A recent New York Times article goes in-depth to report on moms who manage Instagram accounts for their pre-teen daughters modeling clothes that draw pedophiles in droves. There ought to be a law!
What is wrong with these mothers? They KNOW what kinds of “men” are drawn to these sites. And it doesn’t seem to bother them in the least. And the youngsters aspire to be big-time “influencers” or “creators” as the more du jour term labels them. The sexualization of 11- and 12-year-old girls is, unfortunately, nothing new. Women who apparently have no life push their offspring into compromising situations in the pursuit of vicarious fame and fortune. A decade or two ago it was beauty contests. Now it’s social media coverage. Or, perhaps, UNcoverage.
It seems that segments of American society have shown that decadence is now fashionable and concepts like integrity and morality no longer have meaning. Caligula’s Rome is being surpassed as the exploitation of immature girls is allowed free rein.
“More Screen Time Linked to Delayed Development in Babies, Study Finds.”
Matt Richtel, writing for the New York Times, uses the above headline and opens his article with “One-year-olds exposed to more than four hours of screen time a day experienced developmental delays in communication and problem-solving skills at ages 2 and 4….” The study was published the same day in The Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics. Scary, yes?
He goes on to note, “The research also found that 1-year-olds who were exposed to more screen time than their peers showed delays at age 2 in the development of fine motor and personal and social skills.” A bit of good news: “But these delays appeared to dissipate by age 4.”
I went to the actual study, using the link that was provided by The Times. The study does not say that screen time caused the delay. It’s a case of correlation, not causation. The study’s authors said,
“Of the 7097 children in this study, 3674 were boys (51.8%) and 3423 were girls (48.2%)….” and concluded, “In this study, greater screen time for children aged 1 year was associated with developmental delays in communication and problem-solving at ages 2 and 4 years. These findings suggest that domains of developmental delay should be considered separately in future discussions on screen time and child development.”
Compare, if you will, paragraphs 1, 2, and 3 above that tell us what Richtel wrote, with what paragraphs 4 and 5 tell us the study’s actual authors wrote.
I hope you see, as I do, that Richtel is exercising the classic journalistic maxim: “If it bleeds, it leads.” That is to say, his coverage is rather alarmist and pursues the goal of attracting readership, as opposed to dispassionately providing useful information. And I suspect that he lacks a scientific understanding of the difference between correlation and causation.
So please, dear and gentle reader, when you see an article or listen to or watch a mainstream media story that seems to be reporting about some new scientific study, exercise due diligence and consult the source.
As we all stream more and more movies at home rather than go to the theater, many people are struggling to hear the dialog. The car crashes, gun shots, and fights come through loud and clear. The background music does its job to enhance the mood without distracting us from the action. But the dialog? Why is it so hard to understand what the actors are saying?
And I suspect that, like me, you are turning on subtitles to compensate for the seemingly poor sound quality. Writing for the online forum “Medium,” Sean Kernan posted this graphic:
Sean goes on to explain the three different kinds of sound—sound effects, music, and dialog—and how sound engineers struggle to find an acceptable balance, a task made more difficult by two other factors.
One is technology. If you’ve ever attended a live play, you know that the actors speak loudly and enunciate clearly to ensure that no one in the audience misses out on the verbal interplay. And those of you who have had experience with film or video production know that not so many years ago, there was a single boom mic above the actor(s) to catch the dialog and the performer(s) knew they had to speak clearly enough for the mic to pick up what was being said. These days, however, there are usually two boom mics, as well as myriad tiny mics cleverly hidden on the actor’s body that combine to make sure every sound is picked up. Unfortunately, however, this has led to performers mumbling their lines.
Turning up the volume on your sound bar is not going to help those mumbled lines become any clearer, as the sound effects and music get louder too, tending to drown out the dialog.
Factor number two is a combination of two things—the fact that sound recording and editing software isn’t standardized and that the sound engineer’s primary objective is to optimize the sound track for in-theater, big-screen viewing with the latest and greatest Dolby X.x sound systems.
