When I was in high school, Facebook was just opening up access to everyone. I remember literally everyone getting on it, and swapping between messages in MSN, and some posts on FB. We had whole school wide conversations, planning and etc. on social media, and on days when I didn’t get in front of the computer to check things, I remember feeling left out. It’s just so much worse now, because every kid expects every other kid to be on the loop of things 24/7. I think that’s where we screwed up. Having just casual access without mobile phones was the sweet spot, in my opinion.
Social media can be really bad, and maybe it's actually mostly bad, but it does facilitate real life interactions and good things.
Imagine your child going to school but not being allowed to play with other kids in recess. Lots of bullying and physical violence can happen during recess, after all. Would you use that as an opportunity to teach them the dangers of FOMO, and to just read a book?
Teaching another person, even an eager one, how to change their behaviour and mental patterns concerning validation and FOMO is a really hard task. It's not knowledge like math or something that you can just pass onto them. It can take months or even years even for pros (psychitrists etc.) to do that. Combine that with the fact that teenagers brains are wired differently (their need to fit it is greater than that of an adult) and their "natural resistance" to adults' teaching and it becomes almost impossible task.
Ever tried teaching anything to teenagers where their peers and society in general promote the opposite? Good luck with that...
Like a strict parent whose kids end up doing drugs and partying as soon as they can leave the house, or even the opposite, some "hippie" all-too-liberal parent whose kind grow up and seek strictness and discipline, and e.g. turn religious or join a cult, or find some abusive partner who gives that to them.
So, yes you might try teaching your kid that they're not missing out that they can find more meaningful way to spend their time in the real offline world but, the fact is, they go to schools with kid who overwhelmingly are not taught that and who will dislike your kid for being different. Your kid doesn't live in isolation, he lives in society and, during school years is when social pressure to conform to the group norm is strongest.
I'm speaking from experience here, I've been bullied as a teen, I definitely would rather avoid my son going through a similar experience.
What you’re describing doesn’t sound like parenting to me, it’s giving in to peer pressure. From kids. And you’re supposed to be an adult who already knows what’s right and wrong. If your kid’s peers all gain a liking for drugs or gambling or some other vice and they bully your child for not partaking, are you going to tell your child to participate? No, what you should do is show them the right way and to what’s good for them in the long term, even if it’s difficult for them to see it now because of their youth.
I have been bullied by losers the whole school time, because of something as simple as my name and being smarter. I managed to develop a strong resistance to certain things and learned to go my own way, questioning the mainstream, including dealing with network effect and peer pressure to do things I do not want to participate in. For children in primary school it can be terrible.
However, I can easily imagine, what can happen, if a parent does not support their child as much as my parents did support me. I think except for exceptionally strong independent children, there needs to be a balance in children's lives. If almost everyone in their social circles is basically telling them, that they suck, because they are out of the loop, then it needs parents to support them and make them feel that they do not suck.
Parent, after an age, has very small influence in what kids do. Kids will be spending most of their time with peers, not with you.
Anyway, to respond to your points:
> What you’re describing doesn’t sound like parenting to me, it’s giving in to peer pressure.
What I'm describing is knowing how society works and planning around it. It doesn't mean that I would give unrestricted access to social medias, it also doesn't mean that I would not be there to guide my child about how to use them, what the dangers are etc...
I'm saying that straight up abstinence is not a good idea and doesn't work if your child lives in a society that doesn't abstain. There are also perverse effects whereby preventing your child from completely accessing social medias, you end up with a child who just hides it from you.
> If your kid’s peers all gain a liking for drugs or gambling or some other vice and they bully your child for not partaking, are you going to tell your child to participate?
I'd probably consider switching my child to a different school.
fwiw fighting is the only thing that mitigated bullying for me too
I was about to say teach your child self-defense and how to fight, and the last sentence of that same paragraph just proved my point.
Look, as a parent, your goal should not be to teach your child how to avoid bullying. That's not within your control, nor your child, and in the real world, even once your child is grown up, there's always some moron out there in the world who's going to bully you or want to beat you up, sometimes for no reason, sometimes for not being like them. That's not an excuse to teach your child to be like other children just for the sake of conformity because that is the wrong thing to teach. You teach them how to fight back when people beat them up for being the way that they are. None of your other points matter against that.
The thing too is that I'm also not convinced abstinence on something that's part of society and that your kid will have when they grow up is that useful anyway. Social media is unfortunately needed to function in society so learning to use it reasonably (and not in an addictive manner) has value too.
