Previous generations spouted the same strawman about TV, and in general, all previous forms of media

I am pretty damn sure if I didn't waste tons of time as a kid in front of TV and even more in front of computer playing highly addictive games my IQ score would be higher, I would have much wider breadth of knowledge and would be a more complete person.

I caught up on that later on life, but no thanx to this addictive media, but rather by cutting them off and spending time better, much better.

Let's not normalize addictions, human brains for some evolutionary reason we don't grok completely yet have this weakness, which was probably a strength in distant past.

Have you seen many kids these days where parents don't curate their access to internet? My friend there is no big difference between rock-bottom heroin addict and them. Trying all kinds of mind tricks, extortion, fists, lying, stealing (devices) just to get more tiktok time, watch more streams, play more online games. It is a sad view, and normalizing it hurt those victims badly.

My kiddos are too small for this (1 i almost and another a bit more than a year) but I can already see how addictive screens are to those, even if we play them old bedtime tales from youtube that we used to watch as kids. Now active screens are on completely different levels and kids have no way to defend themselves. Heck look at how many adults are addicted to that. Many even refuse to admit it, like word "addict" means failure, rock-bottom, needle sticking out of forehand instead of spectrum of impairments, ie higher restlessness, being more nervous etc. Just like sugar of nicotine withdrawals.

Agreed.

They said that about radio. They said that about TV. They said that about computers. They said that about dumbphones. They said that about smartphones. They're now saying that about apps.

They said it about huffing paint thinner too, to be fair.

Why were "they" wrong? Is it because the issues of each successive development in mass media made those of the previous iteration look quaint? It's easy to look back on (for example) TV as a harmless diversion, but it was a radical development in the dissemination of visual information.

Also this is a funny argument. If these things are truly making people dumber but the change is happening on a generational level, then a dumber generation would not realize that it is dumber than the previous one.

It's also further muddied by other changes - like changes in education in the past 50 years - which makes the phenomenon harder to isolate and to judge.

I don't know about IQ but it does reduces people's attention span and that's the reason to limit the video length to few seconds.