When it comes to children it seems that the costs of spending time online far outweigh the possible benefits. The content you refer to is utterly disturbing and soul-destructive. As parents we may assume that somehow our awareness of the problem will protect our children, that we'll keep an eye out for harmful content and that they will be spared from witnessing graphic images or videos. Unfortunately the reality is that most do encounter disturbing content that can simply not be unseen. I came across a fitting quote in Erin Loechner's new book "The Opt-Out Family" that I am currently reviewing: "...when asked about when her daughter will be ready for a smartphone: 'When she is ready for porn'".
Here's the thing though... the question I've grappled with having almost lost a genZ daughter and having 9 and 11 yo daughters coming up... as a parent, do you shut it down and avoid it? Do you create an alternate social (and other) media free universe? Or do you expose it for what it is, call it out, and let them choose?
I dont know if I'm doing the right thing but I decided to have age appropriate, step by step conversations about all of it, everything concerning the digital age, which I hope will give them reasoned agency.
I wanted to simply "protect" them, and then I realized (thanks to following Jonathan Haidt and collegues for years) that "protection" is part of the problem. Its unfortunate to have to arm them at a young age but arm them I am! For better or worse. So far (per the school counselors), they are the kids at school who handle almost every situation in a balanced and reasonable way because they think. They reason. They weigh their emotions and the emotions of others, as much as they are able. And they question.
Importantly, they KNOW they dont want to jump in "the river". Thats what we call it. I made an analogy to the river of food waste we had to take turns managing in the cafeteria at boarding school 😆 ...they got it!
Thanks for adding these reflections Nyla. I think having continuous, open conversations is essential and helps to raise their awareness and it's great to hear that this is working well for your daughters:) I also think that there is a difference between protecting kids from harmful online content vs real life experience. Giving children freedom to explore independently, allowing them to take reasonable risks, and take on responsibilities also helps them in growing a life outside the media universe.
You are absolutely right, Ruth, and I'm so grateful for the work you and Peco are doing to raise awareness and bring some light to these dark digital times.
I wrote a short story, designed for all ages (well, maybe not the very wee ones), and posted it today. It's a cautionary retelling of Little Red Riding Hood; she is a modern little girl who goes to see her grandmother in assisted living. I'm finding that storytelling is perhaps our last, best way of reaching parents and their children about the beast that is devouring them whole. Here's the tale:
Milan Kundera has a good line in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: "The moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies"
Trying to be authentic, virtuous, vulnerable, etc. on these platforms is usually a fool's errand. Posturing is baked into the system.
I came to this Substack because lately I feel like the only parent around me that is bothered by children not only having smartphones but also having seemingly unlimited access on them. My daughter is about to turn 5 and she doesn't even have her own tablet.
On our Roku, she has access to PBS Kids, Disney+, and Paramount+ kid profiles but she has almost zero access to YouTube or YouTube Kids because I have seen the algorithm do weird things after just one video (Elsagate but with Paw Patrol and Peppa Pig). People always find the YouTube ban interesting because I am a regular co-host of a channel with 20K subscribers! She has been on the channel, which is about roads and transportation history. At this point she thinks YouTube is strictly documentaries and history videos and I am letting her believe that as long as possible.
I have become much less active on social media - I have posted almost no videos of her and basically only post pictures on holidays and special occasions. This is because I don't want her to see it influences her parents - the fakeness, the validation for likes, the meanness, etc.
Last night was the first time I've worried about her not fitting in. She's too young to not fit in. Suddenly kids just 2-3 years older than her have phones and don't want to play with her - they seem so much older now. YET - they seem so much more restricted in the real world than her in a lot of ways. I get met with a lot of stupefied looks when I tell people how I want to prepare her for the big milestone of being allowed to be alone for short periods at age 8 (which is our state law). They won't let their 9 year olds go in the backyard alone yet they've had cell phones for years.
