I wonder if social media technology is as much at fault as the neoliberal program of exporting well-paid manufacturing jobs overseas and replacing them with low-paid service jobs (with the difference going into the pockets of the shareholders) is.
If children are being raised on TikTok, okay, the average video length on TikTok is a couple minutes. Advertisements are now 5-15 seconds. This is not conducive to 'long attention span'. Now, imagine popping these kids into a classroom and expecting them to pay close attention for, say, 15 minutes, without any breaks. What to do... diagnose them with ADHD and dose them with amphetamines, what else? Of course this is the same issue for girls and boys but is generally going to create more of a dumbed-down population. Kids are probably better off playing video games instead, those require more attention. Even better, encourage them to read actual books.
I wonder if the WaPo would be interested in publishing any critiques of social media effects on children, given their ties to Big Tech... Let's see... "New report: Most teens say social media makes them feel better, not worse, about themselves (2018)"
Corporate media claims... remember this one? "NAFTA and China WTO will raise the standard of living for all Americans!"
I've heard the causation goes the other way for ADHD.
TV and TikTok don't cause ADHD. They're products that arise to exploit people's attention, and they work excellently on people with poor executive function. TV doesn't cause ADHD, ADHD causes TV.
You can probably train attention span, and there are ways to cope with ADHD (I cope pretty well, and I have only mild symptoms), but it's measurable and it's genetic.
I guess you and I would agree on the conclusion - Treat social media like any other addictive drug: Regulate it, don't let kids get hooked on it, maybe even discourage adults from abusing it.
I think a lot of it comes down to, video and human faces exploit something deep in your brain. Maybe Hacker News just feels high-brow to me because there aren't image macros and constant ":O" clickbait thumbnails like some other sites.
I don't know, the vast majority of teens are users of TikTok, and attention spans are undoubtedly decreasing across the board. Everyone. Yet I don't think the majority of the population had ADHD previously. If the incidence of ADHD was really like the 4-8% in the medical literature, then we would see 4-8% of teens hooked to TikTok, but no, it's a majority (>50%) of teens that are hooked to Tiktok/youtube/instagram.
I could see it go either way, but I think it's important to distinguish that apps/platforms that exploit short attention spans don't exclusively have effect on people with ADHD (nor do all ADHD-diagnosed people neccesarily use TikTok). There's a number of reasons why people might want to seek out short-form content; they're on the go, they can't focus at the precise moment they want to peruse social media, or they want to blow by a huge amount of diverse content in a short amount of time.
That being said, I despise TikTok personally and would even go as far as to say that these short-form content platforms are reinforcing lower attention spans, but does it cause ADHD? I think that's a stretch. What's more likely is that it turns susceptible individuals into "whales" who sink time into it like nobody else. Not just ADHD folks, but those who are lonely or lack socialization too.
> I wonder if the WaPo would be interested in publishing any critiques of social media effects on children, given their ties to Big Tech... Let's see... "New report: Most teens say social media makes them feel better, not worse, about themselves (2018)"
Oh come on. You're either being misleading, or have been mislead. What you wrote doesn't make any sense:
1. Why would the existence of an example of one type of article show the absence of a different type? It's not like the Washington Post cannot report on multiple sides of an issue.
2. A single article from five years ago? How is that supposed to support such a sweeping statement?
> Corporate media claims... remember this one? "NAFTA and China WTO will raise the standard of living for all Americans!"
As far as I can tell, you just made that up. Literally no Google hits: https://www.google.com/search?q="NAFTA+and+China+WTO+will+ra... (at the time of this writing, it looks like your comment hasn't been indexed yet). So, no, no one "remembers" that one.
And even if if the WaPo did publish an article claiming exactly that (most likely some kind of advocacy on the op-ed page), what's the big deal? Do you think they should censor articles like that? Perhaps by using their precognitive abilities to know who the future will prove wrong?
It's kind of ironic that many people's who criticize the media for being some kind of propaganda rag issue critiques that implicitly advocate for it to be a propaganda rag.
> As far as I can tell, you just made that up. Literally no Google hits
NAFTA was passed in the very early days of the internet. Here's a great quote about it from former presidential candidate Ross Perot via wikipedia:
"We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory south of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, ... have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car—have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south. ... when [Mexico's] jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals."
Perot was from Texas, and mocked by corporate media as a clueless hillbilly for suggesting that NAFTA would be a bad deal for Americans. It was one of the few issues Noam Chomsky and Rush Limbaugh and all the major unions agreed on. Trump, whether sincere or not, uses it as one of his main talking points because it is absolutely true. Selling out our capacity to manufacture our own goods has been a terrible choice for Americans. We can't make the things our civilization needs to function. We have hollowed out entire metro areas and replaced steady paychecks and fairly cohesive social units with "gig" work and broken families.
That's a long way of saying their memory is accurate, but I think it's a critical moment to understand in modern US history. NAFTA was a big fucking deal, and the owners of corporate media spared no one to make sure it would get passed. They understood the power it would give them in terms of wealth accumulation and bargaining power to beat down unions and wages. Everyone thought Clinton wouldn't capitulate since it was unpopular with Democrats, but Clinton was attracted to and further corrupted by Wall St power and depended on them for guidance.
For a lot of Americans, NAFTA was the beginning of the end of their community. They are still pissed off about it, and that's the reason the criticism of the Clintons can turn vile in certain circles. It's not entirely unearned. I don't like the Clintons, though I voted for her as the lesser of two evils in 2016.
>>> Corporate media claims... remember this one? "NAFTA and China WTO will raise the standard of living for all Americans!"
>> As far as I can tell, you just made that up. Literally no Google hits
> NAFTA was passed in the very early days of the internet. Here's a great quote about it from former presidential candidate Ross Perot via wikipedia:
I'm well aware. What I meant was the headline he "quoted" was almost certainly made up (I mean "NAFTA and China WTO"? There was a bit of a time gap between those things). Obviously there were advocates who made grand predictions in favor of free trade in general, and advocates who said that was all BS (and for the record the latter have been proven to be far more correct). The issue I have is with the sloppy thinking and sloppy argumentation in the GGP.
A lot of people seem to lazily think of the media as a unitary agent, and think that agent's intentions are revieled in some random cherrypicked op-eds they read sometime that pissed them off. That's almost as big of a pet peeve of mine as libertarianism.
That's not to say it can't be taken by a zeitgeist or its participants don't show bias, but it's kind of an important thing that ought to be thought about more carefully and less conspiratorially.
> Selling out our capacity to manufacture our own goods has been a terrible choice for Americans. We can't make the things our civilization needs to function. We have hollowed out entire metro areas and replaced steady paychecks and fairly cohesive social units with "gig" work and broken families.
If children are being raised on TikTok, okay, the average video length on TikTok is a couple minutes. Advertisements are now 5-15 seconds. This is not conducive to 'long attention span'. Now, imagine popping these kids into a classroom and expecting them to pay close attention for, say, 15 minutes, without any breaks. What to do... diagnose them with ADHD and dose them with amphetamines, what else? Of course this is the same issue for girls and boys but is generally going to create more of a dumbed-down population. Kids are probably better off playing video games instead, those require more attention. Even better, encourage them to read actual books.
I wonder if the WaPo would be interested in publishing any critiques of social media effects on children, given their ties to Big Tech... Let's see... "New report: Most teens say social media makes them feel better, not worse, about themselves (2018)"
Corporate media claims... remember this one? "NAFTA and China WTO will raise the standard of living for all Americans!"