10 ms·

Having exited my teen years just before the smartphones became ubiquitous in the US, I got the opportunity to watch externally how social media and other simila

by d_sem 4y ago

Having exited my teen years just before the smartphones became ubiquitous in the US, I got the opportunity to watch externally how social media and other similar systems effected the day-to-day of my younger siblings through their teen years. It was not positive. Maybe someone younger can attest to my observations: - more localized isolation as kids spent a higher % of their attention in internet communities - less cultural cohesion due to hyper diversity in memes resulting in fewer shared experiences. - a shift in perceived life value/success based on internet influencers and incentive to emulate their lifestyles. - always online presence increasing the stakes making embarrassing or uncool mistakes permanent and detrimental to one's image.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sct202 4y ago
The always online I think is a big issue, because now if you're not invited to things or not popular it's very in your face with livestreams that your friends or schoolmates are all having fun together at that exact moment without you.
- pipeline_peak 4y ago
  I think it's also that you and all your friends are invited to completely different livestreams. No one feels left out even though they physically are. Like it or not, you're supposed to fit in with people around you. If you can't do that then there's something either wrong with you or them. That inherent urge to fit in is being digitally compensated, and I don't think it's healthy to avoid being challenged by all these factors we take for granted, from something as simple as eye contact to behavioral consequences.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    Interesting take. I guess your and my high school experiences were very different.
    - pipeline_peak 4y ago
      I was in hs from 2009 to 13 and it was a lonely, niche road filled with watching youtube rants lol. This comes from my experience thinking I didn't need to fit in for a very long time.
      - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
        I graduated in the time before YouTube. I read books alone and left my small town when I could. Sometimes the solution to a better life is changing the people around you and not settling.
wutbrodo 4y ago
An additional one I noticed with my female cousins was that a lot of fun was sucked out of high school girls' social expression/reconnaissance. On the recon side, gossiping is a fun bonding activity, but scrolling through snaps/reels is relative drudgery. On the performance side, "be pretty and vivacious at fun social events" is no longer sufficient without obsessively managing your profile's brand. This doesn't only include posing for, curating, and editing photos, but a bunch of arcane rules about tagging etiquette, who's included in your photos, etc. This is all from the horse's mouth, with a little bit of editorializing. The social environment of an in-crowd high school girl has always been extremely intense, but these tools hage made the process simultaneously more work and less fun, to hear my cousins tell it.
- shaunxcode 4y ago
  We have distributed the spectacle. Now each of us is responsible for projecting our chosen subliminal intent.
- danenania 4y ago
  On that note, I wonder how much of these results are due to social media specifically and how much is caused by addiction to screens more generally, and the resulting insomnia, lack of exercise/time outside, and lack of human connection. I know that in some respects, social media is uniquely bad, but perhaps the bulk of the problem is just being hooked on anything that makes you look at a phone or a screen all the time and neglect other aspects of life. Social media just happens to be the most popular thing currently to be hooked on.
  - prawn 4y ago
    I think you're on the right track. Personal screens consume so much time. Many of us defend it as just killing time, or researching, or keeping abreast of things but it eats up more than that until the average person feels harried and barely able to keep up. I know that's true for me.
oneoff786 4y ago
> less cultural cohesion due to hyper diversity in memes resulting in fewer shared experiences People being different is bad?
- hosh 4y ago
  It's not. But people also need some kind of shared meaning and a sense of belonging as well.
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    And how did memes make that harder
    - hosh 4y ago
      Memes don't necessarily make it harder. However, memes can be used to simultaneously include and exclude -- as references to something the "tribe" gets, but others outside the tribe do not. Inside jokes are an example of such references. When you make hyperspecialized memes, and you have many of them, you're basically fragmenting a larger pool of shared meaning into many smaller ones. Diversity, and of itself, is not inherently a virtue -- although lots of people would like it to be. Rather, diversity in the ecological sense, leads to more resiliency. There's still have to be some kind of unifying aspect (such as, unifying on humanity as a whole, or better yet, the whole earth as a whole) within which there is diversity. There's a sense of belonging to something greater than you while simultaneously participating and relating from the uniqueness of an individual.
- slowmovintarget 4y ago
  Teenagers having the idea reinforced through social media that being different is bad, is bad. Left to their own devices, that is the default social order that children create.
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    But come on. Diversity is not actually bad. People being diverse even if they think it’s bad is not bad. And memes are not a meaningful driver of diversity.
tarkin2 4y ago
Shared experiences. These help you learn to socialise: you can talk about what you watched and heard last night on television with a wide and local social group. You feel closer to your community through having shared things to discuss and learn the skills to operate within a social group. Without this you feel isolated which leads to depression. It seems to me, with modern technology, things are shared amongst people to create shared experiences and discussions but these are not people within your local physical community--leading, again, to isolation and the dangers therein.
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> It was not positive. Can you elaborate? I only ever see children like 9-14 happy doing the latest Instagram or TikTok dance craze in the park/at the mall/with groups of their friends.
- function_seven 4y ago
  What you don't see are the kids that weren't invited to the park or mall. The ones those kids are possibly making fun of. Or those same kids you did see, but later at night as they stress about what to wear tomorrow, why Jake didn't like their post earlier today even though he liked Jasmine's post and Mia's post. Many characters in "Nosedive" (Black Mirror episode) looked really happy as well.
  - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    How does one measure whether it's a net positive (for those who are laughing/dancing with their friends at the park) or a net negative (for those like you described) without being biased/projecting? It feels a little "anarchist" to say "down with all social media! it's most likely a total net negative! nobody should be allowed to enjoy it because it isn't inclusive of those who might be left out!"
    - function_seven 4y ago
      I can't answer your question, but do note that there are many who are studying this and coming to some similar conclusions. (But of course it's really hard to separate the moral panic from the real trends!) I agree that we shouldn't just ban anything that exclude some users. I'm not as shrill as some people are about the dangers, but I do have a generally negative opinion of childhoods that are spent so online. I have several young relatives—ages 9-22—that are heavily online. For the most part, they're the popular kids in their schools. Yet I see and hear constantly how they would never dare do things because of the pile-on potentials. Things I (a nerd who desperately wanted to be cool) would still have done. When I was in elementary and middle school, I was definitely in the lower quartile of popularity. I was bullied occasionally, and I would sometimes dread going to school because of my social standing. BUT, I had friends at home! I had a life outside of school that I could return to after a short day of that stress. Even in school, the social pressures abated during class. If Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok existed during my school years, I would have found no refuge from the hierarchies and drama of school. The game I was "losing" between first bell and final bell would have gone 24/7. My only saving grace would have been parents that refused to let me play the game in the first place. I think parents and schools should lean harder in this direction. Kids need to learn their social skills in small settings first, before they're exposed to literally the whole world. An awkward 11-year-old can only do so much "damage" to themselves in the limited setting of IRL. Let's get the mistakes out of the way before they're broadcast across space and time.

