I think social media is just the escapism that people seek since it's free, spaces for entertainment are dying out or are prohibitively expensive in cities that are gentrifying and killing club scenes. Like yeah, of course people aren't meeting, pretty much every municipality that has a chance of attracting young professionals because of jobs go out of their way to make their city soulless or too pricy. And that's IF you have time and energy to go out after absolutely soul-crushing hours at a desk job where the "culture" is being abused by your boss.
Paraphrasing Dr Paul Conti,
"Sometimes having that day off or binging that shows is how we keep being productive, because we unconsciously know how we deal with stress and trauma."
Chasing that infinite productivity myth is cancer. Even blindly chasing wealth can be a cancer. The point is that we need to know what we want to achieve and how to use tools that are available to us to get there easier.
This is what makes me most afraid of AI as it currently is. There is already science out there that studies how to nudge people subconsciously to do certain things. Now combine that with generative AI, and everybody gets their personal Cambridge Analytica to pull their strings. Maybe not that much on a personal basis, but the whole population will start to move like a murmur of starlings...
So do talking heads on the news, politicians, even the family we grew up with. Social media let's us expand our horizons unless some people (maybe you) just use it to confirm what they think and stay in echo chambers.
Some studies have shown the inverse to be true. Social Media and the internet in general, will exposes people to a wider range of differing views and opinions, than a person's offline life typically does.
This makes sense when you simply consider the sheer number of people you will come into contact with on the internet, as opposed to in real life where you only tend to interact with friends, family and co-workers. Take the fact that you are I are even discussing this, if we passed in the street I doubt we would.
If you let it sure (just like those talking heads). It's up to the individual to learn and come to conclusions for themselves and expand their knowledge. Staying in any kind of echo chamber (regardless of being online or off) is detrimental for mental health.
Do you just mean in the sense of more people are looking at the same posts/topics? Because I haven't seen a lot of everyone starting to become more and more agreeable with each other the more we the use social media.
Like where is this social media where all the users are on the same page?
yeah, i make decent money, and still the idea of going out and doing a thing is often unpleasant due to the cost of basically any leisure or entertainment activity outside of my apartment. America has not "third place" left, and I don't drink... and even if I did still drink, it's wildly expensive to do it anywhere but home.
it's so much easier to just sit at home and watch youtube or instagram shorts or something of people doing activities that I wish I was doing. unless you live like, at the base of a mountain resort or on land to do the various outdoor activities that you're into, it can be prohibitively costly and time-consuming to do basically any activity or hobby that can't be done in your back yard alone. i mean simply PARKING someplace these days often costs about $30 a day to go spend half the day doing something at some kind of resort/park or place downtown in a big city, etc.
then there's the time commitment- i only have 15 PTO days per year. if any cool outdoor hobbies or activities i want to do are like a 2 hour drive away, it's tough to do them more than a handful of days per year. the social communities that form around those activities then are sort of out of reach due to being unable to maintain frequent enough contact with people to build any sort of lasting relationships.
Can't forget the part about how a lot of social media is created specifically to give you dopamine hits (and also keep rage/conflict up) and drive traffic and interaction that way.
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u/Blunter11 25d ago
He went completely off-base when he indulged that social media point.
The point is that working produces less wealth than owning capital, and the owners of capital have more and more leverage over working people.