Comment by palata
4 days ago
I understand your point, but I don't think it works like that for teenagers. Teenagers need to connect. They will go where the others go, because that's exactly what matters to them.
It's not that they deliberately want the addiction. The addiction is a consequence of it, but they go to TikTok because their peers are on TikTok.
They can connect in person. Like they did exclusively up until the mid 00s.
I think peers is also a strange word to use. When I joined Facebook in 2007 you were more-or-less sorted by where you went to high school. You connected with people you knew.
I'm sure that still exists on some level, but social media is now about driving engagement with people who pay these companies to get eyeballs. An influencer isn't your peer. It's like considering Billy Mays (may he rest in peace) your peer in 2007. No, he's a dude who sold you Oxy-Clean, but he was on TV a lot.
I was bullied in high school because I was so different.
I was also a new kid so it was hard to join an existing clique in a small town.
Online groups saved me. It not only let me stay in contact with my old friends, but also let me meet new people with similar interest so I didn't feel so alone.
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. have mostly killed off the places where online groups formed when I was a kid.
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I don't think your story is uncommon especially for people who had trouble fitting in, however I would bet that places like facebook or instagram were not where you found your online groups. More likely to have been forums or online games. Very different environments and consequences.
Facebook is not "online groups", and it is known to statistically lead teenagers into higher rates of suicide.
Connect in person as a teen when everything is designed around cars and stuff a lot more expensive. Where cops arrested for you for loitering. Where people see kids going home from school as 'they're up to no good'. A lot of the past locations are gone and no longer accessible for todays youth. Even fast food places want you gone as fast as possible.
> social media is now about driving engagement with people who pay these companies to get eyeballs
That's what it is, but that's not how teenagers perceive it, I think.
I see it like this: if all your friends watch the news everyday and spend a lot of time talking about it, you will end up watching the news as well. To connect.
If all your friends watch a lot of sport and meet for that, you may well end up learning to enjoy sport as well.
If all your friends know the trends on TikTok and talk about it...
>Teenagers need to connect.
But not in a tiktok-way. They have more than enough social contacts when they go to school. No one need tiktok.
I went to a school with over 1,200 students and still had no friends. Kids can be extremely cruel to their neurodivergent peers. I wasn’t able to learn social skills until university .
Things would have been a lot different if I had access to the internet.
I’m sorry to hear that happened to you.
Unfortunately, the data about mental health outcomes of teens who consume social media is not positive, so I’m not sure things would have been better.
Xanga allowed kids to connect and be social that otherwise weren’t able to in high school. But do we want to raise a society of Xanga kids, or do we want to solve the root problems why they couldn’t be social in the first place?
(Or am I asking the same exact question two different ways, a distinction without a difference?)
> They have more than enough social contacts when they go to school.
If you ever found yourself being the "weird kid" in a small town high school, you might see it different.
I found myself being the "weird kid", and I'm glad I had the Internet in general, but I'm also glad the Internet wasn't yet advanced enough to seem like a complete replacement for in-person socialization. I knew I was missing something by playing Runescape instead of talking to people, knowing that drove me to forge in-person connections when I did have the opportunity, and the fact that I had to actively engage with the Internet instead of passively scroll through it gave me at least some baseline for doing that.
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> No one need tiktok.
And we should not underestimate teenagers: if they have something better to do than swiping on TikTok, they do it. Parents must help them have better things to do.
But still, if all their friends know and talk about the TikTok trends, they will feel disconnected if they have no clue. That's how I meant that they "need" it. They need to "connect" as in having the same references as their friends.
That’s kind of like telling parents that they should tell their kids to eat their vegetables when sitting next to McDonalds.
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So if theoretically you ban addictive social media platforms and prevent the formation of any platform with more than a million users, then yes, teenagers will go where their peers go, but that will not necessarily be where teenagers on the other side of the country go. It will also not necessarily be a destructive algorithm-oriented social network designed to maximize time spent viewing ads.
My friend group had a phpBB forum back in the day. I spent hours on there because I liked hanging out with that group of friends, not because it was profitable for some megacorp.
yea I don't think people are grasping how different places like Myspace or forums or online games are compared to modern social media.
How do you explain the children/teenager loneliness spike since ~2008-2010 if these things are the pinnacle of connection ?
I didn't want to imply that those things are the pinnacle of connection.
I rather wanted to say that it's easier said than done. You can't just tell teenagers "stop using social media, it's bad for you". Because if their peers use social media, then they need to use social media as well.
I'm all for removing social media altogether.
Social media is not connection.