Last thing - I'm a millennial and still remember the time I accidentally stumbled into an adult AOL chat room at 10 years old and saw graphic ASCII art on our family desktop computer. The difference is that my boomer parents didn't know anything about the internet and that that was even possible. We know far better now as as society than to allow kids as much access as we do on personal smartphones.
Yes WE KNOW BETTER and thats what strikes me as so odd. I wish my parents would have protected me from porn, or set limits on my videogames, they never did.
Thanks for discussing these impacts so thoroughly. I think that social media have also truncated the socialization process of young people to the point that the ability to derive joy from actual people-to-people, in-person interactions is gone because younger people are habituated to brief screen-based interactions and of course critical thinking skills based on the ability to think through complexities and to read material longer than a meme or a tweet, have eroded to a point at which they’re no longer salvageable.
I know he's not well known in the USA but the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han is writing a lot about this particularly in The Burnout Society and the Transparency Society. Very interesting reading as well.
Patricia, I can't locate a reference for him just now, but have read some insightful work of his. Here is a list of curated readings (both classic and modern, fiction and non-fiction) that may be of interest to you "Unmachined Words: A Reading List to Keep You Human "https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/unmachined-words-a-reading-list-to
I agree that we need to discuss the effects of social media in terms of virtue and vice. But how many today even know what these words mean? The loss of a culture rooted in such terms paves the way for the monstrosities described above. How do we rebuild such a culture?
A friendly reminder that social media is NOT an inevitability. We can choose to turn away from it and I encourage you to do so. SM companies have enormous power but only while they have billions of users.
Really interesting read. Thank you for sharing. Part of the problem about the virtue and instilling generational wisdom is that people have tried to turn that into being a bad thing. Anyone who uses those terms gets called an extremist when just a few years ago this would’ve been considered common sense. On another note, there are some ways to use social media that are helpful. Animal rescue and finding homes for animals has been aided by social media for sure. But I do agree there are very few instances where it is probably more helpful and harmful. But there are a few!
> Anyone who uses those terms gets called an extremist when just a few years ago this would’ve been considered common sense.
When two sides used to agree on something, and now they're so far apart that the distance between their positions is described as "extreme," it's not unusual for both to call the other extremists. If you want to know who the actual extremists are, here's a good rule of thumb: which one remained where both sides used to agree was the land of common sense, and which one moved off into extreme territory?
Being proud of one's heritage and culture, and wishing for it to continue into the future, is Nazism.
Moral Virtue, character, community, these things are all Extreme Right Wing.
Difficult to arrive at common ground when, as you note, values that were perfectly normal for 200 years until yesterday, are now signs of derangement and extremism.
> Oh, and in the U.S., thanks to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, we parents can’t do anything about it. The companies have been granted immunity from lawsuits for what they show to our children, even underage users (under 13) because the companies have also been granted freedom from any duty to check or verify ages.
That's not due to section 230 per se; that's due to Reno v. ACLU, which threw out the parts of the CDA that said that they had to perform exactly the sort of age verification you're asking for, but left section 230 intact.
Doing so was based on the legal reasoning, quite dubious at the time and utterly absurd today, that “[c]ommunications over the Internet do not ‘invade’ an individual’s home or appear on one’s computer screen unbidden. Users seldom encounter content ‘by accident.’ ” Given the utter falsity of the reasoning upon which it is predicated, it seems to me it's long since time we find a way to get this ruling rolled back and the CDA reinstated.
Canada and Australia don't have any equivalent to Section 230, yet they still seem to be having the same problem we in the USA are having in the virtual world. Repealing it will NOT be corrective, rather it will have a chilling effect on free speech, and it will only make the land of a million lawyers even MORE litigious than we are now.
Yup. 230 was written specifically because of some lawsuits in the early days of the commercial Internet that set some very bad precedents. We don't want to go back to the problems it fixed!
My argument is that we don't even need to reform it carefully; we just need to apply the law *exactly as written.* Which is not what's currently happening.
