I'd really love to see the spatial and environmental element to all of this, especially regarding your stated goal to "reinvent the play-based childhood for the 21st century." Playing requires safe streets, play spaces, etc. And I wonder how the urban development patterns in the US since the mid-20th century have contributed to and/or exacerbated our epidemic of loneliness. Another way of putting this inquiry is: Do walkable neighborhoods mitigate the harms from smart phones and social media?
Thats one issue but also, a huge consideration is school consolidation. We live in a VERY walkable affluent town 30 min from Boston. Because of state incentives based on "model" designs for "21st century", "sustainable", "equitable" schools, neighborhood elementary schools are being shut down in droves and replaced with new mega schools with fancy theaters and playgroumds and "efficient cafeterias". They are beautiful but kids have to be bussed now because the sites are chosen for cost and design efficiency NOT for children and families and their wellbeing. Its the biggest miscarriage of justice and a driver of so much family stress I cant even count the ways it has effected our way of life. All over the state neighborhood after neighborhood is being destroyed for sustainability. Our town traded 3 neighborhood elementary schools for a MASSIVE traffic catastrophe that already had one kid hit by a car. And every elementary kid now has a cell phone to manage pickups because an 8 year old cant walk home 45 minutes in 25 degrees. Thats absurd. (Only 2 miles out qualifies for the bus)
Life has never been safe now a good many of our fellow man are mind numbing safe and secure imprisoning others because of their own needs. I have a sibling with six children, he lined them up like puppies and sat them on the floor in front of the boob tube to eat their meals. They are a mess. Does any one talk with each other anymore? I am not criticizing you in any way, I send you sisterly love.
I had the good fortune and pleasure to briefly chat with Marshall McLuhan, when I was 15. It is to his lasting credit that he would willingly suffer a fool like me. One of his underlying beliefs is that a society shouldn't move on to any new technology until it has figured out what the current technology might be doing to it. Unfortunately, we live in a time when the impetus is to create and adopt new technology before we've even finished paying off the preceding things, let alone come to any insight about what it might be doing to us. It's an adolescent-dominated/driven society that demands new technology on the "hit parade", rising up the charts, constantly.
A friend of mine, who grew up in France, just yesterday suggested to me that America truly is an adolescent country compared to Europe. And some of our current behaviors indeed present themselves as hormone-infused adolescence. :-)
France has had 3 governments since WW II not counting the 3 during the war including a coup attempt by the French Foreign Legion. It regularly has large scale riots and cars burning in its streets. There are regular country wide strikes and protests. There are regular if small scale Islamic terror murders. If the ability to tolerate all of this with a Gallic shrug and a "C'est la vie," means that they are the post-adolescent country, I remain unimpressed. I'm pretty sure our feeling that they are assured and stable is because the number of people that care about French news enough to follow it is infinitesimal.
Maybe but France is willingly losing its heritage to the Muslim hordes that are overrunning the whole European continent and our worthless installed president has thrown open our border so the same thing can happen here.
"We must stop overprotecting children in the real world and underprotecting them online." An urgent yet simple message that every parent needs to hear.
I've read several books and loads of articles on this subject your writing is the clearest and best.
y’know, I never really understood McLuhan’s “the Medium is the Message” until the Smart Phone. since I grew up with TV, but not with Smart Phones until I was almost 40 years old, I can clearly see the effect it had. I imagine this was what television did to the Silent Generation.
Let's Go! Thank you Professor Haidt. Burke said evil triumphs when good people do nothing. We ALL have a part to play in this. It is a matter of JUSTICE!!!!!
I was a free range kid in the late 50s and through the 60s, before phones, and I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything in the world. Good ideas, Mr. Haidt.
I’m currently at day 94 of going completely cold turkey on all social media and news. I tried in earnest for a year to cut down my usage; like only scrolling till the first advert, never clicking on the video “shorts”. My time online, which wasn’t much, took time away from me doing more interesting things for myself, even if it was something as simple as reading a new novel.
