Parents used to warn their kids that literature would rot their brains. Then it was the radio, TV, and video games. Now it's TikTok.
Socrates bemoaned those young'ns who had the audacity to read their Homer, instead of memorizing it.
Eh, there is sufficient evidence to recommend children and teenagers having limited internet and social media access during their formative years at this point.
The tiktok algorithm of mindless doomscrolling funny little bits all short and digestible for a decaying attention span is just the most egregious example why restrictions should at least be considered.
You could say that about a lot of things, though. Video games and TV were commonly criticized this way. And it was a popular meme on Reddit that people would be so addicted to the site that they'd spend hours scrolling it.
Criticizing tik tok is just popular on sites like this because people here really don't like tik tok.
At any rate, parents can already try to restrict their children's access. But governments are gonna have a hard time doing so without hurting everyone as a whole (eg, see the attempts of some US states to require giving your ID to porn sites). Dunno if you remember being a kid, but I found my way around every restriction my parents set and I just disliked them for it.
Red Dead Redepmption 2 is not a video game.
"That's not a game at all. That's like fucking Shakespeare."
-Tenacious D
Tik tok is legitimately rotting their brains though.
They don't adapt, though.
The kids always adapt though.
There is a strong survivorship bias in this though. Some kids do adapt, maybe even most, but many still are harmed, and have been by unhealthy exposure to radio, television, videogames, etc. in the past. Social media is even wreaking havoc in the older generations right now.
It's easy to point at the survivors and the success stories and say see, there is nothing to worry about - but that's also a bit like pointing at the lifelong smokers who do not get lung cancer as an argument against promoting non-smoking.
Yes, the trend of making more and more mentally disruptive technology has been continuing. Yes, capitalists have managed to make more and more effective attention/brain drains…that’s exactly what we’re saying.
The kids “adapt” in that the world has changed and kids have no choice but to live in the world they grew up in. It doesn’t mean the above things aren’t true. It just means things change, and I dunno about you, but I don’t see things moving in the most positive direction. Angrier people, less and less able to have nuanced discussions, people becoming more entrenched and hostile about their views, more instances of thinking people with differing opinions are “evil…”—that shit is in large part due to social media, not to mention network news (both “advancements” of the exact type were discussing).I mean, shit, look how much radio has changed. From old timey radio broadcasts with the family sitting around the fire hearing tales of Redd McGibbon and Bullet to fuckin Howard stern making strippers do math so people can laugh at them and goddamn Rush Limbaugh. See what we’re saying?
Tiktok definitely doesn't fall into anything intelligent that's for sure.
I spend a lot of time on TikTok and once the algorithm knows what you like it's a fantastic way to waste your time, the same way reddit and YouTube are.
They were making a typical "TikTok bad brain rot user stupid cringe natural selection🤓☝️" "joke". Don't bother explaining that to them because they don't care
They’re not wrong. Screen time is known to be harmful to children. And radio time may have been as well: hard to say, because kids aren’t listening to that kind of radio anymore. Two things can be true at once: pointing fingers at something that doesn’t apply anymore (when’s the last time you listened to a radio serial?) doesn’t invalidate the harms today.
Here’s what the actual experts say:
Talk radio still rots a lot of brains of all ages. It's insidious as a lot of folks still have that on in the background while driving to work or cooking etc, as compared to video and TV where you have to look directly at it and think about the message received with your whole brain.
Tiktok is digitial media, the attention span is the issue, not the media format.
I know a few people who admitted to me without me even probing them that they cannot handle watching or listening to a video over 1 minute long.
I am not for censoring Tiktok, however I will never used it since its horrible on privacy and has "back doors" to a powerful and malicious government. And I like videos that are long with good discussion or information.
No, tiktok is not digital media. It's a chinese cyber warfare weapon of mass destruction.
I think your right about that. It can be used to divide and subvert the west, but American big tech platforms do the same domestically and abroad.
And they were right.
wildly gesturing at everything around
You're correct that it has been overblown in the past. That does not invalidate what is occurring, doubly so since we have scientific proof now.
You are equating "Old man yells at cloud" to "hundreds of nuclear scientists says cloud of radioactive gas is harmful and here are dozens of papers proving it."
They are not the same thing.
Weren't they right? I mean, the people wildly gesturing at everything around?
To be fair as someone who over my life has transitioned from reading, to the internet, to videos, to short form content. it does have an effect on your attention span.
My advice. Do what you will, but never stop reading. Pick up some books.
TikTok conditions you to process media very quickly, id it doesn’t catch you within a few seconds you’re on the next one — that sort of thing then applies access the board and not only when browsing TT
Especially since children are still developing their brains this makes it even more problematic
TikTok, Social media, video games, rock and metal music, rap music, Dungeons and Dragons, Rock 'n' Roll, movies, phones, bikes, novels, older generations will always chose a scapegoat to focus on
Eventually it will be our turn
Just so you know, newspapers used to be pretty terrible in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were ripe with exaggerations and sometimes downright lies. The issue with TikTok and social media in general is how easy it is for absolute idiots to spread lies and harmful information to children (and naïve adults).
Here's an article on the topic from the New York Public Library.
