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Mistletoe | on: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts
This is exactly the parasocial way my girlfriend's niece and friends experience life. No relationships of their own, it is all celebrities and their lives, ingested on their phones. I don't have the heart to tell them that 95% of it is stuff created by PR firms.
lazystar | parent
playing devils advocate for a minute... isnt that similar to what our parents said in the 80's/90's about our generation? all that "tv and phone" brain rot
maccard | root | parent | next
Yes. And what the previous generation said about rock music.

Celebrities and “socialites” have been idolised for years - Paris Hilton certainly isn’t the doing of this generation, neither is Jackie Kennedy.

If you think that what we’re doing with mobile apps and social media is new, take a look at the 20th century a little harder.

addicted | root | parent | next
1. People were clearly wrong about music. Audio only is clearly not as addictive as video + audio.

2. People did say that about TV and TV maybe had the potential to be like this. However, TV failed in many ways to be a hyper addictive device. Some of the many reasons: i. Just less content. There wasn’t that much TV content at all. YT probably adds more content in an hour than all the TV content ever created.

ii. You couldn’t choose what you wanted to watch beyond a few dozen channels at best. So you always had opportunities where you were forced to do something different at many times.

iii. The TV wasn’t available to you at all times. You had to go to the den to watch it and you couldn’t take it to school with you.

iv. TV couldn’t specifically target you individually with content to keep you watching. The most amount of targeting TV could do was at maybe a county level.

v. You couldn’t be part of the TV. Social media and phones today make you an integral part of the “show” where a kid can end up having a video of them popping their pants on a playground shown to millions of people. Even in a more ordinary sense, a kid commenting on a video or sending a message to a friend makes them part of the device in a way TV never could outside of extraordinary situations.

dotancohen | root | parent | next
TV certainly could target their audiences. Television shows would share their viewer demographics with advertisers: age groups, income levels, race and other social indicators, related interests.

The shows had target markets often driven by the need to reach certain demographics, though actual viewer demographics sometimes were surprisingly way off the mark.

graemep | root | parent
They could not do this at the individual level, nor did they have ways of reaching people to persuade them to watch (notifications from mobile apps, emails about posts).
BoingBoomTschak | root | parent
> 1. People were clearly wrong about music. Audio only is clearly not as addictive as video + audio.

Or they weren't and addiction wasn't the crux of their position; and I say that as someone who loves a lot of rock derivatives.

The influence pop icons with broken lives had on teen generations was horribly deleterious (and I'm not even talking about hippies), mainly because malleable and unproperly taught minds rarely see that an artist's respectability is completely separate from his output.

The ancients had the concept of muses for a reason.

vouaobrasil | root | parent | next
The key is limits. In the past, even if celebrites were idolized, we had a limited amont of information compared to now. The fluid variable is the increase in information, which makes the situation different.
Fluorescence | root | parent
You might need to recall just how crazy it was e.g. literal shrines to boy bands were just normal. To cover every inch of your bedroom walls and ceiling with photos of a celebrity crush was not unheard of. At school, every conversation could be about these obsessions. Folders/files would be covered with pledges of devotion.

No comment on how it is today, but looking back it was terrifyingly nuts - full on religious fervour to the point of mental disorder. When bands broke or people married/died, there would be full on breakdowns and sympathy suicides.

The lack of information might have helped exacerbate the religious mystery and make more space for imagination, fantasy and faith.

Wytwwww | root | parent | next
> take a look at the 20th century a little harder

Effectively unlimited content is huge, though. IMHO that pretty much overshadows everything. There were only so much records, magazines and other content you could consume before the internet.

tirant | root | parent | next
And they were right. But we would watch TV usually together and only for around 4-5 hours a day. Do you know how much screen time are people having ? 8 to 10 hours are not uncommon. And alone.
gehwartzen | root | parent | next
And our kids will warn their kids about how the ‘direct to brain’ type interface they will use is rotting their brains. Each generation will have been a little correct along the way; the harm at each step was just always gentle enough to not scold the frogs too quickly.
graemep | root | parent | next
I do think TV was, and is, harmful. I do not have one for that reason and I think it was good for my kids (as well as myself).

I also think social media is a lot worse.

lazide | root | parent
No, they hung out with each other in person too.