That said, yes I absolutely will teach my son to fight back, violence in some circumstances is a useful tool to have.
No, wrong again. It’s not necessary to function and there already are secure messaging apps through which kids and adults can communicate. You don’t have to have a Facebook page. You don’t need an IG profile of portraits where you pose like a model. You don’t need to make funny Tiktok videos.
This entire issue is being murkied by adults who are projecting their deep-seated bullying issues as value judgments on how to raise children when evidently they haven’t sorted themselves out and they are already having kids.
Are you a parent yourself? Just wondering.
It's at the heart of socialization itself, which is an important part of growing up healthy.
The analogies with drugs and gambling are also misplaced, because these things are illegal and/or generally frowned upon by parents, the legal system, and society as a whole. In other words, the exact opposite of what's happening here.
And, those things are illegal/ frowned-upon for reasons you respect enough to use them as examples. That should actually help you see the point?
If your child just tells you “yeah I don’t care about others’ opinions”, then I’ll have a hard time to believe as well. As we age, and grow up, sure those things matter less. But come on, we’ve all been children, we’ve all wanted to be a part of some group. Some of us got bullied, some of us got ostracized, but we always wanted to belong.
This usually means "my close friends and peers have same opinions as I do and nobody else matter to us".
This is more prominent among people who grew up with social media everywhere compared to ones who did not.
That's unnecessarily reductionist. Calling is less convenient and takes longer.
No, I don't think so. The time for me to ring you, tell you this in voice would be far quicker than typing.
Calling conveys so much more than text ever can.
A call can take seconds, "hey mate, want to go to the cinema tomorrow? Ill text you the time" "yeah cool, see ya".
Voice expresses emotion, you can pick up the mood of your buddy if they're up, down, need cheering up.
Its real, you hear a voice and you know it's your mate. Text, you assume. Text leaves you on edge waiting for confirmation.
The only inconvenience is that you could be interrupting something and even if so, then send a text.
The post you I was responding to was talking about "group chat". How long would it take for you to call 6 people? How long would it take for you to text 6 people?
I'm all for calls from one person to another person, if you know that person doesn't mind voice calls. Text and group chats are great for coordination of groups.
Now, every conversation, whether it's by phone or zoom, feels like a struggle of who's going to take up the air time, trying not to talk over one another, dealing with delay, etc... It doesn't feel natural at all and there's little to no presence. Having smart phones makes it so much easier to tune out on a call and scroll reddit, check headlines or play a game. I agree that it's less convenient and takes too long for most things. I'd rather check in once a day with someone via text than have one longer phone conversation once a week.
I would however imagine you have some relationships of some kind that you care about. Can you imagine your relationships changing if these others you cared about changed their behaviours? Then extend this imaginary possibility to the relationships of these others. It's a network we are in we are not operating entirely alone.
Care of the other is wanting what is good for the other.
Sometimes this care is not forcing the other to change, sometimes it's encouraging them to change to benefit them as it benefited you.
While a perfectly fine rule of thumb in general, I think you might find the sticking to "I don't care what other people do" as an overriding principle doesn't hold water in a substantial number of edge cases. One such case is where someone is willfully influencing others to act against their best interests, or against the best interest of society as a whole. That's when one needs to make a judgement call on a case by case basis. Is this such a case? Not sure. I just wanted to point out that "I don't care what other people do" can't be your guiding light, always.
I "don't care" what others do in the strict sense that I don't let it influence me.
But I can tell you that me quitting socials did impact relatives and friends to quit those too, and thus I absolutely do not relate with his statement:
> It doesn't matter whether you abstain from using Instagram or not
example from real life:
My local musicians community decided to use only FB to communicate their gigs dates. I refuse to use FB. I no longer know when or where is the gig. I don't see my fellows anymore.
I even admin and moderate FB groups.
In my case it is home education in the UK. It is what everyone else uses, so its where you can discuss things or ask questions. I just asked about parking at the exam centre where my daughter is doing her GCSEs (UK exams typically taken at 16). It is where I found a GCSE classical civilisation tutor for her. It is where I can use my experience to help others. It is where I can find out about local events and activities.It is where people find resources and courses and can discuss them with others. It is where discussion of approaches and how to do things happens.
not using FB would mean giving up all that.