I started Substack and I thought it was fantastic as my attention span could get a workout, spending 30 minutes reading an essay without ad intrusions but still, my time was not mine.
It wasn’t until I went cold turkey late last year on all social media, all news, all YouTube, that I realized how anxious it had been making me feel. Like seriously, so fucking anxious about everything. In some ways it could be said I’m sticking my head in the sand, but no, I’m choosing now who and what I give my attention to; whether that be reading up on my next fermentation adventures, learning some new skills, spending time with my kids (and listening to them with full concentration, not with the thumb paused mid-scroll on the phone), online chatting with distant friends. Getting off social media can be isolating so I do make sure I keep connecting with online friends through instant messenger, asking random nonsensical questions just to reach out and connect.
I’m back here, to check in on a fermentation Substack about making tempeh (we’re using a bean that grows wild here and I wanted to contribute my results) and as soon as I open the app, I get distracted by THIS post. But heck this post is a great distraction. Thank you Jon for the critical work you are doing, I’ll be sharing this on my instagram stories in a month or so when I “post and run” (post a whole bunch of stories in one day, all about the farm, then close the app and not open it again for another couple of months). I have thought about returning one day to Substack only, removing all subscriptions that aren’t relevant to things I personally do, but at the moment the break from anxiety is literally life-changing. But you Jon, will remain on my list of subscriptions.
I’m 49 and I struggled to control my small amount of phone usage. How do we expect kids to?
Go to it, Jon! A "campaign to end the phone-based childhood and reinvent the play-based childhood for the 21st century" is music to my ears. It is the only sensible solution to the problems of childhood we are now seeing, as well as the large problems of declining literacy, which seem a disaster for a democracy threaten by both cynical and ignorant forces. I'm happy to help this campaign however I can, starting with buying your new book and recommending it to my friends. Thanks for your work! :)
This is so true. We have to get rid of the default to screens for kids. Three-year-olds should not be watching videos/games on their parents' phones as a primary mode of entertainment, and that is not easy to do. A bored three-year-old is going to beg for that phone, and it's easier to hand it over (and hilarious when the kid takes 8 pictures of her nostrils), but we are teaching our kids to default to screens for comfort, entertainment, and everything else.
I look forward to your book. I LOVED "The Coddling of the American Mind" and was vastly disappointed by your co-author's following book (The Cancelling..) which seemed to actually embrace many of the ideas it was supposedly criticizing. I'll be fascinated to see what more you have developed since Coddling.
I particularly agree with the idea here that simply being exposed to "influencers" stressing various "ideal" female qualities is taking us right back to the days of insistence that some things are girly and some boy-ly and never the twain shall meet. I wonder if some of the interest in teens in thinking of themselves as "non-binary" is a result of resistance to that message--"if I don't think of myself as female I don't have to live up to those standards." But as we all know from the tragedy of Nex Benedict, taking that route can actually lead to death by others, not just suicide.
I've returned the book to the library now and can't recall examples. It was my overall impression. He would set out principles that I agree with. Then he'd give examples from only one point of view as if that were the ONLY way the principles could be applied. I could think of lots that was left out.
I agree with the basic idea that many kids are way too unwilling to listen to points of view that contradict their own. When I was their age, the idea was not arguing that speaker shouldn't be allowed to speak. We used "teach in" protests where we tried to tell students attending what was WRONG with whatever the speaker was saying. This was during Vietnam--there were a lot of teach-ins.
But the book gave the impression that ALL students and lots of faculty members agreed with "cancelling." For example, there seemed to be a generalization that because professors tend to be "liberal" that they MUST agree to the cancellations. That has not been my experience with most professors; for them "liberal" involves the play of ideas, not the preaching of them. (I was married to one, and still attend lectures under a senior program). In this is actually seems to be trying to "cancel" universities.
There was also very little discussion of "cancelling" by the right. Knee-jerk responses to ideas is a major feature of BOTH the right and left today. I kept wondering what the influence on the book had been of the definitely right-tending co author.
