Smartphone makers will soon face an unlikely competitor. Concerns about the impact of social media are driving demand for old-school Nokia brick-like handsets…

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    The whole focus of concern about social media is on kids being exposed to material their parents don’t want them to see. I think this misses a much larger point - simply the effect social media overuse has on attention span and encouraging superficial thinking.

    Scrolling through the firehose of infinite content trains people to process each item as quickly as possible and make a quick value judgement based on minimal information before moving on to the next item. This is absolutely backasswards of how kids should learn to think. It encourages binary thinking - seeing every issue as two opposite extremes - and spending as little effort as possible acquiring information before making that binary decision about who to idolize or demonize. Degrading people’s intellectual process makes them much more susceptible to suggestion and conditioning, which of course is how oligarchs want us.