by d_sem 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

sct202 4y ago

The always online I think is a big issue, because now if you're not invited to things or not popular it's very in your face with livestreams that your friends or schoolmates are all having fun together at that exact moment without you.

pipeline_peak 4y ago
I think it's also that you and all your friends are invited to completely different livestreams. No one feels left out even though they physically are. Like it or not, you're supposed to fit in with people around you. If you can't do that then there's something either wrong with you or them. That inherent urge to fit in is being digitally compensated, and I don't think it's healthy to avoid being challenged by all these factors we take for granted, from something as simple as eye contact to behavioral consequences.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  Interesting take. I guess your and my high school experiences were very different.
  - pipeline_peak 4y ago
    I was in hs from 2009 to 13 and it was a lonely, niche road filled with watching youtube rants lol. This comes from my experience thinking I didn't need to fit in for a very long time.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      I graduated in the time before YouTube. I read books alone and left my small town when I could. Sometimes the solution to a better life is changing the people around you and not settling.

wutbrodo 4y ago

An additional one I noticed with my female cousins was that a lot of fun was sucked out of high school girls' social expression/reconnaissance. On the recon side, gossiping is a fun bonding activity, but scrolling through snaps/reels is relative drudgery. On the performance side, "be pretty and vivacious at fun social events" is no longer sufficient without obsessively managing your profile's brand. This doesn't only include posing for, curating, and editing photos, but a bunch of arcane rules about tagging etiquette, who's included in your photos, etc. This is all from the horse's mouth, with a little bit of editorializing. The social environment of an in-crowd high school girl has always been extremely intense, but these tools hage made the process simultaneously more work and less fun, to hear my cousins tell it.

