100%. As others have pointed out, it's designed to be addictive, and is addictive. They know it, too; people at companies like Facebook don't let their kids use Facebook. And like any addiction, extreme forms of it cause harm.
The difficulty is going to be that -- although all of our brains have figuratively been irradiated by nuclear-hot Twitter takes -- this doesn't give you a literal, physical harm like cancer (one possible exception: suicide, but that opens up whole other causation questions). The harms it does cause (you do worse at school or work, your phone is a distraction from real people in your life, etc.) also fit neatly into the "they're just lazy/inattentive/immature/it's a parenting problem" box, so there are decades-old narratives in place to defend this shit.
From a neuroscientific perspective, I think tech like this is too new to really know what kind of harm we might be causing ourselves by being online. Like it's known that there are behavioral correlates of improved outcomes in the graded severity of symptoms of alzheimers patients who broadly seem better off if they were someone who read often and enjoyed solving puzzles. Who knows how social media use in one's teens and twenties might bias their behavior in subtle ways that may add up later in life?
100%. As others have pointed out, it's designed to be addictive, and is addictive. They know it, too; people at companies like Facebook don't let their kids use Facebook. And like any addiction, extreme forms of it cause harm.
The difficulty is going to be that -- although all of our brains have figuratively been irradiated by nuclear-hot Twitter takes -- this doesn't give you a literal, physical harm like cancer (one possible exception: suicide, but that opens up whole other causation questions). The harms it does cause (you do worse at school or work, your phone is a distraction from real people in your life, etc.) also fit neatly into the "they're just lazy/inattentive/immature/it's a parenting problem" box, so there are decades-old narratives in place to defend this shit.
From a neuroscientific perspective, I think tech like this is too new to really know what kind of harm we might be causing ourselves by being online. Like it's known that there are behavioral correlates of improved outcomes in the graded severity of symptoms of alzheimers patients who broadly seem better off if they were someone who read often and enjoyed solving puzzles. Who knows how social media use in one's teens and twenties might bias their behavior in subtle ways that may add up later in life?
Good point.
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