"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
And there has been a lot of progress, those kids would have had to push carts up mine shafts in the previous era.
In the era before that, most of them would have died from hunger or some disease
I don’t use TikTok, but I’ve heard anecdotes from users that it’s currently the least-terrible of the social media services, and this doesn’t sound totally implausible to me, given what the competition is.
It seems more productive to focus on the enriching activities that we want more of rather than trying eliminate distracting ones - there are so many of those it’s easy to imagine one distraction just being replaced with another.
I grew up in the same era... and the solution to that was easy: my parents told me to go outside and play.
In 2021, their phone goes with them everywhere, and if it doesn't one of their friend's phones does. There's almost no way, short of helicopter parenting 24/7, that you can insulate your children from Tik Tok, and I'd argue it is far, far, far more harmful than TV. Random kids at school didn't attack me for the TV shows I watched privately in my own home in high school.
And phones are hardly the worst thing friends can get your kid into... I remember the main concern being alcohol or drugs, which I think have since declined (at least among youth).
I have to say I am not familiar with the attacks based on browsing history you speak of though. How/why does this happen? Are you forced to make it public?
Defeatism short-circuits one's ability to grow and serves as an excellent excuse to do nothing.
No, most kids of the previous era never came within a million miles of pushing a mine cart up a shaft. We have very well documented historical records of what type of work young people were most commonly doing circa 1850-1950, mining was not one of the top activities (nor was any other type of very dangerous hard labor).
I don't much care about kids cloning lame faux dance routines on TikTok, I think it's mostly benign and unimportant. And it's definitely a temporary fad (these kids won't be spending lots of time learning and cloning lame dance routines in 10 second videos ten years from now). It's also exceptionally vapid. I grew up with MTV when it was becoming a thing, and it too was largely vapid garbage (although not entirely, as is true of TikTok), and it culturally melted away just as TikTok will recede with time, as the kids move on to something newer and cooler, as always happens.
The biggest shot against TikTok is that most of the young people on there aren't even producing their own content, they're directly copying other content and repeating it like brainless zombies. Maybe it's no worse than mediocre cultural cloning was in past decades, it's just considerably accelerated and pumped up in terms of projection / audience. It's nothing great to celebrate though, it's a high-fructose soda for the brain (which is why it's so addictive), an intravenous line of cheap validation for nacissists and young people with low self-esteem, not high quality sustenance. MTV didn't lead to an improved outcome for the generation reared on it, and TikTok won't either, there isn't actually much value being created with it. These types of platforms don't matter very much ultimately, in terms of consumption they're mostly just another way to pass the time for bored brains.
if you dont allow your children tiktok/insta/etc, they get completely excluded from their community.
a possibility is to move into a community that does not use social networks that much, so not using them is normalized, but sadly this is not easy in western europe (at least for me).
It should be noted that most culture war stuff is itself engineered for an emotional "hit", although usually an angry one.
1990s: Kids these days wouldn't have the attention span to {read a book}. All they can do is {watch music videos}.
2020s: Kids these days wouldn't have the attention span to {watch a music video}. All they can do is {browse TikTok}.
On the extreme end, you got the Civ series. It's been around for 30 years now. There is literally a joke website called Civ Anonymous. "One More Turn"
FPS games like CS really feed that dopamine hit when you get a kill, especially a head shot. You think the game designers aren't thinking about how to make that kill as satisfying as possible?
Even the games of the 90s were engineered to be addictive. Tetris when you clear the blocks. Mario when you get a power up. Even Solitaire when you win the game and the cards go flying.
You remember those old farts, annoying everybody with their sanctimonious imprecations about video games ? They were right.
I wasted so much time especially in my 20's racking up idiotic "achievements" that exist only in a Factorio savegame and other similarly irrelevant places.
Most people, opponents and supporters of video games alike, tend to discuss if the activity itself is harmful - does it make us desensitised to violence etc, but the real issue is what you are NOT doing when you play those games.
If a child doesn't have easy access to cheap thrills from a video game, she will start using her imagination, draw something, go to a friend, come up with some mischief.
Time is limited, and childhood is the most precious thing in the world, don't waste it.
I think there are also serious qualitative differences between games in the 90s/00s and mobile freemium games of today.
This is rather sad; would you rather have been prevented from them? What would you prefer to have been made to do?
Yes, playing video games occasionally with friends or watching the odd film can be good things but that's obviously not what we're talking about here.
I'm very happy most of my childhood memories revolve around tree houses, bicycles and gangs of friends roaming the streets.
Do they used to watch MTV in School?
Do they used to watch MTV while waiting for bus?
Was their classmates all making videos for MTV?
Not MTV exclusively, but yes I knew kids (in elementary school!) that watched TV for hours every day (although I didn’t grow up with that habit).
Pretty sure the same hours-a-day thing was true for video games as well, although in my view at least that’s not totally passive and was sometimes social (kids playing against each other in person).
Which I suppose was a small minority. Defintely not the case with TikTok.
That seems to fit with this recent data [1], which shows the average as still high but lower in the younger demographic. It has the 65+ group as 7+ hrs/day on average, which seems mildly horrifying considering half of people are likely above that. But perhaps not surprising - especially with the obesity rates being what they are, many people may not be very mobile at that age.
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/15224/daily-tv-consumption-by...
I don't know if it's just me, but I feel like some of these attitudes which are considered progressive nowadays would have made Mary Whitehouse blush. What happened to insisting on a free and pluralistic society?
HN is in favor of free speech, except for teenagers dancing to each other.
It’s legitimately the best social network around right now. The content is so freaking good, raw, silly, and spans all walks of life. Whatever they did with the algo makes it extremely high-signal for me and my friends who are on it. I get really high quality content for exactly my niche interests without ever having to spend time searching for it.
It's hard for me to imagine adults spending their time watching these stupid clips constantly but you are right, it's not just limited to children.
I still can not understand how we moved to a point where Vertical Video is acceptable in civil society
- default phone capture mode
- default phone display mode, both due to the way you hold it
- humans are vertical: vertical video frames the whole body, useful for dance videos. Portrait mode more useful for quadrupeds
Never quite understood why some people get so upset at vertical videos.
It was cheaper to have wider halls than taller, more seats, maybe lesser construction costs so 11:8 ( standard academy) or 1.43:1(IMAX) or 2.2:1 (70mm) all became popular.
The wider screens also gave more immersive experiences and film makers took advantage of that in their movies with panoramic landscape shots and other techniques.
Most non professional films(post covid even a lot of professional ones) are watched today on a smart phone screen which is usually something like 9:16.
So, unless you are making a movie to be released in theatres I would say film makers should default to use 9:16 not other way around.
A good film maker should target the medium they are working with, there is nothing inherently special about either one.
There were great directors/actors who could do amazing work without sound or only b/w etc (sometimes failed to adapt to to the transition), all mediums have some limitations we have to work with what we have.
Funny way to write 16:9....
>>are watched today on a smart phone screen
This is where my age likely shows as I still can not use my mobile as a video consumption device. I need 27in or larger monitor, or even better a 40in or large TV screen. I primary consume YouTube and other non-professional video from my Roku not my phone...
Video Calling is something I can not get behind either so...
Think about what shape a human being is…
I don't spend much time on it, but there are a lot of original funny bits I have seen people do in the compressed timeframe that are really quite good.
To me this is a massive liability for the US. It's just a matter of time before China starts to dabble in "content shaping" on the platform, if they aren't already.