If I sold newspapers, and I heard the radio spreading the news as well, you bet your ass I'm going to slander the shit out of it.
Which is why lots of people believe the storiea abour "War of the Worlds". Because of newspaper lies.
newspapers used to be pretty terrible in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Periodism is still terrible, not in the form of newspapers, but the internet, and it's why you usually end your searches with a 'reddit' at the end (hopefully lemmy will fully replace that soon)
Is that even unique to social media? We have "news" sites that do the same thing (like the various alt right ones). If the goal is to tackle misinformation, we should tackle misinformation directly.
Social media amplifies their voice.
Counterpoint: They used to be able to memorise the works of Homer.
and now they're able to memorize all the dances/emotes from a specific influencer/streamer. Almost the same, no?
No.
Like not even close. Even if we aren't judging each on the difficulty of memorizing a two second emote or dance versus an entire novel, things that are physical are more easily learned.
Ask yourself this, did they have to commit themselves to memorizing all of if? No, they casually memorized them all through watching it. No one has ever casually memorized a novel on accident.
Plus memorizing literature is unquestionably more valuable than learning what some micro-celebrity that doesn't fucking matter is making faces about.
Who did?
I don't know. It's probably apocryphal, but I just stole what he had said in the title.
Tiktok is not comparable to these other technologies, as TikTok uses an individualized algorithm to manipulate its users.
The fact that people have been concerned about this for generations doesn't automatically nullify the point. Attention and focus are skills which children must develop through boredom and long-form focus. TikTok brain is making that harder and harder for children to learn.
Worth pointing out here is that many of these criticisms all along have been totally on-target. The printing press brought on wars of religion and a multitude of poorly-thought out, often racist/hate-filled screeds along with advances in learning and science. Radio has brought us Father Coughlin and Limbaugh along with democratizing politics the way printed pamphlets couldn't. I'm sure I don't have to point out that both TV and the internet have their brain-rotting sides as well.
The fact that something won doesn't mean it's better. The fact that it's better doesn't mean it doesn't have serious flaws.
John Philip Sousa had only terrible things to say about... wait for it... player pianos.
I hear he liked to blow his own horn. And I confuse him with Adolphe Sax who nearly died multiple times before inventing the saxophone.
Youtube shorts, TikTok, Facebook Story, Snapchat Reel: they are all the same. If you block TikTok, then you need to block others as well.
Legal wise, it's very hard to target a very specific type of media consumed. How can you really restrict that? IMHO, the only thing that might have better effects is educating people.
Same for drugs, alcool and tobacco. They are a all addictives at different levels, and they have different consequences as well that neeeds to be taken account.
They were right about TV and TikTok.
I hope we can all agree that media, like drugs, exists on a spectrum of less harmful (books / weed) to very harmful (torture porn / bath salts). As time passes and more things are added to our lists we should no longer generalize and say everything in our once very small category is all good or all bad.
Meanwhile, parents are on all of these believing every conspiracy theory they see.
They're all mediums. The content on them can be anything from mindless to informative.It's all up to who's curating it. Do you leave it up to the algos and advertisers or actually provide something to your kids? Up to a certain age letting them do whatever on the internet is idiotic like letting them run around a bookshop that carries porn and mein Kampf.
As always the issue is loneliness. This has been proven since the 1970's with the rat park experiment.
Wholey depends on the content of said delivery platforms. Tik-tok content does tend to lean towards mindless entertainment. If it was a bunch of learning or information content as the majority, people would have less of stink about it.
Too much of anything is bad obviously.
That's the thing though there's loads of that on there and some really intelligent debate, it's not as fun to write a story about though and the media companies certainly aren't going to advertise their competitors like that.
When I was a kid my parents said you shouldn't belive anything on the internet, all they'd seen is exaggerated media stories about terrible things and 'anyone can put anything up' type comments - obviously now they understand it more they know what can and can't be trusted online
Social media in general and TikTok specifically have had major impacts to both our attention span as well as things like anxiety disorders.
Everything else in this list from reading to videogames is a different way to absorb a story, but social media isn't built for that. Its designed on FOMO, and the idea that you have to keep posting and engaging or you'll disappear. The algorithms are also toxic and designed like a gambling addiction. Books don't do that, even TV can't really do that. Videogames can, but not all are. Social media absolutely is, though. Everytime.
I feel like the actual danger is too much of a single kind of stimulation. So if you ONLY sit around and read books, literally never go outside, never take a walk, never go out with friends, stop working... Is your contention that people were wrong to warn against doing that?
Now, have you seen how some people consume TikTok? They will literally do almost precisely what I've described above. Just sit and stare and scroll for hours. Neglect other life activities.
If you scroll TT for an hour per day, you're never going to experience negative effects from it. If you scroll it for 14 hours a day, you will probably become a vegetable. Find a happy medium (for me it's 0 hours per day but everyone is different), eat, go outside sometimes, spend time with real life people, go to work or school, etc.
It's ironic how that article mentiones reading as a good think children should do but when children books written in second person were first published people were using the exact same arguments against them
Argumentum ad antiquitum. Shame on you.
Full circle with the book banning.