Yes. I remember having conversations with a woman in the early 2000’s who was telling me how social media was fucking her brain up by pushing ungodly amounts of beauty bullshit into her feed. This was before iphones.
I believed it then and I believe it now especially with the landfill full of articles pointing to it being the case.
Not going out and interacting as freely with people paying direct attention to one another leads to heightened mental issues? Shocking.
I grew up in the 80's and we were super fucking social. Anyone that didnt live it cannot grasp how far we have fallen from what we once had, and we had no idea how good we had it.
Not to mention everything is being recorded to haunt every kid there is.
I feel read bad for modern day kids, my daughter included. An important aspect of humanity has been lost.
Exactly. Sure, we can say it’s not directly related to tech devices, but it’s definitely related to not wandering and having real human connection constantly.
And with the recording of everything - absolutely changes behavior.
There is a wast difference between the internet. That gives you access to information.
And social media with algoriths fine tuned to keep you there as long as possible.
Cameras everywhere is for sure a disaster for anyones sanity and development.
100%. I read my phone a lot. Typically Lemmy and Wall St Journal. If I didn’t have this device I’d be reading paper magazines and newspapers just like I did pre-device / internet.
It’s not the device, it’s how it’s being used that’s harmful. But I think we all agree with that
Yeah, everyone in this thread saying the phone bad is a Boomer cop out is oversimplifying the issue.
Yeah, there’s probably a component of taking the blame away from decreased quality of life by blaming it on phones—but you can’t neglect the effect that lack of social interaction has. I’m from the same era, and it’s overwhelming to think how much more complex everything has gotten.
That's not a phone issue, that's a place issue. Where can your daughter go (without needing to drive) to hangout with friends? Can she conceivably walk there? Can her friends? I've been hearing my entire life that I just need to go outside and Bla Bla Bla but I don't have anywhere to go. The closest park is a good half hour walk and now there's even sidewalks! How pleasant. There's nowhere for children outside, it's nigh impossible to walk anywhere and it's not like your parents would let you anyway since there probably isn't even sidewalks the whole way.
For perspective I live a very reasonable 10 minutes walk away from the elementary school I went to. I think you'll agree that's a reasonable distance for at the very least the older kids to walk. However it took them till I was a senior in high school before they put in the side walk. You literally couldn't get to the elementary school on foot without walking on the side of the road for ~4 minutes. Even now the experience is awful and the crossings are unsafe. This is the world us phone kids grew up in. It's not that we don't want to go hangout in person, there's just nowhere to go and by the time people can drive it's far too late.
Also the high school is about 40 minutes walk, there's even sidewalks the whole way (now (only on one side))! It's an awful experience as there's absolutely no shade and about half of it is down a stroad.
I feel like this is the crux of it. do they think we WANT to be glued to our screens? social hubs are dead or dying, wrung out for profit. people have less time than ever, having to work and spread themselves thin just to stay afloat. mental healthcare is inaccessible to huge swathes of the population and our parents who can afford it refuse it. outside is a car dependent hellscape with increasingly unpleasant weather and increasingly agitated people. as a neurodivergent person it feels impossible to navigate. the phones don't exactly help, but they're certainly not the root of the issue. everybody on social media at this point is well aware of the drawbacks.
What else do any of us have? If I want to go out to a place, most places will have someone ask for money for me to be there. And it's usually not "some" money, but a "lot"of money, that always only goes up. Some people can't or don't want to spend money.
Being bombarded by corporate propaganda and fear is cheap, so that's where all your friends are if you have any.
Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews converge on the same message. An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally. Moreover, findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States, has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital-technology use. Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence.
Even though everybody seems convinced our attention spans have decreased, there is no conclusive evidence of it and scientists don’t even really think it is useful to talk about attention outside the context of motivation anyways.
Your attention span is fine, you are just too burned out from modern life to invest energy into things that take a lot of sustained focus that aren’t essential to survival.
You also have to be way more picky with what content you choose to engage with because there is sooooooo much more content now and that may look like a “short attention span” when your brain optimizes for tossing out the 95% off fluff to get right to the thing you actually wanted.
Our attention spans are fine, this has been the most boring moral panic ever but that is really all it is.
I can't make sense of bringing this in for this piece.
The headline of this piece is not really a question. Sure, there is a question in it. But it answers the question in the headline. . . .and that answer isn't "no." It's "it's not clear what the cause is."
