Comment by mullingitover 3 days ago
Everything invented up to your 20s is just the innate environment.
Everything invented from your 20s-40s is cool, you accept it and will probably make a living with it.
Everything invented after your 40s is a perversion of the natural order and must be destroyed.
I almost forgot the accompaniment to the third item:
When you reach your 40s, something starts corrupting the youth.
would you like to serve up some comparative evidence showing just how much these things have degraded in kids these days vs. some particular point in the past?
This reminds me of people harping about the pervasiveness of misinformation in social media today, while completely forgetting how narrowly propagandized and baited toward yellow journalism the much more restricted media sources of the past often were, helping create all kinds of absurdly ignorant belief systems from which escape into alternative viewpoints was much harder.
Here is a blog that rolls up lots and lots of time series graphs from different research.
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/international-mental-illness-pa...
Time series data is always confounded in many ways; lots of stuff changes, and as a society we change what we're paying attention to and that itself changes things like emergency room visits or perceptions of being anxious. At the same time, a whole lot of different measures moved in a negative direction suddenly (after slowly moving that way for many years). Of course, to be fair: these time series seem to show more the effect of social media in general and smartphones than short form video content on social media/smartphones.
There is no shortage of comparative evidence, though.
There's also evidence that short form video use is correlated with shorter attention span and that it is addictive. Of course, correlation ain't causation: maybe it's just the most naturally attention-challenged that consume a lot of it. I personally suspect it's a little of both.
We also have research that shows that if you show people lots of short form video and then test their attention span later, it's worse. But this, of course, isn't the same as the effect of voluntarily watching short form video. This is all trivial to find, but if you want links to specific things, let me knwo.
Kids complain that the other kids who are on tiktok all the time will do something like ask a peer a question, and then drift off to something else during the answer if it's longer than a single short sentence.
I've been doing youth programs for quite awhile now, and there's been a definite qualitative shift in the past several years, and various kinds of quantitative shifts in my own data aligned with this trend, too.
There will never be perfect evidence, unfortunately. We have to act on the information we have, and when we're studying humans it's going to include time series data and artificial studies of the phenomenon in lab conditions.
> One person's short attention span is another person's intolerance for bullshit.
If a student asks a friend a question, and then drifts off into space before the two sentence answer has been delivered, that's not great.
> One person's poor mental health is another person's emotions appropriate to the actual state of the world.
Perhaps being prone to anxiety attacks, panic, and self-harm are what we need to meet today's challenges head-on.
> The kids these days are doing great in all the ways that matter.
Hey, not everything is negative-- we live in a world with more interpersonal kindness and tolerance than a few decades ago, and that's great. But the kids aren't alright.
Especially teen girls. It's impossible to escape curated content encouraging social comparison to edited, perfectly curated standards of perfection.
On the other hand, kids don't seem to have great mental health, attention spans, or academic attainment right now, and this type of social media is one of the likely factors behind this change.