Multiple sources vie with each other for sound software dominance and the result can be that what sounds fine with a recording being listened to on a complementary output system, doesn’t sound so hot on another speaker/amplifier combo.
And your 72″ OLED flat screen’s speakers are no match for a movie theater’s latest version of Dolby.
I recommend you read Kernan’s post for yourself. It’s a well-written and enlightening piece.
According to research done at the University of Cambridge, it’s Millennials and Gen Z’ers.
“University of Cambridge psychologists have developed the first validated ‘misinformation susceptibility test’: a quick two-minute quiz that gives a solid indication of how vulnerable a person is to being duped by the kind of fabricated news that floods online spaces,” starts the University’s June 28, 2023 post.
The researchers found “…that younger adults are worse than older adults at identifying false headlines, and that the more time someone spent online recreationally, the less likely they were to be able to tell real news from misinformation.”
The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Behavior Research Methods. The polling results can be accessed at YouGov US website.
Are you gullible? Find out. Take the test yourself at https://yourmist.streamlit.app/, answering 20 true/false questions. The factual sources for the answers came from the likes of the Pew Research Center and Reuters while the false information was generated using ChatGPT version 2.
Dr. Rakoem Maertens, the lead researcher, said the results were “…eye-opening and alarming.” The post goes on to note that, “When it came to age, only 11% of 18- to 29-year-olds got a high score (more than 16 headlines correct), while 36% got a low score (10 headlines or fewer correct). By contrast, 36% of those 65 or older got a high score, while just 9% of older adults got a low score.” And Snapchat users were right only 4% of the time, the worst of the lot, followed by habitués of Truth Social, WhatsApp, TikTok, and Instagram.
It seems that in today’s America, Democrats all think that Republicans are racist hate mongers and Republican think that Democrats are radicals working to destroy the country. Why is that?
Anyone who has been paying any attention to what is going on is already familiar with the term “echo chamber,” meaning that each “side” tends to listen, watch, or read only content that reinforces their tendencies and biases. This is true but it is not sufficient to explain what is going on.
I have been subscribing to “Tangle,” an online publication written by Isaac Saul in which he discusses various issues of the day and presents three summaries, two with the views of the opposing sides of the issue at hand (e.g. abortion’s “pro-choice” and “pro-life”) and then adds his own two cents. I find him to be pretty even-handed in his analyses.
And on Friday he always publishes a special edition that is available only to subscribers. Today he started off with this headline: “Why do we hate each other?”
It’s a long read. Saul grants permission to subscribers to distribute his musings far and wide without any restriction, so I am not violating any copyrights here by including the entire content as a PDF.
He makes a very important point well into his piece: The media today are different than they used to be. Once they at least attempted to be objective, even though biases always seem to have a way to inject themselves into even the most well-intended reporting. But this is no longer true. Now the “mainstream” media have all become advocates. It’s the Washington Post vs. Fox News. There’s no middle ground.
And that’s bad for all of us. I don’t know what we can do about it, but as the old adage goes, the first step to overcoming a problem is to recognize that there IS a problem. Read this piece and I think you will see that problem quite clearly. You can download it if you like.
The report says “a highly sensitive period of brain development” happens between the ages of 10 and 19, coinciding with a period when up to 95 percent of 13 to 17 year olds and nearly 40 percent of 8 to 12 year olds are using social media. But the Advisory notes that frequent use of such platforms can impact the brain development, affecting areas associated with emotional learning, impulse control, and social behavior. Murthy has previously said he believes even 13 years old is “too early” for children to be using social media.
Murthy also says more research is needed and while there are good effects from social media use, the risks may outweigh the rewards.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says in an interview with the Wall Street Journal this past December 30 that Generation Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, is in big trouble. Per the Journal article, “When you look at Americans born after 1995,” Mr. Haidt says, “what you find is that they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.” There has “never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile.”