I am very much in favor of letting all points of view being expressed on campus so that they can be debated or--for extreme ideas, evaluated if their logic or premises are faulty. I very much liked the concept in Coddling of deplorable "safe spaces" from IDEAs, not just from physical harm. So I had looked forward to Cancelling as an elaboration of that idea. I was disappointed because it just seemed to condemn, rather than analyze .
Sorry I can't be more specific. Haidt's new book is arriving on my kindle Monday, I think. I am looking forward to IT, because I think the ideas in the first version were applicable to a lot of thought errors, whether on the left or right.
If you haven't read Coddling, try it. You might be able to see the difference I'm sensing.
I agree they didn't talk much about canceling on the right. I wish there were more but what did they miss? What else did you want?
"But the book gave the impression that ALL students and lots of faculty members agreed with "cancelling." For example, there seemed to be a generalization that because professors tend to be "liberal" that they MUST agree to the cancellations."
I guess I get the impression part, mostly from talk of many people involved in complaints but multiple times they explicitly stated it is a minority. As for "because professors tend to be "liberal" that they MUST agree to the cancellations." the authors not only talk about all the people who remain silent but they list many liberals who have been vocally against the cancellations.
Ok. You've read it more recently than I. I just know I LOVED Coddling and disliked Cancelling. I will say that the cancelling by the right is probably most focused on "online mobs" that pour scorn either on social media or reviews (as on Amazon) on books or comments they disagree with. The main cancel culture on the right vis a vis universities is legislation; against schools in general, book banning. I don't recall if those were much discussed. I frankly think those two things are MUCH more dangerous than simply trying to get a speaker uninvited to some lecture.
I do get short tempered by some kinds of "PC" stuff, though not all. I don't think it is particularly "PC" to accept other people's preferences, as with pronoun choice. THAT is getting the legislators in a freakin frenzy. Same goes for how a person from a minority wants to be called--Black? African American? Afro-American? Pretty sure not the n-word and its pals. This is all just personal courtesy.
On the other hand, I've always said that the only trigger warning I want to see about a book is "the dog dies." If a book starts making you uncomfortable, STOP READING. And if the book is required reading, explain to your teacher. Talking about traumas actually helps resolve them.
I really wish your campaign well..... to dig childhood out from under the crushing rubble of the Age of the Smart Phone. As a natural pessimist I cannot be anything but sceptical about the feasibility of holding back the tide of technological-social change. But I wish it well because the alternative - 'content moderation' 'misinformation' moderation etc - that has been generating a lot of politico-chattering class noise recently is an arrogant, pig-ignorant idea. As McLuhan would have told if he was still around. Anyone who gets tagged as a moderation 'expert' or self-tags as one will either be a self-important buffoon or a grifter of some sort or perhaps just a plain simple idiot. Because whereas the upside of the digital age was an explosion of information... the downside was an even greater explosion of tendentious, opinionated ignorance. This is just a fact to be faced. There is no such thing as an 'expert' who can do anything about it. Compared to this Orwellian social engineering 'information' project, restricting children's access to social media - at least in the schoolroom - is a sane ambition.
To paraphrase the saying from Clinton’s presidential campaign, “It’s the business model, stupid”.
This excellent report (https://bit.ly/3SRs4Ga) explains that content moderation is “a downstream effort by platforms to clean up the mess caused upstream by their own systems designed for automated amplification and audience targeting”.
It concludes by saying that “Reliance on revenue from targeted advertising incentivizes companies to design platforms that are addictive, that manufacture virality, and that maximize the information that the company can collect about its users”.
Those four norms - yes!! Let's do it! I'm tired of experts refusing to put an age on things like getting a smartphone or social media. Sure, there's always gray area and individual circumstances. But leaving parents without a norm to reach for makes most default to whatever the parents around them are doing, which seems to lead to a never-ending downward spiral of younger and younger ages logging on.
