Social media, especially now, is designed to harm people’s mental health and isolate them. It’s programmed this way in order to keep people’s eyes glued to ads and buying shit they don’t need, but the side effect is creating a mass mental health crisis. These effects seem to be more pronounced in young people, whose brains are still developing.
So yeah, I would like to see how a social media ban effects mental health and, by extension, the frequency of mass shootings… but that takes time.
It’s also fair to say that school shootings are, sadly, just part of our culture. They’ve been occurring at least since the 60’s (if you count Charles Whitman, and I would.), but maybe that’s an argument for doing something differently too. The problem with that line of thinking is that both ruling parties are pro-gun and most are enthusiastically supportive of making guns extra legal in exchange for lobbyist “gifts” and campaign contributions that they can pocket legally by loaning their campaigns money at 20% interest, so I’m not exactly optimistic that there will ever be meaningful change on gun control.
One would hope that a society could address more than one ill at a time, and that we could deal with rampant gun violence while also trying to ameliorate the harms from highly-addictive social media. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we’re seriously dealing with even one of those at a time, but it sure would be nice!
That said, you’ve also got to look at the probability that a given population is going to face a given harm. School shootings are appalling, and we should be doing something (any of the dozen perfectly viable somethings clearly available) to stop them. But the actual number of kids who will ever get shot at is a fraction of a fraction. On the other hand, literally every kid in the world is a target for the harms of addictive social media. Hell, I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised if, in the process of addressing the widespread psychological harms of social media, we might also measurably reduce the number of mass shootings.
Mental health, cognitive and attention span issues, misinformation, etc. are to the point that it’s a public health crisis. If we’re lucky, ten years from now, we’ll talk about this the way we talk about smoking now.
Great concept, highlighting skewed priorities, but awful execution.
I don’t think this is a good example.
Social media, especially now, is designed to harm people’s mental health and isolate them. It’s programmed this way in order to keep people’s eyes glued to ads and buying shit they don’t need, but the side effect is creating a mass mental health crisis. These effects seem to be more pronounced in young people, whose brains are still developing.
So yeah, I would like to see how a social media ban effects mental health and, by extension, the frequency of mass shootings… but that takes time.
It’s also fair to say that school shootings are, sadly, just part of our culture. They’ve been occurring at least since the 60’s (if you count Charles Whitman, and I would.), but maybe that’s an argument for doing something differently too. The problem with that line of thinking is that both ruling parties are pro-gun and most are enthusiastically supportive of making guns extra legal in exchange for lobbyist “gifts” and campaign contributions that they can pocket legally by loaning their campaigns money at 20% interest, so I’m not exactly optimistic that there will ever be meaningful change on gun control.
One would hope that a society could address more than one ill at a time, and that we could deal with rampant gun violence while also trying to ameliorate the harms from highly-addictive social media. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we’re seriously dealing with even one of those at a time, but it sure would be nice!
That said, you’ve also got to look at the probability that a given population is going to face a given harm. School shootings are appalling, and we should be doing something (any of the dozen perfectly viable somethings clearly available) to stop them. But the actual number of kids who will ever get shot at is a fraction of a fraction. On the other hand, literally every kid in the world is a target for the harms of addictive social media. Hell, I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised if, in the process of addressing the widespread psychological harms of social media, we might also measurably reduce the number of mass shootings.
Mental health, cognitive and attention span issues, misinformation, etc. are to the point that it’s a public health crisis. If we’re lucky, ten years from now, we’ll talk about this the way we talk about smoking now.
Great concept, highlighting skewed priorities, but awful execution.
100000%