If academic study is on one end of a spectrum, lots of Wikipedia is maybe in the middle, pretty accessible and simple enough to keep clicking through links for someone interested, but still at least requiring active participation.
Something like TikTok (which admittedly I’ve never used) along with AI conversations which I have, can basically take place without the brain ever even engaging other than the reward pathways.
If academic books or literature are fruits and vegetables, Wikipedia is maybe a restaurant meal and social media (+ AI chat) dominos pizza or Pringle’s or some other thing that’s been processed into oblivion and just diffuses though your stomach lining directly onto your blood as you mindless binge on it.
It's hard to think of a society where this is the right measure. A better measure would be the user's best interest.
Arguably social media is significantly worse when it's aligned with the society's incentives AND those incentives are bad.
For example, consider hypothetical always-on addictive social media in the following societies:
- Ancient Egypt
- Any fundamentalist religious community
- The Congo Free State
- Antebellum South in the United States
- East Germany
- Sparta
- The Assyrian Empire
Alignment with society isn’t a virtue when society is sick. And a society is almost always sick, or at least there's noticeable room for improvement.
For starters, wasn't the USA founded by, ehh.. how shall I say it tactically, very religious people?
Considering the tech companies kissing Trump's ring start of Jan 2025, we might well be going that way. I mean, it is no secret if you read Project 2025 or a decent summary of it.
Either way, if we ignore all that (too 'political'), it is being used today for amplification of (bogus) information and to influence our democratic processes. Social media is a propaganda tool in the hands of the wrong people.
East Germany is an interesting example, as it is relatively recent. There was mass surveillance in such dictatorship. People's homes were tapped, informants, all the post was opened, read and closed. About one third of the East German population worked for the East German government. This is very inefficient if you think about it. If they had more surveillance tools at their disposal, they'd also need more automation/computers/ML to aid with said surveillance.
In the same vein, something as simple as Bluetooth has been used for P2P messaging between smartphones in mass demonstrations. Think about the revolutions in countries such as Ukraine, Egypt, and many other in that region.
> wasn't the USA founded by... very religious people?
The USA was founded by a mix of people religiously, but many of them were essentially deists. That is, not outright atheists but the closest thing you could admit publicly at the time. It's true that some of them were Christians, like John Jay. Some of them, like Jefferson, retained some Christian belief but rejected many of the core Christian beliefs. Jefferson even literally cut much of Jesus out of the bible. Most of them were committed to religious freedom, and that freedom successfully became the very first enumerated right in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution. Relative to the standards of the time, I think the USA was founded by remarkably secular people.
You may be thinking of the Puritans who founded an American colony a century before the founding of the USA. They still remained a powerful community locally during the founding, but the founders of the USA (as we normally consider them) were not Puritans.
The secular roots of the country are written into the Constitution, but the country gradually Christianized over the years. For example, adding "In God We Trust" in the 1860s and adopting it as an official motto in the 1950s.
But at any rate, I agree if your point is that (consistent with my point above) widespread social media in a Puritan colony or similar would have been unpleasant. In literature, the Scarlet Letter and the Crucible raise a similar point.
I’ve spent more hours than a sane person should just hopping from one topic to another and often end up reading about something I had no idea was a thing an hour earlier.
But I also use YouTube only for documentaries and read a lot generally, my only social media is HN and Reddit (though not a lot).
I’m just not wired for engagement the way most the people in my life seem to be.
Other than Bank App, Kindle and Firefox I have nothing installed on my phone it didn’t come with, iOS is basically same on my iPad.
I don’t find the modern web very engaging and use unhook/ublock origin to keep YT what I want it to be which is a no distraction source of documentaries.
I think this access gave opportunities to bad actors whose incentives are misalligned with society's. Social media companies. They use this opportunity to serve us easily digestible garbage thats going to get us hooked.
Its a not some grand and malicious conspiracy or anything. Greed is just a part of capitalism. Before, people loved getting others hooked on drugs because it made them so much money.
People who like capitalism know this is a bug in the system that needs to be patched with regulations. We stopped putting cocaine in coca cola. We just need to stop putting brainrot garbage in our kids information feeds. We need to penalize companies for these greed driven addiction algorithms. Itll be hard, but its what needs to be done and we can do it if we have enough societal willpower