shaunxcode 4y ago
We have distributed the spectacle. Now each of us is responsible for projecting our chosen subliminal intent.
danenania 4y ago
On that note, I wonder how much of these results are due to social media specifically and how much is caused by addiction to screens more generally, and the resulting insomnia, lack of exercise/time outside, and lack of human connection. I know that in some respects, social media is uniquely bad, but perhaps the bulk of the problem is just being hooked on anything that makes you look at a phone or a screen all the time and neglect other aspects of life. Social media just happens to be the most popular thing currently to be hooked on.
- prawn 4y ago
  I think you're on the right track. Personal screens consume so much time. Many of us defend it as just killing time, or researching, or keeping abreast of things but it eats up more than that until the average person feels harried and barely able to keep up. I know that's true for me.

oneoff786 4y ago

> less cultural cohesion due to hyper diversity in memes resulting in fewer shared experiences People being different is bad?

hosh 4y ago
It's not. But people also need some kind of shared meaning and a sense of belonging as well.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  And how did memes make that harder
  - hosh 4y ago
    Memes don't necessarily make it harder. However, memes can be used to simultaneously include and exclude -- as references to something the "tribe" gets, but others outside the tribe do not. Inside jokes are an example of such references. When you make hyperspecialized memes, and you have many of them, you're basically fragmenting a larger pool of shared meaning into many smaller ones. Diversity, and of itself, is not inherently a virtue -- although lots of people would like it to be. Rather, diversity in the ecological sense, leads to more resiliency. There's still have to be some kind of unifying aspect (such as, unifying on humanity as a whole, or better yet, the whole earth as a whole) within which there is diversity. There's a sense of belonging to something greater than you while simultaneously participating and relating from the uniqueness of an individual.
slowmovintarget 4y ago
Teenagers having the idea reinforced through social media that being different is bad, is bad. Left to their own devices, that is the default social order that children create.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  But come on. Diversity is not actually bad. People being diverse even if they think it’s bad is not bad. And memes are not a meaningful driver of diversity.

tarkin2 4y ago

Shared experiences. These help you learn to socialise: you can talk about what you watched and heard last night on television with a wide and local social group. You feel closer to your community through having shared things to discuss and learn the skills to operate within a social group. Without this you feel isolated which leads to depression. It seems to me, with modern technology, things are shared amongst people to create shared experiences and discussions but these are not people within your local physical community--leading, again, to isolation and the dangers therein.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

> It was not positive. Can you elaborate? I only ever see children like 9-14 happy doing the latest Instagram or TikTok dance craze in the park/at the mall/with groups of their friends.

function_seven 4y ago
What you don't see are the kids that weren't invited to the park or mall. The ones those kids are possibly making fun of. Or those same kids you did see, but later at night as they stress about what to wear tomorrow, why Jake didn't like their post earlier today even though he liked Jasmine's post and Mia's post. Many characters in "Nosedive" (Black Mirror episode) looked really happy as well.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  How does one measure whether it's a net positive (for those who are laughing/dancing with their friends at the park) or a net negative (for those like you described) without being biased/projecting? It feels a little "anarchist" to say "down with all social media! it's most likely a total net negative! nobody should be allowed to enjoy it because it isn't inclusive of those who might be left out!"
  - function_seven 4y ago
    I can't answer your question, but do note that there are many who are studying this and coming to some similar conclusions. (But of course it's really hard to separate the moral panic from the real trends!) I agree that we shouldn't just ban anything that exclude some users. I'm not as shrill as some people are about the dangers, but I do have a generally negative opinion of childhoods that are spent so online. I have several young relatives—ages 9-22—that are heavily online. For the most part, they're the popular kids in their schools. Yet I see and hear constantly how they would never dare do things because of the pile-on potentials. Things I (a nerd who desperately wanted to be cool) would still have done. When I was in elementary and middle school, I was definitely in the lower quartile of popularity. I was bullied occasionally, and I would sometimes dread going to school because of my social standing. BUT, I had friends at home! I had a life outside of school that I could return to after a short day of that stress. Even in school, the social pressures abated during class. If Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok existed during my school years, I would have found no refuge from the hierarchies and drama of school. The game I was "losing" between first bell and final bell would have gone 24/7. My only saving grace would have been parents that refused to let me play the game in the first place. I think parents and schools should lean harder in this direction. Kids need to learn their social skills in small settings first, before they're exposed to literally the whole world. An awkward 11-year-old can only do so much "damage" to themselves in the limited setting of IRL. Let's get the mistakes out of the way before they're broadcast across space and time.