None of those activities really had me envying anyone else. I remember the first thing that made me feel worthless and unaccomplished was TED talks!
I agree the problem is that it's hard to separate our online life from our offline life now.
Life for kids and everyone is drastically different from what it was just a few decades ago, because we have drastically different access and exposure to information, in general. This has changed the human experience.
I suspect it is because I have not looked hard enough, but I do not see enough about how much this has changed us. We try to pinpoint specific aspects, like social media, but I rarely see discussion about how just the raw exposure and access to information has changed us.
The value of knowledge is decreased, because it is accessible to everyone. This fact changed how people find their place in the world, find meaning and purpose, make social connections, etc. How much did this change us? I believe it has completely altered the human experience. Technology only hits this hard a few times every 1000 or so years. Gunpowder, printing press, electricity, internet. We're in the midst of a big shift now.
Here's an example: consider magic and sleight of hand. Until easily accessible information, the method of 'doing a trick' was arcane knowledge. This was the case for thousands of years. Knowledge was generally obtainable, but you had to go out of your way to get it. No adult believed in magic, but the fuzziness around the knowledge was enough to allow the audience to suspend belief that something wondrous happened.
This aspect of wonder is now rare. To what degree is the lack of access to wonder a root cause of the decline in teen mental health?
For what it is worth, I was that person in 2007 who warned everyone I knew about social media, for the exact reasons we are now discussing.
It is a long time ago I impressed my class at school by programming the "biorhythm" on a Casio pocket calculator. Whatever you do, someone did it better, larger, shinier and posted the video on Youtube.
Of course it is not that gloomy and there is still a lot of fun experiments to be had. Currently we have a photographic trap and try to get pictures of wild animals: it is quite hard and that makes it all the more fun. It is a also a way to know our immediate surroundings better and that cannot be replaced by an online experience.
[edit] In low income households smartphone+subscription take a large share of the free income, yet are felt as necessary. This leaves no money for leisure other then social networks, which are costless.
This occurs across a variety of dimensions: too much information about the goings-on of our friends and family, about the world at large, about all the things we're supposed to do to "stay healthy", etc.
This is grasping at straws. While the expectation is you'll create and maintain curated online presence tied to your real life identity in a world of increasingly economically stratified society.
Click bait is the perfect example of this. You see an ad telling you about a story that sounds interesting, so you click the link. Suddenly you are drawing in to a website with 1 sentence of text per page that you want to read surrounded by crappy ads and pop-ups. You want to know how the story panned out, but are overwhelmed by the garbage. Lesson learned, but how do I teach Google to stop showing me that crap?
Personally, I think this all comes down to the cost of publishing. When a publisher had to shell out real money to print a book by an author, there was an incentive for the publisher to hire editors that did a good job of making sure the books they printed were of value (the same applies to newspapers). When the marginal cost of putting a news story on a website is $0, there's not really any point in hiring an editor anymore.
The same parallel exists in the phone network today. Back in the 1980s when it cost $0.34 per minute to make a long distance call, the people calling you probably thought twice before calling. Today's VoIP networks charging less than a penny a minute have enabled farms of robocallers to harass you with garbage calls. The near zero cost of international calls means that call centers in poor countries can profitably harass the elderly in rich companies with endless new scams.
Again, the same pattern exists with videos. 20 years ago a slickly produced video took time and money to produce. Now any teenager with a phone or laptop can throw a bunch of clips together, add some voice over and hit publish without spending a penny.
The only path I see forward from here is that this entire situation will get worse. Technologies like GPT-3 are amazing, but they come with a cost: it becomes cheaper to write walls of text. People will use it or perhaps are using it to create websites devoid of real content. Search engines that are already having trouble distinguishing between real thoughtful content and the wasteland of content farms will have an even harder time to produce relevant results for search requests.
I hate to say, but we were better off when the cost of people's attention was much greater than $0.
Again we’ve made a truism that we’re doing for the greater good by setting ourselves aside for the hustle. Yet no science gives anyone omniscience; we follow along because what else to do, but the high minded goals we follow along with do not have to be rockets to nowhere.
Notice how all the rich people do little real work to provide material things they need? They externalize the necessary effort required for their survival, despite being mortals who are expected to support themselves, they gossip and babble and produce little that truly supports them.
