Socrates bemoaned those young’ns who had the audacity to read their Homer, instead of memorizing it.
Tik tok is legitimately rotting their brains though.
Parents used to warn their kids that literature would rot their brains. Then it was the radio, TV, and video games. Now it's TikTok.
Submitted 1 year ago by aCosmicWave@lemm.ee to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Comments
TheDubz87@lemmy.world 1 year ago
aCosmicWave@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I am not disagreeing, I just think that this trend has been happening for thousands of years. The world is getting faster and faster and every generation fears the next leap. The kids always adapt though.
starlinguk@kbin.social 1 year ago
They don't adapt, though.
ylph@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The kids always adapt though.
There is a strong survivorship bias in this though. Some kids do adapt, maybe even most, but many still are harmed, and have been by unhealthy exposure to radio, television, videogames, etc. in the past. Social media is even wreaking havoc in the older generations right now.
It’s easy to point at the survivors and the success stories and say see, there is nothing to worry about - but that’s also a bit like pointing at the lifelong smokers who do not get lung cancer as an argument against promoting non-smoking.
Polydextrous@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yes, the trend of making more and more mentally disruptive technology has been continuing. Yes, capitalists have managed to make more and more effective attention/brain drains…that’s exactly what we’re saying.
The kids “adapt” in that the world has changed and kids adapt to the world they grew up in. It doesn’t mean the above things aren’t true. It just means things change, and I dunno about you, but I don’t see things moving in the most positive direction. Angrier people, less and less able to have nuanced discussions, people becoming more entrenched and hostile about their views, more instances of thinking people with differing opinions are “evil…” I mean, shit, look how much radio has changed. From old timey radio broadcasts with the family sitting around the fire hearing tales of Redd McGibbon and Bullet to fuckin Howard stern making strippers do math so people can laugh at them and Rush Limbaugh. See what we’re saying?
jesterraiin@lemmy.world 1 year ago
And they were right.
wildly gesturing at everything around
Moobythegoldensock@lemm.ee 1 year ago
They’re not wrong. Screen time is known to be harmful to children. And radio time may have been as well: hard to say, because kids aren’t listening to that kind of radio anymore. Two things can be true at once: pointing fingers at something that doesn’t apply anymore (when’s the last time you listened to a radio serial?) doesn’t invalidate the harms today.
Here’s what the actual experts say:
craftyindividual@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Talk radio still rots a lot of brains of all ages. It’s insidious as a lot of folks still have that on in the background while driving to work or cooking etc, as compared to video and TV where you have to look directly at it and think about the message received with your whole brain.
RanchOnPancakes@lemmy.world 1 year ago
To be fair as someone who over my life has transitioned from reading to the internet, to videos, to short form content. it does have an effect on your attention span.
Fades@lemmy.world 1 year ago
TikTok conditions you to process media very quickly, id it doesn’t catch you within a few seconds you’re on the next one — that sort of thing then applies access the board and not only when browsing TT
Especially since children are still developing their brains this makes it even more problematic
AceTKen@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Counterpoint: They used to be able to memorise the works of Homer.
Moonrise2473@feddit.it 1 year ago
and now they’re able to memorize all the dances/emotes from a specific influencer/streamer. Almost the same, no?
aCosmicWave@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Counter counterpoint: my generation had enough memory capacity to be able memorize the works of Homer Simpson and to quote him regularly. Children adapt to whatever is relevant at the time of their upbringing.
soviettaters@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Just so you know, newspapers used to be pretty terrible in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were ripe with exaggerations and sometimes downright lies. The issue with TikTok and social media in general is how easy it is for absolute idiots to spread lies and harmful information to children (and naïve adults).
Here’s an article on the topic from the New York Public Library.
SGforce@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
They’re all mediums. The content on them can be anything from mindless to informative.It’s all up to who’s curating it. Do you leave it up to the algos and advertisers or actually provide something to your kids? Up to a certain age letting them do whatever on the internet is idiotic like letting them run around a bookshop that carries porn and mein Kampf.