Re: "This is the difficulty I have when I try to explain how the rapid transition from flip phones to smartphones with social media (and thousands of apps) changed childhood in harmful ways in the early 2010s."
Yes, and next comes Apple Vision Pro, that uber-powerful simulation headset. Nick Bilton reviewed the product and writes this in this month’s Vanity Fair:
“When I take it off, every other device feels flat and boring: My 75-inch OLED TV feels like a CRT from the ’90s; my iPhone feels like a flip phone from yesteryear, and even the real world around me feels surprisingly flat. And this is the problem. In the same way that I can’t imagine driving a car without a stereo, in the same way I can’t imagine not having a phone to communicate with people or take pictures of my children, in the same way I can’t imagine trying to work without a computer, I can see a day when we all can’t imagine living without an augmented reality. When we’re enveloped more and more by technology, to the point that we crave these glasses like a drug, like we crave our iPhones today but with more desire for the dopamine hit this resolution of AR can deliver.”
We are heading for new territory, a further migration of cognition into machines, and our children and youth are first in line.
I'd really love to see the spatial and environmental element to all of this, especially regarding your stated goal to "reinvent the play-based childhood for the 21st century." Playing requires safe streets, play spaces, etc. And I wonder how the urban development patterns in the US since the mid-20th century have contributed to and/or exacerbated our epidemic of loneliness. Another way of putting this inquiry is: Do walkable neighborhoods mitigate the harms from smart phones and social media?
Thats one issue but also, a huge consideration is school consolidation. We live in a VERY walkable affluent town 30 min from Boston. Because of state incentives based on "model" designs for "21st century", "sustainable", "equitable" schools, neighborhood elementary schools are being shut down in droves and replaced with new mega schools with fancy theaters and playgroumds and "efficient cafeterias". They are beautiful but kids have to be bussed now because the sites are chosen for cost and design efficiency NOT for children and families and their wellbeing. Its the biggest miscarriage of justice and a driver of so much family stress I cant even count the ways it has effected our way of life. All over the state neighborhood after neighborhood is being destroyed for sustainability. Our town traded 3 neighborhood elementary schools for a MASSIVE traffic catastrophe that already had one kid hit by a car. And every elementary kid now has a cell phone to manage pickups because an 8 year old cant walk home 45 minutes in 25 degrees. Thats absurd. (Only 2 miles out qualifies for the bus)
https://www.massschoolbuildings.org/programs/model_school
Perhaps homeschooling is the best direction now for childhood development and family life?
We did that for a year. Now we are moving to Europe
That would be a problem if more than a tiny fraction of kids living only a few blocks away walked to school.
Life has never been safe now a good many of our fellow man are mind numbing safe and secure imprisoning others because of their own needs. I have a sibling with six children, he lined them up like puppies and sat them on the floor in front of the boob tube to eat their meals. They are a mess. Does any one talk with each other anymore? I am not criticizing you in any way, I send you sisterly love.
I had the good fortune and pleasure to briefly chat with Marshall McLuhan, when I was 15. It is to his lasting credit that he would willingly suffer a fool like me. One of his underlying beliefs is that a society shouldn't move on to any new technology until it has figured out what the current technology might be doing to it. Unfortunately, we live in a time when the impetus is to create and adopt new technology before we've even finished paying off the preceding things, let alone come to any insight about what it might be doing to us. It's an adolescent-dominated/driven society that demands new technology on the "hit parade", rising up the charts, constantly.
A friend of mine, who grew up in France, just yesterday suggested to me that America truly is an adolescent country compared to Europe. And some of our current behaviors indeed present themselves as hormone-infused adolescence. :-)
France has had 3 governments since WW II not counting the 3 during the war including a coup attempt by the French Foreign Legion. It regularly has large scale riots and cars burning in its streets. There are regular country wide strikes and protests. There are regular if small scale Islamic terror murders. If the ability to tolerate all of this with a Gallic shrug and a "C'est la vie," means that they are the post-adolescent country, I remain unimpressed. I'm pretty sure our feeling that they are assured and stable is because the number of people that care about French news enough to follow it is infinitesimal.