The public needs to let go of the Protestant work ethic, the mountain man struggle and become a better negotiator. The grind keeps them from imagining in detail for themselves.
Funny thing is it didn't actually get any less dangerous, people just decided that if everyone did it then there's no problem.
But a strange thing happened with people I knew was that after FB's "Real Name Policy". Anyone who kept using a pseudonym was viewed as outdated at best, sometimes a downright weirdo. Only people part of Twitter/Tumbler niche communities kept using fake names.
I also remember around the 2010s a "friend of a friend" bragging about reporting someone using a nickname to Facebook and having Facebook accept the report and force the person to change.
Interestingly, some teens that I know are sort of going back to that. They don't have Facebook, if they have Instagram, it is just random pictures of objects, more like Tumblr was, no interest in being influencers.
Always remember that the Internet and social media are dominated by people who put an unhealthy amount of time and energy into the Internet and social media. Those people are not real, any more than the old-media commentariat and their taboos are real. Most people are much less visible because they have lives.
Sure, your WhatsApp conversations are end to end encrypted. Except if you’re in a group conversation. Or if you have the on by default backup turned on.
It wasnt all peaches and candy.
If you don't want to see dicks on Chatroulette, don't use Chatoroulette. Or use it, but leave when you see a dick.
Some creeper on AIM? Block them. If they keep making new accounts to come back, create a new account and invite your friends to that one.
With bigger social media, the social cost of not being where your peer group is is high. Things are engineered to try and limit your exposure to the crazy stuff but it's still out there and in higher volumes than ever before.
It's also much harder to avoid now if somehow an algorithm decides you should see it. And you can't just create a new account and leave a dead one behind you, or at least it's much harder.
If you wanted to watch terrorists sever a head you had to at the very least search for it (it was usually more complicated than that). Facebook wouldn’t stuff it in between videos of kittens doing cute stuff while you endlessly scroll your newsfeed.
Or just happen to stumble onto 4chan during the summer period of each year where it would be flooded with gore and other shock content*. Or be unlucky enough to be on a site which had been targeted by a raid by 4chan or other imageboard users and flood those with shock content.
* to provide historical context for the younger folk here, 4chan would receive a flood of new users every year roughly corresponding to the American summer holiday period, and there would be a noticeable decline in posting quality during that time.
To ensure that only people who fit in with board culture stuck around, the site (or at least /b/ which was where I spent most of my time back in those days) would be flooded with the most offensive content possible to scare away the bulk of the new users. This was rather effective at filtering out people of an emotionally sensitive nature and leaving only the most jaded and persistent to become regular users.
Much like the so-called "Eternal September", the board eventually had a culture change and became more welcoming of new users, and this practice declined. Although that was a long time ago and I think perhaps it may have been more that the introduction of CAPTCHA, rate-limiting, and other anti-spam measures prevented the use of automated image dumping software that was used to flood threads with shock content.
But I think another factor is the sheer existence of our ancestors. As more time goes on, the more history there is with more people having achieved great accomplishments. Younger generations will naturally just have more to live up to (with the potential to feel depressed if they don't).
Now, as a teenager you are plugged into that social fabric 24/7. I can't imagine how difficult it must be to find yourself in that hyper-connected social graph.
But now that kids are connected to each other 100% of the time (being in class in school is also not excuse enough to not be connected) you have to be funny and clever all the time. An off hand comment while distracted by a million other things can lead to havoc in your social and online life.
It’s not social media at all; it’s the reality they live in which happens to include social media. It’s plain truth; the majority don’t give a fuck about their future.
Back in the day you didn't get rape threats from 50 anonymous accounts, or see pictures of you photoshopped sucking dicks, or feel like even more of a loser because you see in 4K detail how everybody else in class is having more fun outside of school. The internet is a threat and embarrassment and envy machine. You feel like you're constantly losing a battle to be relevant and have a good time, and you pathologically monitor feeds of other people's lives to try to stay ahead. When that doesn't work you lose yourself in mindless entertainment to avoid mental stress, also avoiding processing hard emotions.
That's not all new, but it's at a level higher than ever before.