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.
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.