I think it's the total visibility that's causing mental illness. There is no space where you can be with your friends, screw up, and not have it become known to everyone in your peer group. There's little space to make mistakes. No space to be yourself. You are under the watchful gaze of your friends, i.e. peer surveillance, nearly all of the time. Which induces stifling conformity.
Everything's under constant scrutiny. And your friends end up exerting social control over your life through social media.
So your "friends" in essence, force you to use these platforms. If you don't you will be treated as a social outcast, a pariah. It makes you wonder what these "friends" really are in the first place.
On top of that, parents are on there too, and can more easily find out what their children are up to, thus allowing them to be helicoptered and coddled even more than ever before, thus stifling childrens' development, because in order to learn responsibility, they need the freedom to be able to make mistakes, and be exposed to the natural consequences of those mistakes.
I left facebook a long time ago because it just felt like low value interaction. None of my friends on there were people I actually spent time with, and the whole thing seemed to just bring out the worst sides of people. I never specifically experienced the peer surveillance you describe, but I believe it's real or that social media has made people believe it's real (to a degree worthy of concern)
I think what I'm trying to say is that I don't relate to your perspective, but I don't doubt it, because to me social media is a cornucopia of ways to make yourself crazy and I believe that everyone that has a "why I think social media is making us worse people" rant is probably correct to some degree and highlighting a piece of a spectrum of horrible.
> the whole thing seemed to just bring out the worst sides of people
I wonder if it's still the case though. It's been years I haven't seen anyone arguing on my quiet feed. Maybe people have learned? or just deserted it?
Nowadays, the really toxic place is Twitter, orders of magnitude worse than FB has even been in my opinion.
Twitter is first with the news and political hot takes. Those and memes boil down to Facebook posts and reshares.
It’s pretty similar to what was the 4chan to Reddit to Facebook. But politics became more polarizing and every government official was giving their hot take. Instant short replies. I guess all those seconds of engagement add up.
Twitter is easy to sign up for, doesn't really require any sort of actual human details, and runs entirely on essentially short text blurbs that are easy to automate, scan, parse, and track.
Retweets, ratios, and bog-standard sentiment analysis also give immediate feedback as to success of a tweet. Real easy to tweak a bot to produce content, or to game the system -- and that's before GPT-4.
Facebook at least requires you to pretend you're a real person with a real face and real friends.
> So your "friends" in essence, force you to use these platforms. If you don't you will be treated as a social outcast, a pariah. It makes you wonder what these "friends" really are in the first place.
I think this is truthy, but I abandoned social media a long time ago and my experience is different. At first, I lost touch with a lot of people and my world became small. After some time people found me (I still run a blog, so I'm discoverable) and now folks will call and visit with me. I get a lot more authentic conversations with folks because they know I'm not going to put them on blast. I still have my judgements and my opinions like anyone, but those, I think, are easier for people to deal with.
Maybe the real equation is that if the shallow, judgemental connection is made available, people will reach for it because it's easy, and palatable, like junk food. But sooner or later they need a real meal and wouldn't you rather be that occasional quality interaction rather than the quantity interaction?
I think it's the addicive nature of social media is causing mental illness. Lack of sleep, lack of time to just let the mind wander (=lack of time to actually lift your gaze from the small and take care of your bigger things in life).
It's quite shocking when you think about it, that your "friends" here are in effect not allowing you to be yourself. And will potentially socially ostracize you (i.e. punish you) if you do something, that is harmless, but is not accepted by the group for some reason. Dystopian stuff indeed.
not only there are multiple spaces to be yourself within, you can be yourself in different ways and under different identities. there's "side profiles", "finstas", etc., there's more flexibility and more ways to express yourself, across all different sides of you. like, if someone thinks that people just use one identity and hang out around a certain circle of people in a certain space (or set of spaces), that just doesn't align with reality. people make side pages, pseudonyms and identities, with those having different circles of people they interact with, and different audiences, within one space/platform or across multiple different ones. just like, a handful of apps, insta, twitter, tiktok, discord, all may have different circles and dynamics. and it's fine - and it works - because irl spaces/circles/identities, do play out in a similar way. (like, differences between home/friends/school/work/public/etc.)
If this is the case, is this reflected in the suicide rate of small, nosy towns? Small towns are notorious for everyone knowing everyone else’s business.
There’s a difference, though, between everyone having access to what you have done, and people in your circle of trust gossiping about you to people outside of it. First, you can theoretically figure out the gossip and exclude them. Second, the gossip gossips about things _they_ find interesting, not about things random bored trolls find juicy. Thus, the odds of your faux pas exposing you to abuse are naturally lower.
