ones listen to online personalities (many adults do, too) and although the medium through which they're getting these concepts (tiktok) plays a large part, it is not the root nor is avoiding tiktok the solution. I would add, my parents moved us far from the town with the intent to take us away from bad influences of kids who hung out downtown- what this actually did is prevent me from being able to walk to the library, while my sister still found a way to get in trouble because lo and behold, her friends had cars or knew older kids with cars. The isolation they thought might be a solution proved ineffective, but I think if their parenting had been more nutruring and less abuse/neglect she might have avoided a lot of the trouble she got into.