Great essay. Alasdair MacIntyre said something similar decades ago in his profound book After Virtue. It gets at why we can't even talk about moral problems with any seriousness because we don't agree on what it even means to have purpose as a human being.
WE CHOOSE whether we get dragged into the gutter or whether we elevate ourselves and others.
If anything, perhaps social media is the mirror that shows us what we truly are. We keep telling ourselves that people are inherently good, but if social media—the very digital space billed as a place to be ourselves—is little more than a cesspool of lies, anger, resentment, and overweening pride, then perhaps people are NOT good at their core.
But again, this may still come down to choice. You can resist the urge to follow the crowd. Instead, you can choose to be a helper, to assist people, to offer hope and encouragement online. You can even reveal yourself not as a tower of strength but as someone who makes mistakes and whose life isn't perfect. Every one of us can choose to be a genuine, positive, encouraging force online.
I think a more accurate statement is that social media allows us to dehumanize each other - we type things and do things that most of us would never do if we were face-to-face.
If this is the case, then it only reinforces the contention. If anonymity gives me permission to say what I really think—and that thought degrades or attacks another person—then I am at my core a sin-sick soul.
This is a surprise to you? There is great depravity in humanity. Just look at male sexuality when unrestrained. We evolved ways to control and channel those energies, though. Religion is one, village governments, family ties, even things like body language to show disapproval.
We’ve thrown most of those out because they constrain behaviour too much for what we prefer now that we have technological wealth — what is essential for village survival in a marginal subsistence economy is annoying and stifling in post-WW2 hyperabundance.
But the final straw was social media where you lose all human ties, and then the algorithms and the capitalist incentives encourage you to be your worst self!
The result is, well, the world of social interactions we see today.
Ahh yes, because religion was so great at controlling unrestrained male sexuality...
There's a reason we threw out a lot of old traditions and generational wisdom and its because they were awful. I'm an ex-Catholic and refuse to raise my child in a Church that still in 2024 is doing everything it can to undermine sexual abuse. I grew up in an extended family where abuse was rampant and it was hushed away and that was not okay. In one case, it was hushed away even more once the perpetrator found Jesus.
Unfortunately, social media as well as politics (sometimes together!) have filled in the void. Rather than intentionally creating better ethics as a society that uplift the worth and dignity of every person we found a new way to tear each other apart.
Amen! I too am a "recovering Catholic" who gradually realized that I disagreed with too much of their dogmas to continue. And those old rules were primarily written and designed by men to control and restrain *female* sexuality, albeit indirectly backfiring on men as well.
As someone who was raised in abuse, I can definitely sympathize there. Having said that, religion is still *far* better at managing "unrestrained male sexuality" than any of the alternatives people have come up with to try to replace it. One particular church being corrupt in one area does not change that; it's just the exception that proves the rule.
You mean by controlling and restraining women's sexuality in order to perhaps indirectly (and very inefficiently) control men? Because that is literally what patriarchal religion does. In crude terms, it's a "price floor" to keep the cost of sex arbitrarily and artificially high for (non-elite) men as a tool of social control. Mark Regnerus, an unwitting ideological descendant of Roy Baumeister, had unwittingly "spilled the tea" on that in that regard, lol.
I recently had a VBAC after a traumatic first cesarean where my OB lied to me. I found an amazing community of women who cheered me on.... on Facebook. As a clinical researcher myself, I made sure to read all relevant ACOG guidance for vbacs... which I found online. The most joyous and powerful day of my life happened BECAUSE of social media and the internet. I do think "forum culture" is worth preserving and it's certainly an older form of social media- since the 90s.
I like how you draw the distinction between fictional portrayals of violence in traditional media and actual violence (often perpetrated for views, mind you). The real mind-f*ck is that in the desensitization process of viewing it in such high volume through the filter of a phone, the real violence becomes un-real to the viewer. It’s merely “content.”