In other words, “small towns have no secrets” is an oversimplification.
I don't think this is unique to social media. Try dressing different from the norm in the 1990s before people even had cellphones in class and you'd definitely end up ostracized. It would be even worse because there's no way to find people who might be different like you, unlike today where there are forums and other websites.
> Try dressing different from the norm in the 1990s before people even had cellphones in class and you'd definitely end up ostracized
I think that's a part of OP's point. After that, if you wanted, you could go away to college and buy normal clothes and reinvent yourself completely.
Nowadays, if you're a person who agrees for whatever reason is a shitheel, you're that same shitheel forever, and the inertia required to overcome that is greater.
You're right in the sense that the internet also allows to find sympathetic others, but that doesn't shake the stigma, merely exposes it to more people. (Which has the added benefit of contributing to polarization.)
If I ask 100 people who Gary Johnson is, most of them will remember him as "The Aleppo guy." If I type "Gary Johnson" into Google (even incognito), the first auto-complete is "Gary Johnson Aleppo." Nevermind that he's an accomplished politician, mountain climber, author, etc., he's broadly defined by his one big public gaffe.
Howard Dean's political career was ruined and is largely defined by one poorly timed on-air scream after it was mocked by late night comedy hosts.
If you remember Lindy Chamberlain at all, it's probably as the "Dingos ate my baby" lady, whose name was dragged through the mud and went to prison for years before it was revealed likely that dingos had almost certainly eaten her baby.
Chris Jeffries was questioned in the murder of Joanna Yates.
Richard Jewell. Fatty Arbuckle. Bruce Ismay. Rebecca Black. Kevin Carter. Monica Lewinsky. The McDonald's Coffee Lady (Stella Liebeck). If you remember any of these names, it's almost certainly for something bad they were accused of doing.
I've seen studies that show that because our brains are our foremost self-defense mechanisms, they're constantly looking for bad patterns to avoid, so we remember the bad things about people much more readily than we remember the good. That we do so for faraway people with whom we'll never likely have any contact is likely low on the utility scale, but we mostly haven't adapted to avoiding it.
Actors who manage to land parts doing crime scene reenactments for true crime docudramas tend to regret them, because people at the grocery see the actors and forget they were watching television and assume he's a serial murderer.
We rely on our intuitions so much when meeting new people, and our brains hold onto negative impressions so strongly that even though you think you don't have the energy to keep track of it, the brain actually does. Perhaps not just over a disagreement, but if you form a negative connotation around a picture of someone internet infamous, cognitive bias ensures that you'll likely dislike them if you ever actually meet and they'll have to actively work to overcome that negative preconception despite us having formed that preconception based on perhaps as little as 10 seconds of their life portrayed out of context.
If you do not dislike anyone that you haven't met (e.g., a politician, or polarizing celebrity like Logan Paul or Joe Rogan or Elon Musk) then congrats, you're in the (presumably) low percentage of people who don't have this affliction. But I think it's a pretty big stretch to say that "most" don't.
> Howard Dean's political career was ruined and is largely defined by one poorly timed on-air scream after it was mocked by late night comedy hosts.
Amazing to think that Donald Trump could make gaff after gaff and still, inexplicably, be considered electable. Dean made one dumbass howl and got shit-canned. MSM in action.
Also, a shame about Fatty Arbuckle, dude even got an apology from the court but still got his career ruined.
I think being able to find others like you is actually what really sends mental health spiraling.
Back in the day, if you were a pathetic loser, that’s all you were, and that’s how you had to navigate life. This would force you to take an honest look at yourself and see why you don’t fit in to larger society and maybe if you should try to be different. And eventually you might become a version of yourself a bit more acceptable to society. Even if you knew deep down you were a pathetic loser, at least now you knew how to cooperate and be agreeable with others and even make friends that are different from you and not total losers. In time you would gain wisdom about life and be content with yourself.
But now? It’s quick to find so many others exactly like you, and you can feed off each others thoughts and words of encouragement, no matter how twisted. Eventually you see everyone not like you as an enemy, rather than as a person whose friendship and acceptance you seek to earn. You lose your connection to the rest of society, you find yourself increasingly unable to relate, and find yourself spending your days seething with hate at the society that you feel has nothing to offer you, filled with people you’ll never give a fuck about.
I think in most cases this isn't true (who cares how niche your hobbies or style are), but when it comes to internet mental health discussion communities there definitely is a double edged sword IMO. Depends on the community and person, but I suspect you're right in the case of e.g. finding others who are depressed, there's a lot of overshoot in the reaction to stigma in some of these groups, to the point it encourages giving into some pretty bad lifestyle loops.
