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And thirdly: would anyone complain if children were spending 5 hours and 45 minutes a day reading books? Watching television was much more toxic than digital m

And thirdly: would anyone complain if children were spending 5 hours and 45 minutes a day reading books? Watching television was much more toxic than digital media. Network television spoon fed content targeted at a lowest common denominator to everyone, that content was consumed passively. It was horrible. Digital media allows active selection of content, and provides access to much higher quality information, if you want it. Back in the day, you were lucky if your public library had even one book on a subject you were interested in, and if it did, it was probably mediocre at best. And highschool libaries? Pfft. Brittanica? Pathetic compared to Wikipedia. Today, kids have instant access to all of human knowledge as digital media. It's a false equivalency to compare TV time to digital media time.

teekert 2y ago
Sure, my son enjoys high quality content like "Life on our planet", but he also has a Smartphone, which is much more addictive than a TV with, indeed, mediocre content. Moreover, all my friends were outside, on the streets, in the forest. Not so much right now.
Cheer2171 2y ago
Come off it. These kids aren't spending that time reading Wikipedia, they're on social media platforms that optimize for engagement and gambling apps disguised as video games.
notachatbot1234 2y ago
Have you seen what children are doing on their phones? It's not sophisticated discourse on all human knowledge or reading informative articles. It's digital heroin, ads and rage content.
sickofparadox 2y ago
There has to be a name for this absolutely divorced from reality whataboutism. At best, kids may spend one of those ~6 hours watching edutainment, but it is far more likely to be entirely spent scrolling on Twitter, Tiktok, or Instagram for microdoses of engagement dopamine.
autoexec 2y ago
> Watching television was much more toxic than digital media. That's a wild take. TV didn't spy on you while you watched it. TV didn't send you a steady stream of notifications that sounded alarms or vibrated in your pocket at various hours even if you weren't at home just to make you feel like you were missing out and to keep you checking back in. TV didn't have microtransactions or lootboxes either. TV wasn't pay to win. TV didn't have ads targeted to an individual. Ads on TV could only be targeted to a market and to broad demographics (kids before school starts and during cartoons, women in the day and while soaps were airing, etc) and there was some regulation on the kinds of advertising you show children and programing intended for children was developed with oversight from the network. Elsagate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate) was impossible on television. There was too much perl clutching over what kids could see on TV, but these days parents hand their kids a tablet with youtube and they are at the mercy of an algorithm that's designed to show them the most extreme and divisive content.

teekert 2y ago

Sure, my son enjoys high quality content like "Life on our planet", but he also has a Smartphone, which is much more addictive than a TV with, indeed, mediocre content. Moreover, all my friends were outside, on the streets, in the forest. Not so much right now.

Cheer2171 2y ago

Come off it. These kids aren't spending that time reading Wikipedia, they're on social media platforms that optimize for engagement and gambling apps disguised as video games.

notachatbot1234 2y ago

Have you seen what children are doing on their phones? It's not sophisticated discourse on all human knowledge or reading informative articles. It's digital heroin, ads and rage content.

sickofparadox 2y ago

There has to be a name for this absolutely divorced from reality whataboutism. At best, kids may spend one of those ~6 hours watching edutainment, but it is far more likely to be entirely spent scrolling on Twitter, Tiktok, or Instagram for microdoses of engagement dopamine.

autoexec 2y ago

> Watching television was much more toxic than digital media. That's a wild take. TV didn't spy on you while you watched it. TV didn't send you a steady stream of notifications that sounded alarms or vibrated in your pocket at various hours even if you weren't at home just to make you feel like you were missing out and to keep you checking back in. TV didn't have microtransactions or lootboxes either. TV wasn't pay to win. TV didn't have ads targeted to an individual. Ads on TV could only be targeted to a market and to broad demographics (kids before school starts and during cartoons, women in the day and while soaps were airing, etc) and there was some regulation on the kinds of advertising you show children and programing intended for children was developed with oversight from the network. Elsagate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate) was impossible on television. There was too much perl clutching over what kids could see on TV, but these days parents hand their kids a tablet with youtube and they are at the mercy of an algorithm that's designed to show them the most extreme and divisive content.