“Sometimes it’s a deeper sense that this is wrong; that this is inhuman.” — yes. I’m on Instagram with a lot of intention and regular breaks, and I’m still discerning that it’s toxic overall. Inhuman is such a good word for it.
> But then: social media. Modernity mined culture of its customs, denied the importance of families, made a mockery of generational wisdom—and then left the door wide open for companies to crawl in and decide what we value. What did we expect when we took down the traditions? When we uprooted our communities? And allowed a generation to be raised by algorithms and the role models it generates for them?
“Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.”
Chesterton's Fence comes to mind. Often paraphrased as, "before you take down a fence, make sure you know why it was put up in the first place". Words of wisdom indeed.
At the same time, though, the "five monkeys, stairs, and banana" experiment also comes to mind as well, as a kind of foil to Chesterton's Fence. Both "appeal to tradition" AND "appeal to novelty" are both logical fallacies, after all.
The problem with the "monkey, stairs, banana" story is that it's not real. As far as I'm aware, the tale is entirely apocryphal and the experiment described therein never took place.
The interesting thing about Chesterton's Fence is that Chesterton didn't just give the pithy adage; he gave a good justification for it: that fence didn't erect itself. It wasn't created by nature. Someone put it up, and they had a specific reason for doing so, so before you go and take it down, you need to know what that reason is and evaluate whether or not it's still valid.
When it comes to children it seems that the costs of spending time online far outweigh the possible benefits. The content you refer to is utterly disturbing and soul-destructive. As parents we may assume that somehow our awareness of the problem will protect our children, that we'll keep an eye out for harmful content and that they will be spared from witnessing graphic images or videos. Unfortunately the reality is that most do encounter disturbing content that can simply not be unseen. I came across a fitting quote in Erin Loechner's new book "The Opt-Out Family" that I am currently reviewing: "...when asked about when her daughter will be ready for a smartphone: 'When she is ready for porn'".
Here's the thing though... the question I've grappled with having almost lost a genZ daughter and having 9 and 11 yo daughters coming up... as a parent, do you shut it down and avoid it? Do you create an alternate social (and other) media free universe? Or do you expose it for what it is, call it out, and let them choose?
I dont know if I'm doing the right thing but I decided to have age appropriate, step by step conversations about all of it, everything concerning the digital age, which I hope will give them reasoned agency.
I wanted to simply "protect" them, and then I realized (thanks to following Jonathan Haidt and collegues for years) that "protection" is part of the problem. Its unfortunate to have to arm them at a young age but arm them I am! For better or worse. So far (per the school counselors), they are the kids at school who handle almost every situation in a balanced and reasonable way because they think. They reason. They weigh their emotions and the emotions of others, as much as they are able. And they question.
Importantly, they KNOW they dont want to jump in "the river". Thats what we call it. I made an analogy to the river of food waste we had to take turns managing in the cafeteria at boarding school 😆 ...they got it!
Thanks for adding these reflections Nyla. I think having continuous, open conversations is essential and helps to raise their awareness and it's great to hear that this is working well for your daughters:) I also think that there is a difference between protecting kids from harmful online content vs real life experience. Giving children freedom to explore independently, allowing them to take reasonable risks, and take on responsibilities also helps them in growing a life outside the media universe.
Just yesterday i was browsing Quora which I always thought was for career questions or life advice and got a disturbing image of a crime
You are absolutely right, Ruth, and I'm so grateful for the work you and Peco are doing to raise awareness and bring some light to these dark digital times.
I wrote a short story, designed for all ages (well, maybe not the very wee ones), and posted it today. It's a cautionary retelling of Little Red Riding Hood; she is a modern little girl who goes to see her grandmother in assisted living. I'm finding that storytelling is perhaps our last, best way of reaching parents and their children about the beast that is devouring them whole. Here's the tale:
https://marypoindextermclaughlin.substack.com/p/the-tale-of-lil-red
Thanks for sharing Mary - will take a look :)
Milan Kundera has a good line in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: "The moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies"
Trying to be authentic, virtuous, vulnerable, etc. on these platforms is usually a fool's errand. Posturing is baked into the system.
