"This time is different"

I do think modern apps, adtech, and addiction engineering are devastatingly effective and different from predecessors. We need to treat these with specific care. Similar to nukes vs. conventional bombs. Adtech and recommendation algos are the WMD of the marketing world.

I was recently interviewed for a job by a guy doing infra at an adtech company. He had a PhD in physics from UCLA. These are the big guns your 7 year old is up against. TV and video games did not have this intellectual firepower behind them. May the odds be in your child's favor.

While I do think extreme doomerism about new technology is misguided, I also feel this hand wavy "they said it about us an we're fine!" dismissal is also misguided.

Just because TV and video games did not lead to total societal collapse does not mean they are free of negative side-effects, nor does it make these technologies necessarily comparable to any other generational-shift technology adoption. TV definitely had and has negative societal side effects. Prolonged and uninhibited video game usage definitely van have negate side effects. Same thing will likely be the case for smartphones.

I also think smartphones are a special breed since they can expose children much more easily to fringe ideology than either video games or mass media ever could thanks to gatekeeping mechanisms.

We'll never get a handle on appropriate, healthy societal relations with media technologies until we stop summarily treating them as purely negative, purely positive, or purely neutral and start doing the work of analyzing each technology and its use and potentialities in their particulars.

There was a study posted here recently showing that the earlier a person is given access to a cell phone, the worse the person's mental health is as an adult: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=35948332

But also: our generation saw a dramatic increase in obesity.

Correlation is not causation. But some correlations are just too obvious to ignore.

It also may not have been wrong then. Being outdoors and playing with others is great for kids, watching TV is... mixed. Same w video games. Definitely dosage dependent. And it's pretty clear social media is not good for kids.

Was TV really any better though? You seem to be saying "we survived so they will too" but just because you survived an environment with TV, doesn't mean that TV was harmless.

Waaay before that it was, um, books. Kids who read books instead of playing outside were weird. The age of the 10c pulp magazine, science fiction, westerns, crime stories, they were everywhere.

And parents lamented the time spent reading them instead of doing something outside.

Just wait until our kids grow up, and their kids have a VR headset strapped to their face 24x7. They'll bemoan the time lost that was watching youtube.

As an aside, in my day it was TV, and today my kids aren't interested in TV. Not sure my parents see the irony ;)

Violent video games have always been the boogeyman, but there never was any real evidence of its effect on children. These days there's constant news of widespread mental health issues in teenagers; I think the current iteration of social media has much worse effects than video games ever had.