The Internet is a shithole

[macdoc]

Post by aufbahrung » Tue Oct 01, 2024 12:21 pm

Internet needs breaking up. It was supposed to be many nodes to survive a nuclear war, and was a far more entertaining place when it was in the hands of amateurs and small sites. These big companies are the cause of depression - gated cartels of meaning gonna depress anyone with a brain, they don't allow the side alleys where so much of the real action of life takes place in the real world.

someone needs a BlueSky fix....

[pErvinalia]

BlueSky is too optimistic for Crumple.

[Sean Hayden]

People almost never make things better --on the first pass-- and social media has given them a megaphone and blowtorch to prove that point.

[Brian Peacock]

If you’ve got children, you need to watch Swiped – and see how sick their phones are making them

Every parent of a school-age child should watch Swiped, the Channel 4 documentary on smartphones shown last week. It was devastating. It told of an Essex secondary school’s experiment in response to what it saw as a rise in anxiety and stress among its 11-year-olds. A group of them agreed to surrender their phones for three weeks.

The parents’ stories were familiar – of children unable to make eye contact with adults, no longer chatting with ease, spending hours alone and staying awake into the small hours. Some spent five, six, even nine hours a day on their phones. They made “friends” with total strangers, received hate mail, suffered panic attacks, went from normal to self-harm. Surveys claim a quarter of British 11-year-olds have now watched online pornography. One child died in tragic circumstances closely linked to their social media use.

The survey was thorough. A monitoring team from York University scanned the children’s brains and noticed many suffered from deteriorating grey matter, despite being articulate, intelligent, normal children. We see them dropping their phones into a glass box and watch their initial symptoms of addiction withdrawal. They were acutely bored, silent at meals and had disturbed sleep.

Yet over the weeks the tests and interviews with both children and parents were undeniable. Just three weeks without phones saw a marked 17% fall in symptoms of anxiety and depression. Children had an average of one extra hour’s sleep and a 3% improvement in memory. A girl’s panic attacks ceased. Most significant was the children’s eerie sense of normality. “I thought part of me had been missing … I came downstairs … I did things with my family … I found my mum … one day phones will be banned from children.” Parents likewise reported a brief period of family happiness, and dreaded “the return of the phones”.

...

Smartphones must sooner or later be universally banned for young people under 16, with the same ferocity as are cigarettes, drugs and knives. A technology so long eulogised is now dissolving the bonds that should be at the heart of a child’s family and friendship relations. This must be wrong, yet nothing is done about it. At least watch the programme.

[pErvinalia]

Australia is banning social media for children under 16.The details are yet to be worked out, but will be good if they succeed. Already many schools ban the use of phones during school day.

[Brian Peacock]

I fear the social and mental health aspects of smartphones are not limited to children. How many alt-right fanbois have been radicalised through Facebook or X: The Everything App?

[Sean Hayden]

I see it every day. But there are possible confounding factors eg socioeconomic status might influence both what ends up on a phone ie what social media is most viewed, and how it is interpreted/used. But it seems likely to me that it’s at least amplifying negative feelings and harmful perceptions, and serving to constantly distract and isolate.

[Tero]

I'm mostly regretting the time wasted. But half the days in winter are shitty here. As is most of February due to the cold. So the Internet.

Stuck indoors I spend too much unfocused time. My Finnish friend's brother, 75, is a well known musician. He now lives in a small apartment alone. They had to use a family intervention and take the laptop away. It was some damn conspiracy site.

[Tero]

I put it in my politics blog as it it the only serious one (others are music, Finnish blog and onion stories), but has more to do with social media invading our lives than politics. It of course shapes politics too.
https://esapolitics.blogspot.com/2024/1 ... rload.html

[Tero]

And the opposite of too much information: just google it and take the first hit that agrees with you.
https://bsky.app/profile/esa88jarvi.bsk ... wfawjsd226

[Sean Hayden]

People want to believe stupid things. Somehow these conspiracy theories are helping people cope, and you can’t access that same relief…

[Brian Peacock]

That's just what the Moon People want you to believe.

[Sean Hayden]

Bleh, moonies. They’re nearly as obnoxious as people from the core.

[Sean Hayden]

Facebook has decided the platform shouldn't use fact checkers and will instead ape X's approach. Apparently, the fact checkers destroyed trust.

[pErvinalia]

Facts are a left-wing conspiracy!