I came to this Substack because lately I feel like the only parent around me that is bothered by children not only having smartphones but also having seemingly unlimited access on them. My daughter is about to turn 5 and she doesn't even have her own tablet.
On our Roku, she has access to PBS Kids, Disney+, and Paramount+ kid profiles but she has almost zero access to YouTube or YouTube Kids because I have seen the algorithm do weird things after just one video (Elsagate but with Paw Patrol and Peppa Pig). People always find the YouTube ban interesting because I am a regular co-host of a channel with 20K subscribers! She has been on the channel, which is about roads and transportation history. At this point she thinks YouTube is strictly documentaries and history videos and I am letting her believe that as long as possible.
I have become much less active on social media - I have posted almost no videos of her and basically only post pictures on holidays and special occasions. This is because I don't want her to see it influences her parents - the fakeness, the validation for likes, the meanness, etc.
Last night was the first time I've worried about her not fitting in. She's too young to not fit in. Suddenly kids just 2-3 years older than her have phones and don't want to play with her - they seem so much older now. YET - they seem so much more restricted in the real world than her in a lot of ways. I get met with a lot of stupefied looks when I tell people how I want to prepare her for the big milestone of being allowed to be alone for short periods at age 8 (which is our state law). They won't let their 9 year olds go in the backyard alone yet they've had cell phones for years.
Last thing - I'm a millennial and still remember the time I accidentally stumbled into an adult AOL chat room at 10 years old and saw graphic ASCII art on our family desktop computer. The difference is that my boomer parents didn't know anything about the internet and that that was even possible. We know far better now as as society than to allow kids as much access as we do on personal smartphones.
Yes WE KNOW BETTER and thats what strikes me as so odd. I wish my parents would have protected me from porn, or set limits on my videogames, they never did.
Thanks for discussing these impacts so thoroughly. I think that social media have also truncated the socialization process of young people to the point that the ability to derive joy from actual people-to-people, in-person interactions is gone because younger people are habituated to brief screen-based interactions and of course critical thinking skills based on the ability to think through complexities and to read material longer than a meme or a tweet, have eroded to a point at which they’re no longer salvageable.
I know he's not well known in the USA but the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han is writing a lot about this particularly in The Burnout Society and the Transparency Society. Very interesting reading as well.
Can you recommend some links?
His books are short and easy to read. It's very accessible. My recommendation is to start with the Burnout Society.
Patricia, I can't locate a reference for him just now, but have read some insightful work of his. Here is a list of curated readings (both classic and modern, fiction and non-fiction) that may be of interest to you "Unmachined Words: A Reading List to Keep You Human "https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/unmachined-words-a-reading-list-to
I agree that we need to discuss the effects of social media in terms of virtue and vice. But how many today even know what these words mean? The loss of a culture rooted in such terms paves the way for the monstrosities described above. How do we rebuild such a culture?
> How do we rebuild such a culture?
One soul at a time.
Exactly, starting with ourselves. It's funny how many people complain about social media but still use them.
A friendly reminder that social media is NOT an inevitability. We can choose to turn away from it and I encourage you to do so. SM companies have enormous power but only while they have billions of users.
Really interesting read. Thank you for sharing. Part of the problem about the virtue and instilling generational wisdom is that people have tried to turn that into being a bad thing. Anyone who uses those terms gets called an extremist when just a few years ago this would’ve been considered common sense. On another note, there are some ways to use social media that are helpful. Animal rescue and finding homes for animals has been aided by social media for sure. But I do agree there are very few instances where it is probably more helpful and harmful. But there are a few!
> Anyone who uses those terms gets called an extremist when just a few years ago this would’ve been considered common sense.