Maybe but France is willingly losing its heritage to the Muslim hordes that are overrunning the whole European continent and our worthless installed president has thrown open our border so the same thing can happen here.
France is not losing its heritage to Muslim hordes but rather to secularism…
"We must stop overprotecting children in the real world and underprotecting them online." An urgent yet simple message that every parent needs to hear.
I've read several books and loads of articles on this subject your writing is the clearest and best.
y’know, I never really understood McLuhan’s “the Medium is the Message” until the Smart Phone. since I grew up with TV, but not with Smart Phones until I was almost 40 years old, I can clearly see the effect it had. I imagine this was what television did to the Silent Generation.
I didn’t understand it until this afternoon. (Not that I really tried, but you know what I mean.)
It's not just kids harmed by social media - you can see lots of the warning signs in adults too.
Let's Go! Thank you Professor Haidt. Burke said evil triumphs when good people do nothing. We ALL have a part to play in this. It is a matter of JUSTICE!!!!!
Love it, love Burke, thank you!
I was a free range kid in the late 50s and through the 60s, before phones, and I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything in the world. Good ideas, Mr. Haidt.
I’m currently at day 94 of going completely cold turkey on all social media and news. I tried in earnest for a year to cut down my usage; like only scrolling till the first advert, never clicking on the video “shorts”. My time online, which wasn’t much, took time away from me doing more interesting things for myself, even if it was something as simple as reading a new novel.
I started Substack and I thought it was fantastic as my attention span could get a workout, spending 30 minutes reading an essay without ad intrusions but still, my time was not mine.
It wasn’t until I went cold turkey late last year on all social media, all news, all YouTube, that I realized how anxious it had been making me feel. Like seriously, so fucking anxious about everything. In some ways it could be said I’m sticking my head in the sand, but no, I’m choosing now who and what I give my attention to; whether that be reading up on my next fermentation adventures, learning some new skills, spending time with my kids (and listening to them with full concentration, not with the thumb paused mid-scroll on the phone), online chatting with distant friends. Getting off social media can be isolating so I do make sure I keep connecting with online friends through instant messenger, asking random nonsensical questions just to reach out and connect.
I’m back here, to check in on a fermentation Substack about making tempeh (we’re using a bean that grows wild here and I wanted to contribute my results) and as soon as I open the app, I get distracted by THIS post. But heck this post is a great distraction. Thank you Jon for the critical work you are doing, I’ll be sharing this on my instagram stories in a month or so when I “post and run” (post a whole bunch of stories in one day, all about the farm, then close the app and not open it again for another couple of months). I have thought about returning one day to Substack only, removing all subscriptions that aren’t relevant to things I personally do, but at the moment the break from anxiety is literally life-changing. But you Jon, will remain on my list of subscriptions.
I’m 49 and I struggled to control my small amount of phone usage. How do we expect kids to?
Go to it, Jon! A "campaign to end the phone-based childhood and reinvent the play-based childhood for the 21st century" is music to my ears. It is the only sensible solution to the problems of childhood we are now seeing, as well as the large problems of declining literacy, which seem a disaster for a democracy threaten by both cynical and ignorant forces. I'm happy to help this campaign however I can, starting with buying your new book and recommending it to my friends. Thanks for your work! :)
This is so true. We have to get rid of the default to screens for kids. Three-year-olds should not be watching videos/games on their parents' phones as a primary mode of entertainment, and that is not easy to do. A bored three-year-old is going to beg for that phone, and it's easier to hand it over (and hilarious when the kid takes 8 pictures of her nostrils), but we are teaching our kids to default to screens for comfort, entertainment, and everything else.
Go, Jon, go!!
I look forward to your book. I LOVED "The Coddling of the American Mind" and was vastly disappointed by your co-author's following book (The Cancelling..) which seemed to actually embrace many of the ideas it was supposedly criticizing. I'll be fascinated to see what more you have developed since Coddling.
