Most people are getting drip fed curated content to 'influence' them, which has a very different agenda to accuracy regarding real things.
Also most people are not selecting real things, they are selecting entertainment.
If you had just said connecting to real things, agreed that sometimes it is, plus a lot of false things, plus heaps of fantasy/entertainment. But when you said its connecting us more accurately to the real state of things, well thats just false.
Accuracy in echo chambers that create information bubbles as socmed systems do is simply impossible, then the fact these systems are used to influence not inform makes them produce highly distorted minds.
1. Kid seems happy, does stuff
2. Kid gets phone for birthday
3. Kid seems sad, and no longer does anything other than sit in his room scrolling through tiktok
It's an extraordinarily depressing situation and anyone who denies this obvious truth is DELUSIONALLY BLIND
I think there's an incredible resillience especially in youth to not get bogged down in or at least to tangle with & find peace with the sad scary backdrop of the world. When they have elememts of hope, when they have positive role models, when they see successful adults having ok lives. And frankly that's a challenge, period; there's just little community, few role models left. Big employers are better quality of life but it's deeply depersonalizing, being so deeply embedded somewhere odd deep deep inside an org chart, with only modest chances of getting to work hard for a long time & then at best retire. The new work world is opaque, dis-real.
Reality is already very well built, well estaished, and there's little available space or reward for trying stuff out & finding ourselves. We see less making life happen.
A lot of this difficulty is because of so many of these sad scary hopeless background factors. But rather than try to tackle endless symptoms as problems, i keep feeling like there's rootstriking we could be doing by trying to develop & support a more youthfully active world, by directly trying to support & enable people interested in taking chances in getting things started. In building the world. Not just working in it. Some real signs of positive life, creating role models of people who have real hands in shapimg their lives, have established good locus of controls: this is just wild spouting hypothesis, but I think that would make such a difference. Some signs of reality within reach.