When two sides used to agree on something, and now they're so far apart that the distance between their positions is described as "extreme," it's not unusual for both to call the other extremists. If you want to know who the actual extremists are, here's a good rule of thumb: which one remained where both sides used to agree was the land of common sense, and which one moved off into extreme territory?
Desiring biological grandchildren is Eugenics.
Being proud of one's heritage and culture, and wishing for it to continue into the future, is Nazism.
Moral Virtue, character, community, these things are all Extreme Right Wing.
Difficult to arrive at common ground when, as you note, values that were perfectly normal for 200 years until yesterday, are now signs of derangement and extremism.
> Oh, and in the U.S., thanks to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, we parents can’t do anything about it. The companies have been granted immunity from lawsuits for what they show to our children, even underage users (under 13) because the companies have also been granted freedom from any duty to check or verify ages.
That's not due to section 230 per se; that's due to Reno v. ACLU, which threw out the parts of the CDA that said that they had to perform exactly the sort of age verification you're asking for, but left section 230 intact.
Doing so was based on the legal reasoning, quite dubious at the time and utterly absurd today, that “[c]ommunications over the Internet do not ‘invade’ an individual’s home or appear on one’s computer screen unbidden. Users seldom encounter content ‘by accident.’ ” Given the utter falsity of the reasoning upon which it is predicated, it seems to me it's long since time we find a way to get this ruling rolled back and the CDA reinstated.
I wrote about this last year: https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/cda-230-and-the-ejusdem-generis-rule
Canada and Australia don't have any equivalent to Section 230, yet they still seem to be having the same problem we in the USA are having in the virtual world. Repealing it will NOT be corrective, rather it will have a chilling effect on free speech, and it will only make the land of a million lawyers even MORE litigious than we are now.
Yup. 230 was written specifically because of some lawsuits in the early days of the commercial Internet that set some very bad precedents. We don't want to go back to the problems it fixed!
Indeed. Reforming it carefully is one thing, repealing it entirely is another.
My argument is that we don't even need to reform it carefully; we just need to apply the law *exactly as written.* Which is not what's currently happening.
Great essay. Alasdair MacIntyre said something similar decades ago in his profound book After Virtue. It gets at why we can't even talk about moral problems with any seriousness because we don't agree on what it even means to have purpose as a human being.
WE CHOOSE whether we get dragged into the gutter or whether we elevate ourselves and others.
If anything, perhaps social media is the mirror that shows us what we truly are. We keep telling ourselves that people are inherently good, but if social media—the very digital space billed as a place to be ourselves—is little more than a cesspool of lies, anger, resentment, and overweening pride, then perhaps people are NOT good at their core.
But again, this may still come down to choice. You can resist the urge to follow the crowd. Instead, you can choose to be a helper, to assist people, to offer hope and encouragement online. You can even reveal yourself not as a tower of strength but as someone who makes mistakes and whose life isn't perfect. Every one of us can choose to be a genuine, positive, encouraging force online.
I think a more accurate statement is that social media allows us to dehumanize each other - we type things and do things that most of us would never do if we were face-to-face.
Social media taught me that I really do not like certain people whom I know in real life. It's sad and should not be like that!
If this is the case, then it only reinforces the contention. If anonymity gives me permission to say what I really think—and that thought degrades or attacks another person—then I am at my core a sin-sick soul.
This is a surprise to you? There is great depravity in humanity. Just look at male sexuality when unrestrained. We evolved ways to control and channel those energies, though. Religion is one, village governments, family ties, even things like body language to show disapproval.
We’ve thrown most of those out because they constrain behaviour too much for what we prefer now that we have technological wealth — what is essential for village survival in a marginal subsistence economy is annoying and stifling in post-WW2 hyperabundance.
But the final straw was social media where you lose all human ties, and then the algorithms and the capitalist incentives encourage you to be your worst self!
The result is, well, the world of social interactions we see today.
Ahh yes, because religion was so great at controlling unrestrained male sexuality...
