Has the internet ruined society?

[mrbrklyn]

[mrbrklyn]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...ration/534198/

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”
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I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology. Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually, and along a continuum. Beliefs and behaviors that were already rising simply continue to do so. Millennials, for instance, are a highly individualistic generation, but individualism had been increasing since the Baby Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Then I began studying Athena’s generation.

[mrbrklyn]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/hea...tally-ill.html

Are smartphones making our children mentally ill?
Leading child psychotherapist Julie Lynn Evans believes easy and constant access to the internet is harming youngsters

Julie Lynn Evans has been a child psychotherapist for 25 years, working in hospitals, schools and with families, and she says she has never been so busy.

“In the 1990s, I would have had one or two attempted suicides a year – mainly teenaged girls taking overdoses, the things that don’t get reported. Now, I could have as many as four a month.”

And it’s not, she notes, simply a question of her reputation as both a practitioner and a writer drawing so many people to the door of her cosy consulting rooms in west London where we meet. “If I try to refer people on, everyone else is choc-a-bloc too. We are all saying the same thing. There has been an explosion in numbers in mental health problems amongst youngsters.”

[mrbrklyn]

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-...g-kids-unhappy

For the first time, a generation of children is going through adolescence with smartphones ever-present. Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, has a name for these young people born between 1995 and 2012: "iGen."

She says members of this generation are physically safer than those who came before them. They drink less, they learn to drive later and they're holding off on having sex. But psychologically, she argues, they are far more vulnerable.

"It's not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental health crisis in decades," she writes in a story in The Atlantic, adapted from her forthcoming book. And she says it's largely because of smartphones.

[Carabas]

No, humanity has always had an ugly side. The internet just makes it visible

It also makes that ugly side stronger by giving it an anonymous voice and places to gather.

[The Darknight Detective]

Before they talked behind peoples backs or ganged up on them.

Except we still have that and the cowardly trolls.

I love the Internet for a variety of reasons, but with the good there is unquestionable bad.

[Duskman]

I really feel like most of the damaging effects of the internet stem mostly from commercialized social media which encourages tribalism and addiction with instant results. As a medium for spreading knowledge and entertainment, its pretty great.

[DrNewGod]

I really feel like most of the damaging effects of the internet stem mostly from commercialized social media which encourages tribalism and addiction with instant results. As a medium for spreading knowledge and entertainment, its pretty great.

A few places on it spread knowledge. Most of it spreads opinion and/or data.

[Michael Watkins]

society has always been a crap-show

[Jack Dracula]

Wouldn't it be more accurate to ask whether society has ruined the internet?

[Tuck]

Wouldn't it be more accurate to ask whether society has ruined the internet?

Failing to account for human nature while constructing something man made is the fault of the architects.

Philo Farnsworth believed the television would lead to world peace. He also thought that perhaps sports and entertainment broadcasts might be a minor, ancillary use. We've been on this ride before.

People get so excited about the upside of tech, they make unjustified, overly optimistic predictions and ignore potential alternate possibilities.

[DrNewGod]

Failing to account for human nature while constructing something man made is the fault of the architects.

Philo Farnsworth believed the television would lead to world peace. He also thought that perhaps sports and entertainment broadcasts might be a minor, ancillary use. We've been on this ride before.

People get so excited about the upside of tech, they make unjustified, overly optimistic predictions and ignore potential alternate possibilities.

Yup. Got it right

[mrbrklyn]

I really feel like most of the damaging effects of the internet stem mostly from commercialized social media which encourages tribalism and addiction with instant results. As a medium for spreading knowledge and entertainment, its pretty great.

that is mostly true

[mrbrklyn]

A few places on it spread knowledge. Most of it spreads opinion and/or data.

Most of the knoweldge on the internet has been expunged by web search engines that don't list them. The internet as we knew it, is already a dead letter and replaced with a more controlled media run on "smart" phones. It is impossble to do reserch any longer on the net. All the serious publications, many from universities, and home pages, are dead.