There are some small, insular scenes where everybody knows everybody and word gets around, but those are getting fewer every day.
This seems so weird to me. I help organize some local groups centered around hobbies and games, and none of them use Facebook because we know not everyone will be there, and we don’t want to exclude people. Sorry, but that musician group seems pretty poorly run.
Luckily, I have other hobbies that are less prone to this, mostly because they don't involve much event promotion if any at all and don't need any audience to exist. Example: my local shooting range uses a mailing list for communication and you can always hang with fellows at the club-house.
No one has "bizarre insistence" on use of social media, they're just there and it's the easiest option for all parties. People like you and me are the ones who are perceived as the ones bizarrely insistent on not being on social media. This doesn't make it wrong, and it's luckily slowly becoming more and more accepted, but it is important to keep in mind.
You are right that ideally groups like these should cater to all audiences but that's a lot of effort, and many organizers do it on a voluntary basis, not as a job. In my case, I know that 98% of people are included in the media that I use for my audience, and catering to the last 2% would double my workload. Not happening.
As far as workload goes, we have not found anything lighter weight and less maintenance than an E-mail list.
I’ve done the same, but it’s not without cost:
- Two hobbies I’m involved with have large local communities on Facebook. I’m not in the loop, and sometimes miss out on events and catchups.
- I’m not on Twitter, and there’s a massive amount of chat about my field (realtime collaborative editing & local first software) that takes place there. I miss out on what’s going on, and I’m reliant on other people to promote my work for me.
Im happier. But it’s you really are cut off from a lot of society - especially in the tech world - if you aren’t on social media.
Also worth noting that it sounds like meta thinks like they already have all earth population in their products because new accounts are really easily banned for no reason. Any temporary account I made to access some information have been blocked minutes or hours after creation.
Before Twitter, you had to go to the coffee shop and listen to people ramble on with their inane political rants and conspiracy theories just to get at the occasional tidbit of useful field-related information. That was depressing.
I left Twitter after it started showing me posts from people I don’t follow that I found annoying and in one case just straight up racist. I replied and he was as surprise as I was. He asked “why are you in my replies?”. I didn’t know why I was there either. I deleted the app and haven’t been back.
Of course, we know enough about these algorithms to know that they are based on your action, not what you claim. Pretending that you find something annoying, but then contradictorily dedicating your attention to it is going to tell the algorithm to give you more of the same. If you don't want to learn the truth about yourself, I can see why you'd want to steer clear.
Wow, um - I don’t know how to say this politely. I know the truth about myself. I know I’m drawn towards stupid stuff like that. That xkcd “I can’t come to bed yet honey, someone is wrong on the internet!” - that’s talking about me.
It’s like an addiction. Just because I’m addicted to stupid drama online doesn’t mean I want an algorithm to feed it to me. I want technology to support the better angels of my nature. Not inflame my worst parts.
The problem with algorithmic news feeds is they’re too compelling for me. I don’t want to live in a constant state of battle, where I need to exert self control to make my attention my own. I want technology to support my life choices. Not to constantly tempt me to doom scroll. Just because I do it, doesn’t mean I enjoy it or that I choose it.
It’s much easier for someone who’s a problem drinker to just not have alcohol around the house. Me? I just can’t use algorithmic news feeds in a healthy way. I think a large portion of society has the same problem, and just doesn’t know how to quit. If it were up to me, I’d ban algorithmic news feeds entirely. They’re bad for us.
Then say it inpolitely? Software doesn't care if you are polite or not.
> Just because I’m addicted to stupid drama online doesn’t mean I want an algorithm to feed it to me.
Understandable, but that which annoys you will not produce addict behaviour. You are drawn to the stupid drama because it does the opposite of annoy you.
Emotions aren't an either/or sort of thing. You can love and hate someone at the same time. I love and hate exercising, and junk food. Just like I love and hate algorithmic news feeds. I find social media both annoying and compelling, all at the same time.
The fact I'm compelled to doom scroll doesn't make it good for me, or mean I want twitter in my life. Twitter and FB's news feeds annoy me. I know they're bad for me. But that doesn't magically stop them from also being psychologically compelling. Maybe yours do, but my neurons don't cancel out like that.
> Software doesn't care if you are polite or not.
But we aren't software.
Sure, but if they annoy you, truly, that's it.
> But we aren't software.
You might not be. But there is no one else. There is only the software you are talking to. What, exactly, do you think the impolite words floating around in your head are going to do to you if you write them down? They aren't going to do anything to the software, that is for certain.