There's a reason we threw out a lot of old traditions and generational wisdom and its because they were awful. I'm an ex-Catholic and refuse to raise my child in a Church that still in 2024 is doing everything it can to undermine sexual abuse. I grew up in an extended family where abuse was rampant and it was hushed away and that was not okay. In one case, it was hushed away even more once the perpetrator found Jesus.
Unfortunately, social media as well as politics (sometimes together!) have filled in the void. Rather than intentionally creating better ethics as a society that uplift the worth and dignity of every person we found a new way to tear each other apart.
Amen! I too am a "recovering Catholic" who gradually realized that I disagreed with too much of their dogmas to continue. And those old rules were primarily written and designed by men to control and restrain *female* sexuality, albeit indirectly backfiring on men as well.
As someone who was raised in abuse, I can definitely sympathize there. Having said that, religion is still *far* better at managing "unrestrained male sexuality" than any of the alternatives people have come up with to try to replace it. One particular church being corrupt in one area does not change that; it's just the exception that proves the rule.
You mean by controlling and restraining women's sexuality in order to perhaps indirectly (and very inefficiently) control men? Because that is literally what patriarchal religion does. In crude terms, it's a "price floor" to keep the cost of sex arbitrarily and artificially high for (non-elite) men as a tool of social control. Mark Regnerus, an unwitting ideological descendant of Roy Baumeister, had unwittingly "spilled the tea" on that in that regard, lol.
Indeed, it doesn't corrupt, rather, it reveals. And more and more people simply aren't liking what they see about themselves and others.
I recently had a VBAC after a traumatic first cesarean where my OB lied to me. I found an amazing community of women who cheered me on.... on Facebook. As a clinical researcher myself, I made sure to read all relevant ACOG guidance for vbacs... which I found online. The most joyous and powerful day of my life happened BECAUSE of social media and the internet. I do think "forum culture" is worth preserving and it's certainly an older form of social media- since the 90s.
My wife had the same experience! Her VBAC could not have hapenned without the fb groups and podcast that showed her it was possible!
I like how you draw the distinction between fictional portrayals of violence in traditional media and actual violence (often perpetrated for views, mind you). The real mind-f*ck is that in the desensitization process of viewing it in such high volume through the filter of a phone, the real violence becomes un-real to the viewer. It’s merely “content.”
“Sometimes it’s a deeper sense that this is wrong; that this is inhuman.” — yes. I’m on Instagram with a lot of intention and regular breaks, and I’m still discerning that it’s toxic overall. Inhuman is such a good word for it.
> But then: social media. Modernity mined culture of its customs, denied the importance of families, made a mockery of generational wisdom—and then left the door wide open for companies to crawl in and decide what we value. What did we expect when we took down the traditions? When we uprooted our communities? And allowed a generation to be raised by algorithms and the role models it generates for them?
“Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.”
— Donald Kingsbury
Chesterton's Fence comes to mind. Often paraphrased as, "before you take down a fence, make sure you know why it was put up in the first place". Words of wisdom indeed.
At the same time, though, the "five monkeys, stairs, and banana" experiment also comes to mind as well, as a kind of foil to Chesterton's Fence. Both "appeal to tradition" AND "appeal to novelty" are both logical fallacies, after all.
The problem with the "monkey, stairs, banana" story is that it's not real. As far as I'm aware, the tale is entirely apocryphal and the experiment described therein never took place.
The interesting thing about Chesterton's Fence is that Chesterton didn't just give the pithy adage; he gave a good justification for it: that fence didn't erect itself. It wasn't created by nature. Someone put it up, and they had a specific reason for doing so, so before you go and take it down, you need to know what that reason is and evaluate whether or not it's still valid.
What'cha got in mind?
Thanks for this wonderful post. I read the Anxious Generation and found it to be a compelling book with which I heartily agree.
Similarly, I found Freya's article on GIRLS that you've reproduced here an inspiring piece of writing which I hugely admire.
Thank you both again for what you are doing.