Research by Haidt and others, shows that depression rates started to rise “all of a sudden” around 2013, “especially for teen girls,” and “By 2015 it’s an epidemic.” (WSJ notes that his data are available in an open-source document.)
Research by Haidt and others shows that the rate of clinical depression began rising around 2013, “especially for teen girls,” and by 2015 had become an epidemic. Per the Journal quoting Haidt, this is due to a “combination of social media and a culture that emphasizes victimhood.”
This excerpt from the article summarizes Haidt’s explanation for why this has happened:
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What happened in 2012, when the oldest Gen-Z babies were in their middle teens? That was the year Facebook acquired Instagram and young people flocked to the latter site. It was also “the beginning of the selfie era.” Apple’s iPhone 4, released in 2010, had the first front-facing camera, which was much improved in the iPhone 5, introduced two years later. Social media and selfies hit a generation that had led an overprotected childhood, in which the age at which children were allowed outside on their own by parents had risen from the norm of previous generations, 7 or 8, to between 10 and 12.
______________________
The article is well worth reading in its entirety. Here is the link:
According to an article in the Seattle Times cited by the National Review’s Ryan Mills…
“Facebook, YouTube, and other social-media giants are intentionally hooking vulnerable children on their platforms and flooding them with harmful and exploitive content, according to a new lawsuit by Seattle public-school leaders that accuses the tech companies of creating a youth mental-health crisis in the state of Washington and elsewhere.”
Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat have all been named in the suit.
Today’s online Wall Street Journal has a wonderful article that has revelatory insights into Bob Dylan and his thoughts about music, the lockdown…even social media.
Here’s an excerpt:
I think social media sites: bring happiness to a lot of people. Some people even discover love there. It’s fantastic if you’re a sociable person; the communication lines are wide open. You can refashion anything, blot out memories and change history. But they can divide and separate us, as well.
I’m with Bob on that!
He has a new book out, The Philosophy of Modern Song, and it sounds like something I need to buy and read.
That’s what Ian Bogost writes about in the current issue of The Atlantic. He notes that “social networking” morphed into “social media” sometime around 2009, thanks to the debut of smartphones and Instagram. The difference is simple but profound.
Social networking promotes ties between people who actually know each other and communicate intentionally. Social media, on the other hand, radically expand an author’s audience to hordes of people that are unknown and anonymous.
While this transition has proved quite popular, it has also proved to be highly anti-social, per Bogost. That’s because the social media platform owners quickly discovered that emotionally charged content (and all its ill effects) drew the most eyeballs and this created enormous profit-making potential, thanks to marketers who wished to disseminate commercial messages to as many people as possible. Platform algorithms are designed to broadcast the most emotionally charged posts. Social media posters, meanwhile, revel in their seeming popularity, thriving on likes, shares, retweets, and the like.
Bogost says, “…social media produced a positively unhinged, sociopathic rendition of human sociality…” that has been actively fostered by Big Tech firms “…where sociopathy is a design philosophy.”
Bogost’s condemnation is unrelenting and unforgiving. His conclusion is: “We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad, deep in its very structure. All we can do is hope that it withers away, and play our small part in helping abandon it.”
Nonetheless, I for one think that Bogost wants to throw out the baby with the bathwater. This very post by me on this blog is itself a social media transmission. I use Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to make as many people as possible aware of my blog posts. Ironically, this post serves to make Bogost more widely read to an audience that doesn’t read The Atlantic.
I don’t dispute what Bogost says about the various platforms’ business models and their toxic effects. But I hold the view that tools are tools, and they can be used for good or ill.
It seems to me that the likelihood of social media’s demise is nil. People are people, human nature is human nature. It may well be that growth is slowing and perhaps may stagnate. Will it actually start to shrink? Only when the world’s population starts to decline. There may be consolidations and mergers as the various platforms lose their distinctive attributes as they all copy each other voraciously. They all seem to want to be all things to all users. But social media are like hammers. And they will be around for millennia to come.
mediainmind 