The more news you watch, the more insane you get. The more news the world watches, the more insane it gets. Notice that I am not saying that insane people obsess over the media, I am saying that people who obsess over the media go insane. To be even more clear: social media is making you unhappy. It is not making you aware of your unhappiness, it is causing it. It isn't pointing out how bad the world is, it's making the world bad.
I’ve noticed that everything at the top of Reddit is about how important screen time is.<p>I’ve also noticed how your standards for hangout buddies skyrocket when you spend time alone.<p>I think the lesson here is that we’re not getting enough good solitude, and chasing that situation with bad solitude, but I’m not sure what the line looks like yet.
I’m the most calm and happy I’ve been in a long time. I threw away almost all of my social media and news consumption.<p>The more I’ve come to stand outside of it, the sillier and more crazed the culture has seemed. We really need a collective break and some wisdom building work.<p>Laron Lanier’s book, Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now, is still a great read and one I often recommend to my friends. I think now that we’re mostly dealing with socially acceptable forms of addiction, and the sooner we realize that and start treating it like a public health crisis the better off we’ll be.
I don't think the changes in behavior have anything to do with mass media. People don't really follow mass media these days. People simply default to maximizing comfort (minimizing effort), which leads them to all these choices. It's unfortunate that maximizing comfort does not maximize happiness, which inevitably leads humanity into increased unhappiness. Someone should really invent a way of life which aligns comfort with happiness.
Another opportunity on Hacker News to recommend Niel Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death". Best book I've read in the last 5 years and goes deep on this issue as it presented ~40 years ago with televised mass media. The books has aged pretty flawlessly - still 100% applicable to the internet age.<p>A few comments here revealing a core point: It is a feature, not a bug, that people don't consciously realise it's happening to them.
Mass media is not the problem. Personalized media is the problem. Mass media fosters consensus while personalized media fosters divergent views.<p>There are pluses and minuses to both, but I feel like mass media is the wrong term to use to diagnose the problem.
I think people grossly overestimate the amount of real human beings embroiled in these online communities of niche collectivism outrage. Developers are not immune to this either, because they are chronically online and whether they like it or not, they're catching wind of the exact same volume of clickbaity activity.<p>Joe Rogan is notorious for this, as he vehemently believes every single thing he sees or hears from Twitter as being reflective of the state of the rest of the real world. This is because he, ultimately, is actually sequestered from real society,
operating in a tight little bubble of an elite privileged few.<p>And this is no different from other small, vocal, and ultimately isolated communities of people who spend all day together… Just online.<p>I live in a suburban part of Southern California, I deal with regular people of all shapes and sizes and ages and races daily basis in person. 99.99% of them have absolutely no idea about any of this nonsense. not a single thing from this article would even register on their personal radars. unless it was served up to them on a platter by which ever partisan news network they happen to check in with once in a while.<p>and don't even get me started on the fact that the vast majority of this Internet activity is ultimately bots, bored trolls, and paid schills.<p>also: why is this article focused on modern mass media? Simply look thousands of years ago at the original mass media mind prison called religion.
Some 'Normal' people are losing their minds too.<p>The double stack effect of people losing their mind in real life and then finding an echo chamber to blame it on, is hard to escape solo.<p>Critical thinking and solid reasoning goes out the window too easily.
Why is this surprising? These systems are doing what we programmed them to do: maximize engagement with media by selecting and prioritizing the most engaging content.<p>(That happens to be the craziest, most divisive, most triggering stuff because we are wired that way, but the algorithm doesn’t care. It just followed gradient descent and found a local minimum and gave us Qanon and cancel mobs.)<p>This comes at the expense of friendships, relationships, hobbies, and self care. It has to because people have only so much attention and time.<p>So it’s ruining our minds and destroying society, but at least people click ads.<p>Acting like this is a surprise is like “this machine gun perforates things with bullets when I point it at things! How is this happening?!?!” Well, it’s because that there gun was… uhh… designed to do that…<p>People don’t want to admit that this was a deliberate choice.
> "In-person interaction is hazardous to your body, mind and reputation. The only truly safe space is at home, in front of a screen."<p>> This is the one conspiracy theory I truly believe, that mass media’s relentless “stranger danger” propaganda serves the same purpose as a cult’s rules against fraternizing with the heretics. And it’s the worst kind of conspiracy in that I don’t think the conspirators have any idea what they’re doing.<p>Great insight.<p>All mediums promote themselves so they can remain competitive against other mediums. 'Stranger danger' is a powerful way to promote, it hijacks our natural inclination to focus on data that helps us assess risk.<p>We've seen this grow from having like 3 tv news stations to 24h cable news and now to UGC video. As production & distribution tech has increased adoption (from 100s of producers to billions), it's increased the <i>quantity</i> and <i>quality</i> of content that can deliver this stranger danger message. Meanwhile our paleolithic emotions remain unchanged.<p>Whether it's cults, media, social media, politics, etc, the incentives of maximal extraction are always to divide & conquer. Our isolation and a lot of our strife is the product of our extractive economy slowly winning out over our agency.
I don't think it's the mass media. I mean, the media - especially social networks - play a role, but ultimately it's people who make it the hellscape it sometimes is. It's not some feature of technology or business or "capitalism" or anything - it's ultimately people being shitty to each other, again and again. If anybody wants to make it better, that's where they should focus their effort - not introducing regulations to have screen time limits, or banning certain algorithms or media sites, or introducing large print warnings on social media sites (I am not sure if anybody proposed it yet but I'm sure they will) - but trying to push cultural norms towards being shitty to other people is bad. It's much harder to pull off, but I think it's the only hope.
The problem is corporate media which runs as a wing of the US State Dept. If we had state run media that identified itself as such it basically wouldn’t be different.
This article is really not helping by labeling something like half of the US as bigots.<p>I actually believe that mainstream media is more balanced nowadays compared to a few years ago. I think that they've caught on to the fact that trust has eroded in recent years and are adjusting. However critics have not yet realized that.<p>Funny to get flagged by people who don't have anything to say in response by the way. Whenever politics are involved I take it as validation.