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The over-consumption of social media dramatically affects Americans’ ability to have meaningful human interactions. Using platforms like TikTok and Instagram encourages harmful habits towards productivity levels, information retention, mental health, and attention span. Social media was designed to connect people, share ideas, and communicate, yet consumers have lost an appetite for engaging in real-world surroundings.
Hours of doomscrolling make life seem to lack substance. The desire to lay in bed and spend hours scrolling, as social media defines “bed rotting,” is detrimental to one’s human needs. These needs include engaging with others, life’s pleasantries, and brain-enriching environments.
Measures like Governor Hochul’s plan to restrict smartphone usage in schools encourage students to focus on their education. Putting down one’s phone and paying full attention offers an opportunity for growth in relationships and learning.
To induce change in a nationwide lifestyle, we need to change how we spend our time.
Morgan Monile
Rochester
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Lee, agreed. Carol is good hearted but is wrong on human nature. We are more malleable than she argues. It’s why advertising, propaganda and disinformation work. If only we had the free will we’ve fooled ourselves into believing we do. (Or they have fooled us into believing).
I mean being discerning about advertising, misinformation etc. is definitely a skill that can be taught and learned. We should be emphasizing that in school at an early age.
Agreed…we should be teaching that to everyone. Yet, frankly many of us knowing what they read on the internet is biased still remain in our silos.
Agreed, too much of anything can be potentially harmful and social media is both a curse and a blessing. But whether it is good or bad depends on the human that is using it. It is kinda like gun ownership. Social media is not itself good, bad, harmful, healthful nor does it have any attribute to which one can attach any value or lack thereof. There are people who use it to to show pictures of themselves eating their favorite pancakes. . . and there are people who use it to share information about causes, events, and other people who are doing something that matters. So, it’s the people behind the message, not the medium itself that we have to look out for.
I guess I would say though that the use of a gun isn’t subject to the algorithmic whims of the manufacturer. They make the gun. They deliver the gun. After that it’s a lump of goods that has a specific function, and no “will” behind it. You are a customer that buys it, they are a vendor that sells it.
Social media is different and treating it as just another product is dangerous. All social media is run by companies and constantly interacts with you even when you aren’t actively using it. Those companies treat us (the social media users) as the PRODUCT not the CUSTOMER. As such everything you do when connected to them is consumed, distilled, and sold to the highest bidder. Because their CLIENT and CUSTOMER is the advertiser and the purchaser of your data. That’s the first part of the difference between a product and social media.
The second part is that for most platforms, what you see in your “feed” is determined by and curated by the social media platform vendor. They can pick and choose from a wide variety of content what to show you. They can suppress, delete or alter content if they choose. And pick and choose they do. Usually with the intentions of one of two things: Manipulating you to think or know certain things, and getting more engagement (that is keeping you on the app as long as possible so they can both gather data and show you ads). Both of these are dangerous, and schools, and most parents – don’t teach their kids enough about what the danger is there. This “sentiment data” is being used for everything from manipulating social opinion to defending the companies in question from their competitors. It’s purposefully designed to be both addictive and promote controversy. The more you click, repost and comment – like or hate – the more engagement and the better off that platform performs. And since likes and hates are both engagement they have no incentive to cut off either. We need to teach everyone about what these apps do, and what the incentive is of their creators. Starting with doing that as kids is a key factor.
I read this on my phone.
I both….. agree and disagree. I agree that Social Media can be harmful and indeed has been weaponized by it’s creators to be both addictive and to manipulate sentiment to the business owners way of thinking. That’s a given. But there is another element here. Children, and adults, will inevitably have access to the internet, smartphones, AI and all the other tools out there. More and more a smartphone is a very specific tool that almost everyone has at an earlier and younger age. Denying their existence or not incorporating them into the educational experience is sort of like not giving out sex education in the hopes that students won’t discover it on their own and do something dumb.
I think one of the big failings of current traditional education is not adapting to teach the correct things at the correct time, given current technology. In many ways our current educational system is stuck in the 50s and 60s, beholden to an agricultural schedule, unaware of the fact that a 2 person family where one is always at home to greet children in the middle of the afternoon and care for them is no longer the norm, and – and this is important – not teaching critical modern skills that one needs to be a productive adult.
We teach kids social studies but not how to manage a budget, or fill out taxes or other basic financial skills. We teach them reading and writing, but not critical thinking when evaluating ideas and news and facts. We teach them sports but not why that’s important for their body and their future as a healthy adult. We don’t even teach the basic skills needed for things like raising a child or having a balanced life.
When it comes to smart phones you have a choice. You can ban them – force them to be put away and hope someone else teaches them how to use them productively – or you can put them into the category of “a tool we need to teach people to use properly” and incorporate them into the daily educational experience in a productive way. Is it better to hope they won’t use a phone to bully people on social media – or better to teach them that such activities are counterproductive and teach them alternatives such as helping their friends, and being critical of the way that the social media moguls have designed their algorithms to enhance conflict and repeat scrolling as you pointed out.
A final point I will raise is that children in today’s world are in an especially dangerous environment at school. In multiple school shootings a key intelligence factor for law enforcement has been children communicating from inside the school on their personal phones. If they don’t have access to them they are isolated. This is a horrible thing to have to think about – but it’s a reality and none of us would want to be the one to hear a student died because they couldn’t call out for help.
Rather than banning phones I’d propose reasonable network restrictions (as they have now in school networks) on access to certain sites, and using the phones as part of a curricula that teaches responsible, ethical and respectful usage, as well as how best to use the tools on them – including social media, AI, search, learning apps, school apps, etc. These goals could be accomplished but it means changing the way we teach things and there’s a lot of resistance to that.