VoilaChihuahua@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I hope we can all agree that media, like drugs, exists on a spectrum of less harmful (books / weed) to very harmful (torture porn / bath salts). As time passes and more things are added to our lists we should no longer generalize and say everything in our once very small category is all good or all bad.
RubiksIsocahedron@reddthat.com 1 year ago
“Anything outside of the propaganda that I indoctrinate you with will rot your brain” - everyone in history.
nowan@kbin.social 1 year ago
Worth pointing out here is that many of these criticisms all along have been totally on-target. The printing press brought on wars of religion and a multitude of poorly-thought out, often racist/hate-filled screeds along with advances in learning and science. Radio has brought us Father Coughlin and Limbaugh along with democratizing politics the way printed pamphlets couldn't. I'm sure I don't have to point out that both TV and the internet have their brain-rotting sides as well.
The fact that something won doesn't mean it's better. The fact that it's better doesn't mean it doesn't have serious flaws.
EmoDuck@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
It’s ironic how that article mentiones reading as a good think children should do but when children books written in second person were first published people were using the exact same arguments against them
NumbersCanBeFun@kbin.social 1 year ago
I can agree with the TikTok but I’m being facetious.
I consumed a ton of media growing up. From TV, VHS, Radio, the Internet and pretty much everything else that’s cropped up in my lifetime.
I’m not the most knowledgeable or the most educated but I feel like it had the opposite effect. I recall lots of information that I was exposed too from these various form of media and it’s only benefited me.
A great example of this would be Age of Empires 2. I played all the campaigns in middle school and when I got to high school and started taking global studies I was shocked how much I already knew and how easy some of the tests were because I remember reading about that during the campaign in age of empires.
Niggling__Niggard@lemmy.world 1 year ago
“TikTok is just like reading a book”
-OP
ristoril_zip@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
I feel like the actual danger is too much of a single kind of stimulation. So if you ONLY sit around and read books, literally never go outside, never take a walk, never go out with friends, stop working… Is your contention that people were wrong to warn against doing that?
Now, have you seen how some people consume TikTok? They will literally do almost precisely what I’ve described above. Just sit and stare and scroll for hours. Neglect other life activities.
If you scroll TT for an hour per day, you’re never going to experience negative effects from it. If you scroll it for 14 hours a day, you will probably become a vegetable. Find a happy medium (for me it’s 0 hours per day but everyone is different), eat, go outside sometimes, spend time with real life people, go to work or school, etc.
Fubar91@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Wholey depends on the content of said delivery platforms. Tik-tok content does tend to lean towards mindless entertainment. If it was a bunch of learning or information content as the majority, people would have less of stink about it.
Too much of anything is bad obviously.
STUPIDVIPGUY@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
The fact that people have been concerned about this doesn’t automatically nullify the point. Attention and focus are skills which children must develop through boredom and long-form focus. TikTok brain is making that harder and harder for children to learn.
db2@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Argumentum ad antiquitum. Shame on you.
bstix@feddit.dk 1 year ago
Full circle with the book banning.
Anon819450514@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Youtube shorts, TikTok, Facebook Story, Snapchat Reel: they are all the same. If you block TikTok, then you need to block others as well.
Legal wise, it’s very hard to target a very specific type of media consumed. How can you really restrict that? IMHO, the only thing that might have better effects is educating people.
Same for drugs, alcool and tobacco. They are a all addictives.
GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
Eh, there is sufficient evidence to recommend children and teenagers having limited internet and social media access during their formative years at this point.
The tiktok algorithm of mindless doomscrolling funny little bits all short and digestible for a decaying attention span is just the most egregious example why restrictions should at least be considered.
aCosmicWave@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Apparently there was sufficient evidence to recommend children and teenagers to have limited access to the radio as well.
Shiggles@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
You realize that’s still true, right? You’re posting this as some big own as though it’s somehow not harmful to mindlessly consume any form of media to an extreme extent, especially in the learning years.
Somebody been watching too many tik toks?