If your parents or grandparents ask you how to post on Instagram or how to send a birthday message to a Facebook friend, a new study suggests you might want to help them -- not just to be nice but because getting them online may help their brain health, too.
Finding new ways to dunk on libs and chuds online, will help you reduce the risk of dementia!
I think I would agree with what you're saying for a period of time right up until the smart phones really started taking off. Now they try to make Instagram/youtube/etc as addictive and mindless as TV ever was. The internet used to be used for a lot more text consumption (ahem reading) before this shift.
Now they try to make Instagram/youtube/etc as addictive and mindless as TV ever was.
Nah, they're too in-your-face visually stimulating and the smartphone screens are too small for them. Even the act of swiping to the next Tiktok is a mild annoyance for them compared with just flipping to their favorite channel and completely vegetating. They would literally watch TV to fall asleep. It's so fucking creepy. Truly a mind killer.
I think there's truth to this. It's not nearly as mindless as TV. My mom was very into bulldog videos that appeared on Instagram on her phone the last time I went to visit my parents, but she can't just put on the "bulldogs" channel and let it play endlessly.
Even youtube autoplay is ass and gets annoying fast.
anecdotally, i think there's something to what you're saying. there's a guy my age that i have known since we were 15. we worked together in our 20s and 30s. and now we're in our 40s. he was always extremely bright and absolutely the more intelligent of us, but starting in his middle 30s, he went back to just watching TV. cable news and entertainment. i tried to show him how streaming devices work, and he would always say "nah, this is fine." and it was very much coming from a place of just wanting to have something to sit in front of passively. i would see him less and less (once a year) or talk on the phone a few times a year, and the decline was palpable.
eventually it got to the point he would never have anything original to say about anything, even more accessible stuff like mass culture critique or deconstruction. just a bunch of lukewarm takes that could be summed up as a set of editorial bullet points and a general confused cynicism about US decline and a disavowal of doing anything about it... while of course dismissing my passion for basic human rights and material analysis as some kind of naive eccentricity. this is not who he was 10-15 years ago. he used to read constantly, embrace humanism, and be creative. now he's like the poster child for stagnation.
I got into an argument about I think the Flint water crisis years ago with an acquaintance on FB who told me that I needed to just stop caring about other people.
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I think I would agree with what you're saying for a period of time right up until the smart phones really started taking off. Now they try to make Instagram/youtube/etc as addictive and mindless as TV ever was. The internet used to be used for a lot more text consumption (ahem reading) before this shift.
Nah, they're too in-your-face visually stimulating and the smartphone screens are too small for them. Even the act of swiping to the next Tiktok is a mild annoyance for them compared with just flipping to their favorite channel and completely vegetating. They would literally watch TV to fall asleep. It's so fucking creepy. Truly a mind killer.
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I think there's truth to this. It's not nearly as mindless as TV. My mom was very into bulldog videos that appeared on Instagram on her phone the last time I went to visit my parents, but she can't just put on the "bulldogs" channel and let it play endlessly.
Even youtube autoplay is ass and gets annoying fast.
deleted by creator
anecdotally, i think there's something to what you're saying. there's a guy my age that i have known since we were 15. we worked together in our 20s and 30s. and now we're in our 40s. he was always extremely bright and absolutely the more intelligent of us, but starting in his middle 30s, he went back to just watching TV. cable news and entertainment. i tried to show him how streaming devices work, and he would always say "nah, this is fine." and it was very much coming from a place of just wanting to have something to sit in front of passively. i would see him less and less (once a year) or talk on the phone a few times a year, and the decline was palpable.
eventually it got to the point he would never have anything original to say about anything, even more accessible stuff like mass culture critique or deconstruction. just a bunch of lukewarm takes that could be summed up as a set of editorial bullet points and a general confused cynicism about US decline and a disavowal of doing anything about it... while of course dismissing my passion for basic human rights and material analysis as some kind of naive eccentricity. this is not who he was 10-15 years ago. he used to read constantly, embrace humanism, and be creative. now he's like the poster child for stagnation.
:agony-acid:
I got into an argument about I think the Flint water crisis years ago with an acquaintance on FB who told me that I needed to just stop caring about other people.
100%. The boob tube really is the devil's invention.