> I've come to the conclusion that this is the 21st century's "TV rots your brain." We've replaced channel surfing with doom scrolling.
The difference with the TV is that TV didn't have individual, high granularity demographic and usage data to conform to its users' most exploitable side that ultimately drives mindless "engagement". TV ratings had coarsely sampled data at household levels and whatever broadcast was what everyone saw.
> I can say that there's a fundamental human need to stare into space for a while. We could delete all technology tomorrow, and we wouldn't magically be less distracted.
You're right that mild distraction is conducive to insight generation and as such can be thought as a need, but not all distraction is equal. Unlike a walk in the nature which has low-key wonder, expansiveness with a degree of indifference, youtube doesn't want you to be too indifferent at the risk of losing "engagement" and is pretty damn opinionated about what will keep you hooked. The latter is more like the mindless obsessive shuffling of zombies towards brains.
In other words, it would be like saying humans always consumed food for pleasure, and equivocating our modern, hyper-palatable industrial food that drives the obesity epidemic with a 14th century invention like kebabs of the Levant.
> The difference with the TV is that TV didn't have individual, high granularity demographic and usage data to conform to its users' most exploitable side that ultimately drives mindless "engagement". TV ratings had coarsely sampled data at household levels and whatever broadcast was what everyone saw.
I agree. I fail to see how what we have now is inherently worse...especially for cultural minorities. Exploiting psychological weakness to keep people's attention goes back a long, long way. That's never going away.
I also find your analogy to be a bit of a straw man. For it to work, there would have to be evidence of mental "obesity" that somehow began with social media and did not exist before. I don't see it, and you'd have to give me more than anecdote to change my own anecdotal views at this point. If you're saying it did exist before, but now we've crossed some line and now it's too much...well, we're back to what our grandparents said about television again.
> I fail to see how what we have now is inherently worse...especially for cultural minorities. Exploiting psychological weakness to keep people's attention goes back a long, long way. That's never going away
The "attack surface", so to speak, is larger with individualized content consumption. With TV at max we have N channels that can broadcast N different viewpoints with the intention to rile M people up, at most in N different ways. Youtube can rile M people up in M different ways. M is orders of magnitude larger than N.
There is an economical model somewhat analogous to this; price discrimination. Charging the absolute highest price every individual consumer would individually pay yields the absolute maximum profit. In contrast, having a visible price tag that makes everyone pay the same price leaves a lot of those profits on the table. In youtube's case, riling everyone up individually with their particularized content maximizes the engagement. Trying to rile groups of people with the same content doesn't yield the same engagement.
> There would have to be evidence of mental "obesity" that somehow began with social media and did not exist before.
You're right, references to information obesity goes back to Baudrillard. That said keep in mind absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence, even if our grandparents were complaining about a similar phenomena it doesn't mean our intuition about it is as inflated nor the phenomenon are in comparable scales. Not only that, credibility of past grievances go both ways; it took a long while to get cigarettes classified properly carcinogenic.
As for hard evidence, we could use non-work screen time as a proxy, which increases especially in younger demographics. It is still not a perfect comparison because different screens have different information densities and user interaction modalities.
As an indirect evidence I would suggest an increase in intensity and multi-valency of culture wars.
Current phase of the internet is at best a decade old, so there is also going to be an availability bias when looking for evidence.
I also couldn't help noticing you working in high profile media companies like Disney and Twitch in the past, I don't think you would assert it wouldn't ever affect your neutrality on this matter.
> As for hard evidence, we could use non-work screen time as a proxy,
To play devil's advocate, screen play time (i.e. video games) has inspired a whole generation of computer engineers to follow this career. I would argue that screen play time is essential to a child's development in the 21st century, and is just as valid as 'outside' play time or 'social' play time. Of course, all things in moderation still applies.
The difference with the TV is that TV didn't have individual, high granularity demographic and usage data to conform to its users' most exploitable side that ultimately drives mindless "engagement". TV ratings had coarsely sampled data at household levels and whatever broadcast was what everyone saw.
> I can say that there's a fundamental human need to stare into space for a while. We could delete all technology tomorrow, and we wouldn't magically be less distracted.
You're right that mild distraction is conducive to insight generation and as such can be thought as a need, but not all distraction is equal. Unlike a walk in the nature which has low-key wonder, expansiveness with a degree of indifference, youtube doesn't want you to be too indifferent at the risk of losing "engagement" and is pretty damn opinionated about what will keep you hooked. The latter is more like the mindless obsessive shuffling of zombies towards brains.
In other words, it would be like saying humans always consumed food for pleasure, and equivocating our modern, hyper-palatable industrial food that drives the obesity epidemic with a 14th century invention like kebabs of the Levant.