I particularly agree with the idea here that simply being exposed to "influencers" stressing various "ideal" female qualities is taking us right back to the days of insistence that some things are girly and some boy-ly and never the twain shall meet. I wonder if some of the interest in teens in thinking of themselves as "non-binary" is a result of resistance to that message--"if I don't think of myself as female I don't have to live up to those standards." But as we all know from the tragedy of Nex Benedict, taking that route can actually lead to death by others, not just suicide.
" (The Cancelling..) which seemed to actually embrace many of the ideas it was supposedly criticizing."
I'm about halfway through this book and love it. Can you explain what I quote from you?
I've returned the book to the library now and can't recall examples. It was my overall impression. He would set out principles that I agree with. Then he'd give examples from only one point of view as if that were the ONLY way the principles could be applied. I could think of lots that was left out.
I agree with the basic idea that many kids are way too unwilling to listen to points of view that contradict their own. When I was their age, the idea was not arguing that speaker shouldn't be allowed to speak. We used "teach in" protests where we tried to tell students attending what was WRONG with whatever the speaker was saying. This was during Vietnam--there were a lot of teach-ins.
But the book gave the impression that ALL students and lots of faculty members agreed with "cancelling." For example, there seemed to be a generalization that because professors tend to be "liberal" that they MUST agree to the cancellations. That has not been my experience with most professors; for them "liberal" involves the play of ideas, not the preaching of them. (I was married to one, and still attend lectures under a senior program). In this is actually seems to be trying to "cancel" universities.
There was also very little discussion of "cancelling" by the right. Knee-jerk responses to ideas is a major feature of BOTH the right and left today. I kept wondering what the influence on the book had been of the definitely right-tending co author.
I am very much in favor of letting all points of view being expressed on campus so that they can be debated or--for extreme ideas, evaluated if their logic or premises are faulty. I very much liked the concept in Coddling of deplorable "safe spaces" from IDEAs, not just from physical harm. So I had looked forward to Cancelling as an elaboration of that idea. I was disappointed because it just seemed to condemn, rather than analyze .
Sorry I can't be more specific. Haidt's new book is arriving on my kindle Monday, I think. I am looking forward to IT, because I think the ideas in the first version were applicable to a lot of thought errors, whether on the left or right.
If you haven't read Coddling, try it. You might be able to see the difference I'm sensing.
I read Coddling. Good book.
I agree they didn't talk much about canceling on the right. I wish there were more but what did they miss? What else did you want?
"But the book gave the impression that ALL students and lots of faculty members agreed with "cancelling." For example, there seemed to be a generalization that because professors tend to be "liberal" that they MUST agree to the cancellations."
I guess I get the impression part, mostly from talk of many people involved in complaints but multiple times they explicitly stated it is a minority. As for "because professors tend to be "liberal" that they MUST agree to the cancellations." the authors not only talk about all the people who remain silent but they list many liberals who have been vocally against the cancellations.
Ok. You've read it more recently than I. I just know I LOVED Coddling and disliked Cancelling. I will say that the cancelling by the right is probably most focused on "online mobs" that pour scorn either on social media or reviews (as on Amazon) on books or comments they disagree with. The main cancel culture on the right vis a vis universities is legislation; against schools in general, book banning. I don't recall if those were much discussed. I frankly think those two things are MUCH more dangerous than simply trying to get a speaker uninvited to some lecture.
I do get short tempered by some kinds of "PC" stuff, though not all. I don't think it is particularly "PC" to accept other people's preferences, as with pronoun choice. THAT is getting the legislators in a freakin frenzy. Same goes for how a person from a minority wants to be called--Black? African American? Afro-American? Pretty sure not the n-word and its pals. This is all just personal courtesy.
On the other hand, I've always said that the only trigger warning I want to see about a book is "the dog dies." If a book starts making you uncomfortable, STOP READING. And if the book is required reading, explain to your teacher. Talking about traumas actually helps resolve them.