Maybe anonymity has had a good run and is actually at the root of the issue in many contexts. After all, people don't (generally) walk around IRL wearing ski masks so they can say crazy shit or troll people without consequence. And we also get the courtesy of knowing who the people we're talking to actually are.
And if you say, "yeah but doxxing and death threats" or "my employer might fire me", etc then maybe these are the actual problems that need to be addressed.
And, yes, I realize that's coming from someone who's IRL neither Uncle Buck or Buc Nasty, as his handle might imply. But, obviously that's where we currently are, which is the point.
The internet flips this on its head because pseudonymous handles can be linked to reams of online activity that's retained effectively forever but can't be connected to a specific person. This is why "doxxing" is such a big deal online.
If online activity was like IRL activity and ephemeral, I might agree with you. But the internet never forgets.
Edit: By the way, this is not universally defined:
> say crazy shit
"Crazy shit" is very culturally and contextually dependent. If I condemn China's treatment of Uyghurs, that's fine in North America but considered "crazy shit" and can land you in jail in China. That's an extreme example, but there are plenty of other more banal differences in culture and what's acceptable globally.
Maybe this is true in some places. In big cities in Europe and the Americas this is definitely the case. It's done by law enforcement, commercial retail, and private security. It's more or less trivial nowadays to buy a cheap IP camera and collect an database of faces across your camera network.
My guess is that there's more of this going on, but I'm only listing stuff I have personal knowledge of.
The anonymity we're talking about here is WRT the latter.
With that in mind, my point is that it's a social problem that people have to worry about death threats for expressing political opinions. It's not solved by people becoming anonymous at scale to offer up their opinions. In fact, this adds to the problem, in that anonymity tends to lead to increasingly offensive forms of expression (absent the social governor that is present IRL). Anonymity changes the motivation for engaging and removes the constraints that have social value.
It also makes it easy for bad actors to do their work.
Put simply, if people don't feel comfortable offering an opinion in person, then maybe it's not a good thing to give them an opportunity to offer it anonymously at-scale.
>Crazy shit is very culturally and contextually dependent
No. I'm speaking WRT the context of our discussion. That is, saying things anonymously online that one would not say in-person for understood social (or legal) reasons. e.g. threatening people, being overtly snarky, trolling, etc.
So-called "edge lords" and people for whom provocativeness is their brand, perhaps.
But, I don't think that's true for the average person at all. I think we all know this intuitively / empirically, but there have also been studies that bear it out. [0]
>Internet hostility is more analogous to road rage.
No. Road rage is a function of losing one's temper and acting outside of one's self in the moment. Distinctly different from purposely shedding one's identity to engage socially.
Besides that, we're not just talking about hostility, but an overall disposition when one is acting without the social constraints of identity and accountability.
[0]https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/who-is-that-th...
I wasn't aware there was a sizable effort to this effect, and I'm not even sure that I'm proposing it. More just observing the impact of anonymity on society/civility and considering aloud that perhaps the price of anonymity is not worth its perceived benefits.
>Most of the negative effects and hostility of social media (youtube, twitter, facebook, etc.) come from named and publicly-identifiable individuals.
Citation? Because this seems counter to the accepted understanding, multiple studies (see my previous comment) and, anecdotally, my own observations.
But, even allowing that wouldn't preclude that a significant amount of toxicity is also coming from anonymous usage.
Because we live in a society?
Would you care if everyone around you was smoking crack, sociopathic or seriously mentally ill?
Perhaps I just have boring friends that we resort to sometimes talking about what is going on in our lives. I also wouldn't feel like less of a friend if they didn't tell me something, but important life events in their lives are usually important to them, which means that they ultimately end up talking about them in some way or another.
I think a lot of the complaints from people who "cannot stop" is just laziness. They need the government to construct an excuse so they won't have to man up and take control of their own lives.
That is also sad, because it means those people will never grow up but will be constant children in the eyes of the state.
Then I would say there are the 0.01% who do have psychological problems and they need to see a doctor.
If you do live in a society, you do need to care, as "what others do" affects society in general, including you in the end. Affects how they behave, how they vote, what causes they support, their mental health, and tons of other things, all of which end up also affecting those who don't use those apps.
I for one deleted all of those platforms and my life is definitely better (I'm way less distracted for once, but the list is longer).
What do I care what others do?