Agreed a whole lot. Social media is the new whipping boy, but no one is willing to confront that much of what it shows us is a genuine & real reflection, is just connecting us more accurately to the real state of things.
I think there's an incredible resillience especially in youth to not get bogged down in or at least to tangle with & find peace with the sad scary backdrop of the world. When they have elememts of hope, when they have positive role models, when they see successful adults having ok lives. And frankly that's a challenge, period; there's just little community, few role models left. Big employers are better quality of life but it's deeply depersonalizing, being so deeply embedded somewhere odd deep deep inside an org chart, with only modest chances of getting to work hard for a long time & then at best retire. The new work world is opaque, dis-real.
Reality is already very well built, well estaished, and there's little available space or reward for trying stuff out & finding ourselves. We see less making life happen.
A lot of this difficulty is because of so many of these sad scary hopeless background factors. But rather than try to tackle endless symptoms as problems, i keep feeling like there's rootstriking we could be doing by trying to develop & support a more youthfully active world, by directly trying to support & enable people interested in taking chances in getting things started. In building the world. Not just working in it. Some real signs of positive life, creating role models of people who have real hands in shapimg their lives, have established good locus of controls: this is just wild spouting hypothesis, but I think that would make such a difference. Some signs of reality within reach.
No, social media is NOT 'connecting us more accurately to the real state of things'.
Most people are getting drip fed curated content to 'influence' them, which has a very different agenda to accuracy regarding real things.
Also most people are not selecting real things, they are selecting entertainment.
If you had just said connecting to real things, agreed that sometimes it is, plus a lot of false things, plus heaps of fantasy/entertainment. But when you said its connecting us more accurately to the real state of things, well thats just false.
Accuracy in echo chambers that create information bubbles as socmed systems do is simply impossible, then the fact these systems are used to influence not inform makes them produce highly distorted minds.
How is social media a "real reflection" of the "state of things" ?
Doesn't social media amplify and overexaggerate lot of things ?
We're always talking about how people are living double/fake life on Social media and most users, when the see such things develop a FOMO.
This is what happened to me at 14: the first time I've ever had an Internet connection at home. I am now 27 and it's really a downward spiral. I'm starting to think that the only solution, at least for me, would using Internet only for 10 minutes a day and only to download offline all the things I would like to read.
First step is to quit all social networks, and to remain off them for good. It's disorienting at first, and it certainly feels like withdrawal, but then it gets better, and quickly. In my case I'm at the point where I open up the computer and hardly know what to do on it, and pretty much only read HN. You can do it too. Save your spirit.
Most kids here get phones around 9/10 when they start walking to and from school alone, so before they really start using social media so it isn't a sudden one day they are using it, next day they aren't thing. Also children are changing for other reasons hitting puberty, generally growing older etc, and there is other stuff going on in their lives - cause and effect can be hard to pinpoint. There are also grey areas - is messaging your friends social media? Watching videos on YouTube?
I think there's an incredible resillience especially in youth to not get bogged down in or at least to tangle with & find peace with the sad scary backdrop of the world. When they have elememts of hope, when they have positive role models, when they see successful adults having ok lives. And frankly that's a challenge, period; there's just little community, few role models left. Big employers are better quality of life but it's deeply depersonalizing, being so deeply embedded somewhere odd deep deep inside an org chart, with only modest chances of getting to work hard for a long time & then at best retire. The new work world is opaque, dis-real.
Reality is already very well built, well estaished, and there's little available space or reward for trying stuff out & finding ourselves. We see less making life happen.
A lot of this difficulty is because of so many of these sad scary hopeless background factors. But rather than try to tackle endless symptoms as problems, i keep feeling like there's rootstriking we could be doing by trying to develop & support a more youthfully active world, by directly trying to support & enable people interested in taking chances in getting things started. In building the world. Not just working in it. Some real signs of positive life, creating role models of people who have real hands in shapimg their lives, have established good locus of controls: this is just wild spouting hypothesis, but I think that would make such a difference. Some signs of reality within reach.