This was also true for past media like the TV and the criticism of the medium in many ways was correct. TV remains, despite uptick in quality, more generic, intentionally addictive, attention grabbing than say, film. We're now discovering the negative effect algorithmic social media has on the mental health of teens. Critics of automatically produced mass media tend to be right locking backwards.
It doesn't really matter what you, me or the public thinks. If you set up a system that constantly forces people to optimize for lowest cost and highest profits without concern for other things, you eventually will end up with a race to the bottom, where content does cost zero monies.
And that's the system most of us live in today. There is seemingly nothing else to do about than to join the rat race, otherwise you get left behind and on the streets. You can try to fight it, but eventually capitalism will overrun you, either by force and sneakily. It eats everything around you.
Capitalism and globalism was supposed to be the system that forced everyone to be friends via trade, because why would you hurt your trading partner? Instead we got what we have today, which might be less violent, but maybe the same amount of cruel.
>discovering the negative effect algorithmic social media has on the mental health of teens
Same was said for pants over dresses, for radio, for tv, for rock and roll, for video games, for dancing, for co-ed schools, for educating women, for cameras, for electricity, for catalog ordering, and on and on, with literally the same arguments, the same studies, the same downfall of society, and this has been repeated in cultures the world over as they evolve. With all these terrible decreases in teen life compounding for hundreds to thousands of years, it's amazing they do so well today compared to generations past.
It's also nice when people put their beliefs, created from their upbringing, on the next generation, ignoring that each has adapted and evolved with new changes and each does turn out ok, and for the most part with much better lives.
Instead of picking a negative consequence of some change and ignoring the net change, look at the pros and cons - over time society tends to mitigate the cons and adopt the pros, and today will likely be the same pattern.
I actually did, you didn't which is why you're engaging in whig history. Today roughly one in six youths is obese. 10% of all American teens are prescribed some psychiatric medication. Over the last five years about 20% of high school students have reported thoughts of suicide. Today people from all age groups report fewer social connections than in any prior decade. All of these stats are at all time highs/lows.
This pattern you're talking about doesn't exist. If you look at actual data there are huge losses in quality of life, some having continued for decades. The tech utopianism in the face of clear evidence is pathological and imaginary. Vague arguments about "thousands of years of history" (do you actually have data on happiness and well-being over 'all of history')? don't constitute an argument, that's just fantasy.
Mortality has decreased https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past
>All of these stats are at all time highs/lows.
First, that statement is incorrect. I'll post historical data:
>Over the last five years about 20% of high school students have reported thoughts of suicide.
Suicide rates have been nearly flat for 70+ years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/187478/death-rate-from-s...
Thoughts of suicide match - not an all time high https://www.childtrends.org/publications/teen-suicide-databa...
>Today roughly one in six youths is obese.
Are you claiming this is the fault of tech too?
>10% of all American teens are prescribed some psychiatric medication.
Is the the fault of tech or that more people get diagnosed? Before glasses were invented, 0% of people had them.
>do you actually have data on happiness and well-being over 'all of history'
We certainly do on mortality - and that's improved vastly over the past 100 years, mostly due to tech increases.
>This pattern you're talking about doesn't exist.
I just gave evidence it does exist. A living teen is better than a dead child.
Teens also are happier in general than in the 1990s : https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2019/the-sad-state-of-happi...
And that report points out the correlation between general teen happiness and various internet uses is ~ -0.1, which is pretty weak, with plenty of citations of research backing it up.
>Today people from all age groups report fewer social connections than in any prior decade
"there is no evidence that self-reported loneliness is increasing over time" https://ourworldindata.org/social-connections-and-loneliness
So you can cherry pick all the ills you want, blame them on whatever current boogey man there is, but that same argument has been used for all the things I mentioned above. The correlations, and certainly the causes, are no where near as clear in the research data on these topics.
There is a massive difference between "a smaller piece of the pie" and "cut out entirely".
Making content production and duplication cheaper enables more people to consume it, requiring more of it, and more people end up working on the new systems. I suspect these tools will be no different.