Blaming teenage mental illness on social media feels to me like the boomers are trying to find a different scapegoat than all the factors caused by their own stupidity, greed and destruction of human habitat.
Odd when we are also reading how studies are showing increased levels of depression and suicide. Which lie do we believe? I'll just go with what I see happening with my own eyes and experience then.
This piece isn't saying there is no increase in depression and suicide. In fact, the whole premise of the article is that by blaming screen time we might be missing the actual cause of the issue (increase in depression and anxiety) and thus doing our children a disservice.
I would suggest that before trying to decide who to believe, you actually listen to their argument and evidence first. Instead of just thinking that your own perception of the world is perfectly objective and not anecdotal.
The world can't afford the poor either. And yet, here we have rich and poor and all classes in between, existing and extant. That's reality and you won't change it no matter how much you kick against it.
This is a very interesting development. Besides the headline the article explains some of the traditional limitations and complications of PV solar manufacturing today with extreme temperatures and vacuum conditions, performed in specific batches.
This new technology seems to do for PV solar what Henry Ford did for automobile manufacturing. Instead of each cell and panel being a bespoke manufacturing event with drastically different phases for it to move through, this makes a process where you dump raw materials in the front and continuous rolls of fairly cheap solar PV ready for use come out the other side.
So far there is a cost to the performance of these "roll" produced solar PV, and its in solar efficiency. Current consumer installable technology using the expensive process produces a panel of about 22%. This means of 100% of the energy the panel is exposed to under perfect light and temperature conditions, 22% of it becomes electricity coming out of the panel. This "roll" technique produces panels with only about 15% of the performance. In my mind that isn't a dealbreaker. There are places you have way more space than money, and a lower performance, but much cheaper panel would be ideal.
Yes, if the cost is low enough that the price per Kw is less, I think we would find more places to put it. On fences, on balconies, on rooftops of course, on awnings for parking spaces, on gazebos as a shade curtain, on pavilion rooftops.... Yeah
I think that's a big if. With their (generally) shorter life expectancy they have to be half to a third of the cost of silicon panels to break even on a 20yr panel life. And that's not including the labor to replace them.
except Sci-hub hasn't been adding new papers since 2020. Anna's Archive is a better bet, because they aggregate both sci-hub and libgen, among others. They also make torrents available for data hoarders.
You're right about Sci-Hub because of their Indian lawsuit which is very important to them, but I didn't know that Anna's Archive was a repository of scientific journals. Is it? I know Library Genesis (or LibGen) has a lot of scientific textbooks, but I didn't know it had papers. Does it?
Anyhow, Anna's Archive and LibGen are super awesome too!
except Sci-hub hasn’t been adding new papers since 2020. Anna’s Archive is a better bet, because they aggregate both sci-hub and libgen, among others. They also make torrents available for data hoarders. Their torrents total over 600 TB at this point, but include books in addition to articles.
sci-hub and libgen already outputs list of torrents. do they also archive supplementary information? that's where most of actual interesting data is, sometimes it's open source, sometimes it's not. (at least in my field)
I cannot handle the fucking irony of that article being on nature, one of the organizations most responsible for fucking it up in the first place. Nature is a peer-reviewed journal that charges people thousands upon thousands of dollars to publish (that's right, charges, not pays), asks peer reviewers to volunteer their time, and then charges rent the very institutions that produced the knowledge rent to access it. It's all upside. Because they're the most prestigious journal (or maybe one of two or three), they can charge rent on that prestige, then leverage it to buy and start other subsidiary journals. Now they have this beast of an academic publishing empire that is a complete fucking mess.
Wow, I never knew about that and it's not just a small fee either. This 2020 article has it at 9,500 Euro/10,300 USD. "Some observers worry Nature's €9500 publishing fee is so high that it threatens to divide authors into two tiers—those at wealthy institutions or with access to funds to pay, and everyone else."
It's already hard enough getting funding in some fields of science without that kind of added expense to put your data out there. Definitely sounds like you're right to call them out.
Yeah, it's grotesque. Doubly so when you consider that it's often public money that funds the research that they get to paywall. I've been really ragging on them lately for their role in the AI hype, too, which you can read about here and here if that sort of thing interests you.
I'm suspicious of this concept of editorial independence. I think it's a smoke screen that lets companies have their cake and eat it too. As far as I'm concerned, whoever cashes the checks also gets the blame, because either ownership means something, in which case the concept exists to obfuscate that, or it doesn't, in which case why is nature buying up other journals?
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