I'd say that's not necessarily bad, more of a double edged sword. Many marginalized groups do need these kinds of support. They fall into the categories like 'I like playing games instead of sports, so what', 'I like watching niche foreign shows with subtitles'. At the end of the day, many ppl do benefit from increased connections. Many groups(both negative and positive) wont even exist with current technology.
That only explains the poor mental health of terrible people with shitty beliefs though. What about people with parents who managed to socialize them well but yet are horribly depressed due to the environment being in shambles? The environment has always been mistreated by those who make more money from that mistreatment, from way before the Internet was a smidge of an idea.
Not just that, it's one of the biggest themes in modern American fiction before social media. Most of PK Dick's work deals with the opressiveness of middle class culture, mental illness, people who don't fit in and how these things overlap. You had Fight Club or Taxi Driver on violence and isolation particular of men, or American Beauty on the conformist and almost totalitarian nature of the suburbs, etc. It's been a major topic in American culture for decades.
> So your "friends" in essence, force you to use these platforms. If you don't you will be treated as a social outcast, a pariah.
We seem to have different friends. Maybe it's a generational thing? Very few of my friends are highly active on social media. At least, not as far as I can tell, because I rarely check the feeds.
You can always just delete your account. Granted, that's easier for me to say as an adult than it would be for your average peer-pressured teenager. But that's where parents can help.
I think eventually, teens will see social media as "uncool" in the same way as they see smoking cigarettes as "uncool" (in some countries). It takes a lot of social propagandizing to popularize that idea, but we did it with cigarettes and we can do it with social media.
We need to make being off the grid cooler than being on it. Privacy is cool!
I think the pendulum will swing towards that way eventually. It's cyclical. Once the novelty of social media wears away, as it has done already, and the harms start being worse than the benefits.
However not being on social media can have real-world consequences in the classroom, the child could be treated as an outcast and mocked or bullied for it.
There is a middle ground, which is to use a pseudonym and ensure anonymity. You can then selectively disclose this pseudonym to people you trust. It might be safer for the children that way and also make it more difficult for adult authority figures to interfere with their lives.
My 6yo daughter had to create a login for various online things recently (e.g., code.org to keep track of her progress). I don't exactly when or where they taught her this at school, but she absolutely refused to share any of her personal information in any way. She spent a good 30 minutes trying to make up a handle to use that she liked but didn't include any reference to her name, her initials, anything about her birth month or day (I'd suggesting adding the day of the month she was born as a suffix so she'd remember it given all her initial name preferences seems to be taken already), etc.
I was very impressed that they seem to have this conditioned into them so young, and to a level of importance that exceeded even my own paranoia about doing it properly.
One of Haidt's points is that you can't escape by deleting your account, because everyone else is still online. Suppose you're a teenage girl. The gossip mill about you is still going to be doing the rounds on social media, so the cyberbulling can't be stopped whether or not you're participating. If anything, being the strange outcast by refusing to go online will inflame things. That's one reason why a ban for those below 16 or 18 is a good idea.
You say that but it's a bit tough to care if you don't see it happen. It's possible for everyone here to be the subject of a meme somewhere of a picture taken without consent. However, it just feels tough to care unless you actually see the meme and the reactions of people to it.
The difference between some completely random person taking a picture and your circle of friends is that it's very unlikely for the former to reach anyone you know, where as with the latter it's a guarantee.
It might be simply putting a book quote as a response came across as passive aggressive.
The reference is to the Virgin Suicides. The doctor can’t believe that Cecilia would slash her wrists because he can’t comprehend that she would have experienced real or perceived distress at her age. To which she responds with the quote above.
I’m suggesting that it’s very easy to be dismissive of teenage problems as trivial or easily solved when we’ve already long recovered from that particular malady.
> I’m suggesting that it’s very easy to be dismissive of teenage problems as trivial or easily solved when we’ve already long recovered from that particular malady.
Okay that sounds reasonable, but how does that relate to my prior comment?
Everything's under constant scrutiny. And your friends end up exerting social control over your life through social media.
So your "friends" in essence, force you to use these platforms. If you don't you will be treated as a social outcast, a pariah. It makes you wonder what these "friends" really are in the first place.
On top of that, parents are on there too, and can more easily find out what their children are up to, thus allowing them to be helicoptered and coddled even more than ever before, thus stifling childrens' development, because in order to learn responsibility, they need the freedom to be able to make mistakes, and be exposed to the natural consequences of those mistakes.