I really wish your campaign well..... to dig childhood out from under the crushing rubble of the Age of the Smart Phone. As a natural pessimist I cannot be anything but sceptical about the feasibility of holding back the tide of technological-social change. But I wish it well because the alternative - 'content moderation' 'misinformation' moderation etc - that has been generating a lot of politico-chattering class noise recently is an arrogant, pig-ignorant idea. As McLuhan would have told if he was still around. Anyone who gets tagged as a moderation 'expert' or self-tags as one will either be a self-important buffoon or a grifter of some sort or perhaps just a plain simple idiot. Because whereas the upside of the digital age was an explosion of information... the downside was an even greater explosion of tendentious, opinionated ignorance. This is just a fact to be faced. There is no such thing as an 'expert' who can do anything about it. Compared to this Orwellian social engineering 'information' project, restricting children's access to social media - at least in the schoolroom - is a sane ambition.
To paraphrase the saying from Clinton’s presidential campaign, “It’s the business model, stupid”.
This excellent report (https://bit.ly/3SRs4Ga) explains that content moderation is “a downstream effort by platforms to clean up the mess caused upstream by their own systems designed for automated amplification and audience targeting”.
It concludes by saying that “Reliance on revenue from targeted advertising incentivizes companies to design platforms that are addictive, that manufacture virality, and that maximize the information that the company can collect about its users”.
Content moderation? Don’t make me laugh …
Those four norms - yes!! Let's do it! I'm tired of experts refusing to put an age on things like getting a smartphone or social media. Sure, there's always gray area and individual circumstances. But leaving parents without a norm to reach for makes most default to whatever the parents around them are doing, which seems to lead to a never-ending downward spiral of younger and younger ages logging on.
exactly! yes, the downward spiral, now entering elementary school
And this, about you and McLuhan: Dear Jon, I have been trying to reach you discussing exactly this point and I got a book about you and McLuhan published only some weeks ago but containing a detailed discussion of the problem. The book is this: https://www.amazon.com.mx/sociales-emociones-democracia-Perspectivas-McLuhan/dp/6075969624/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_es_MX=ÅMÅŽÕÑ&crid=41E6SN2DUBM2&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.CufyyoNlsw-CkDpC6mZ8wCN0fwZeuz1mU9NYSmjHCqo.pyagf_GexYABIzI71pn7cewElVBk4SuWeVB5ayBzzCY&dib_tag=se&keywords=Carrillo+Haidt&qid=1708627212&sprefix=carrillo+haidt%2Caps%2C152&sr=8-1&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.4e545b5e-1d45-498b-8193-a253464ffa47
Please, Jon, please ser this: https://reflexionesmarginales.com/blog/2024/01/24/el-discurso-de-odio-en-la-comunicacion-contemporanea/
Great piece, thank you!
Re: "This is the difficulty I have when I try to explain how the rapid transition from flip phones to smartphones with social media (and thousands of apps) changed childhood in harmful ways in the early 2010s."
Yes, and next comes Apple Vision Pro, that uber-powerful simulation headset. Nick Bilton reviewed the product and writes this in this month’s Vanity Fair:
“When I take it off, every other device feels flat and boring: My 75-inch OLED TV feels like a CRT from the ’90s; my iPhone feels like a flip phone from yesteryear, and even the real world around me feels surprisingly flat. And this is the problem. In the same way that I can’t imagine driving a car without a stereo, in the same way I can’t imagine not having a phone to communicate with people or take pictures of my children, in the same way I can’t imagine trying to work without a computer, I can see a day when we all can’t imagine living without an augmented reality. When we’re enveloped more and more by technology, to the point that we crave these glasses like a drug, like we crave our iPhones today but with more desire for the dopamine hit this resolution of AR can deliver.”
We are heading for new territory, a further migration of cognition into machines, and our children and youth are first in line.
Does anyone else feel like this mindset of Bilton as obsolete?