Comment by rohan_
13 days ago
These discussions never discuss the priors, is this harm on a different scale then what preceded it? Like is social media worse than MTV or teen magazines?
13 days ago
These discussions never discuss the priors, is this harm on a different scale then what preceded it? Like is social media worse than MTV or teen magazines?
It is a completely different scale.
I loved MTV as a kid but it was as different to social media as can be.
Half the time you would turn it on and not like the video playing then switch the channel. Even if you liked the video that was playing, half the time the next video was something you didn't like so you would switch the channel.
Now imagine if MTV had used machine learning to predict the next video to show me personally that would best cause me to not change the channel.
That is not even really a different scale but a different category.
Why does it matter? We can’t go back and retroactively punish MTV for its behavior decades ago. Not to mention we likely have a much better understand of the impact of media on mental health now than we did then.
The best time to start doing the right thing is now. Unless the argument here is “since people got away with it before it’s not fair to punish people now.”
It matters because it points towards a common failure mode which we've seen repeatedly in the past. In the 1990s, people routinely published news articles like the OP (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/04/26/business/technology-digit...) about how researchers "knew" that violent video games were causing harm and the dastardly companies producing them ignored the evidence. In the 1980s, those same articles (https://www.nytimes.com/1983/07/31/arts/tv-view-the-networks...) were published about television: why won't the networks acknowledge the plain, obvious fact that showing violence on TV makes violence more acceptable in real life?
Is the evidence better this time, and the argument for corporate misconduct more ironclad? Maybe, I guess, but I'm skeptical.
My response I gave to the other person basically covers how I’d respond to this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46023313
What policy proposals would you have made with respect to MTV decades ago, and how would people at the time have reacted to them? MTV peaked (I think) before I was alive or at least old enough to have formative memories involving it, but people have been complaining about television being brain-rotting for many decades and I'm sure there was political pressure against MTV's programming on some grounds or another, by stodgy cultural conservatives who hated freedom of expression or challenges to their dogma. Were they correct? Would it have been good for the US federal government in the 80s and 90s to have actually imposed meaningful legal censorship on MTV for the benefit of the mental health of its youth audience?
I think passively watching something on television is very different from today’s highly interactive social media. Like instagram is literally a small percentage people becoming superstars for their looks and lifestyles and kids are expected to play along..
> people have been complaining about television being brain-rotting for many decades
This was a broad, simplified, unsupported claim that cannot be compared to the demonstrable, well-studied impacts of social media on people’s - especially young people’s - minds. They are not even remotely on the same level.
If we want to debate MTV specifically yes there are well studied, proven impacts of how various media can make people think of their own bodies and lives etc. that can be harmful. But again it’s not remotely to the same degree. Social media can be uniquely poisonous. There are a myriad of studies out there that confirm this but I’m happy to link some if you want me to.
If somebody wanted to it would probably not be very difficult to write an article all but conclusively proving that Instagram is more harmful than MTV.
Plus if we don’t do anything about it now, rohan_2 twenty years from now will use the same argument about whatever comes next!