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Let's talk about how Social Media is failing society

nush

Member
Please tell me in what ways has our society improved since social media was introduced.

You can get a lady to come to your house and have sex with you and you don't need to buy her a drink or pay for the taxi.

Don-Draper-so-smooth-driving-his-car.gif
 

BlackTron

Member
Well... I guess I'm duty bound to ask if you can provide verifiable evidence of this? I'm no fan of Zuckerbot's hellsite, but the claim FB directly led to the death of people needs a bit of back up.

This is more recent but will quickly get you up to speed on the context of the situation. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/business/rodrigo-duterte-facebook-philippines.html

Edit: More info, not the NYT: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/daveyalba/facebook-philippines-dutertes-drug-war
 
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Astral Dog

Member
im not an expert or community manager or something 😅 imo the impact has been quite ugly

Social media has brainwashed an entire generation with negativity,false advice,propaganda and brought the worst of human groupthink to light, though i haven't read them in detail ,i heard there were have been studies linking the use of social media with stress and depression ,and no doubt mental health has deteriorated ,these aren't real human connections but more like a disturbing,false virtual society with an ever changing set of rules that people have associated with real life.(as in,they literally want real life to resemble social media,it has shaped the way they interact,communicate and behave)



i can see it helping people just by not being exposed to it anymore, if it was completely abandoned someday🤔
 
The impact of smartphones and social media is insane and it has never been more apparant to me than now than I'm in a bigger city (Hong Kong). Everyone is staring on their damn phone all the time. When waiting for and riding the train especially I feel like in some form of cyberpunk diystopia. It's crazy. Feel like among some mindless drones. Humanity is doomed unless some form of change comes in this regard.
 
The impact of smartphones and social media is insane and it has never been more apparant to me than now than I'm in a bigger city (Hong Kong). Everyone is staring on their damn phone all the time. When waiting for and riding the train especially I feel like in some form of cyberpunk diystopia. It's crazy. Feel like among some mindless drones. Humanity is doomed unless some form of change comes in this regard.
At least for people in public they have nothing else to do but entertain themselves.

You should see some of the meetings I have at work. You got people talking or presenting shit and some people pull out their phones checking who knows what. It could be business related, it could be Twitter.

The best ones I've seen are people I walk by to change seats (my eyes arent the greatest) or go to the bathroom and I see they are checking Amazon on their laptop.

People dont even have attention span to focus when there's a coworker talking to the crowd. Nor do they care enough to be prepared in case someone calls on them to answer a question in a meeting room. Insane.
 
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Social media is destroying society
The Internet is destroying society
Video games are destroying society
Cartoons are destroying society
Rock and roll is destroying society
TV is destroying society
Comic books are destroying society
Films are destroying society
The Radio is destroying society
Reading books is destroying society


See the trend here. Over the course of human history, people have always been getting their panties in a bunch when a new type of media emerges that they do not understand.

Historically they are always wrong.
What this tells me is every medium takes time to mature. The first wave tends to be novelty and fascination, with very little substance. Over time it gains respect and creators who grew up with that medium but have insights about the world beyond it with meaningful things to say will find a way to tell meaningful stories or make a positive impact with it. In the end people accept what they grow up with and get use to. Maybe Tik Tok will one day be outdated and seen as an old people's pastime like newspapers.

However, I'm not sure social media and the internet are strictly comparable to commercial fads before it. There is an element of much more direct social impact because it is your average person themselves who are creating content and thus much more involving and participatory than what came before. You are not just experiencing pure fiction, you are strolling a very real yet very skewed zoo of society. Once you had to be an expert of a particular trade and people sought to be entertained by that skill, to be removed from reality, but now people are content to be entertained by bubbles of reality itself. The damaging part is thinking the extreme shit you see is real, or ideal, or common, when in fact a lot of it is manufactured and artificial and rare. Most people don't have the skill, the mind, the time, or the patience to distinguish and dissect what is and isn't real. Not to mention the presence of it is ubiquitous, overwhelming, and unavoidable since essential societal functions have been integrated into it. It's no stretch to say social media has distorted both our view of reality and possibly reality itself thanks to a big part of our daily reality being digital. It just blurs the lines in an unprecedented way. Even when we only had movies and comics, there were people who couldn't tell what was reality and imitated those, obsessed over them. But they were few in number. Now, when it's become so pervasive and intwined with how we live, nearly everyone is being affected and on shaky ground, even if you consider yourself sane. Just because it hasn't happened before--and now, at the dawn of AI revolution--I might argue technology has finally outpaced human society's ability to control it and integrate it into their lives without becoming subservient to it.
 

CGNoire

Member
Trying telling this to our Heroin addicted congress who whenever listening to testimonials on the issues with Social Media while the whole time checking and surfing the own phones looking for there next fix.

In other words I wouldnt exspect anything to ever be done. These people in power are just as addicted.
 

nkarafo

Member
When i was younger i had this idea that the internet is better than TV because people can interact and share their opinions, unlike how TV would broadcast whatever opinions and propaganda they wanted, unchallenged.

But because i was young and naive, i didn't realize how back in the late 90's/early 00's, computers and the internet itself, as tools, were not exactly user friendly (as they are now). Computers were harder to use and harder to troubleshoot and the internet was slower and not as good at handling media like music and video. It required much more patience, technical knowledge and attention span to use. I didn't realize how this basically filtered out most of the population and as such, most of the idiots. It was the computer nerd era of the internet, sure there were assholes back then too but they were fewer and there were also much fewer idiots. There were fewer people in general.

As computers became easier to use, as mobiles became much more capable, as the internet became much faster and reliable and social media started to creep in, i started to realize how wrong i was about this "freedom of expression for everyone" being a good thing. And today i have no doubt.

The vast majority of people are idiots, it's simple as that. The rest of us were much better off not having to deal with them or their "opinions". But now they have all the tools and platforms they need to feed their narcissism and push their idiocy to everyone. That's what the internet being better and the social media brought us. And i realized how all this time TV was better because it kept the vast majority of people at bay and we could at least have to deal with the fewer idiots who had the privilege and connections to be on TV. Remember the "Look mom, i'm on TV!!!!!" person who just happened to be where a camera crew was? Remember how obnoxious that person was? Well, now we have to deal with them 24/7 on the internet and social media.

And all that comes from someone who only keeps a FB account with less than 50 or so "friends" so he can use Messenger. On a heavily modded browser that filters out ads, "suggested posts" and other spam. I never use tweeter. Never use Instagram. Never use Tik Tok. I try to use good old, text heavy forums mostly. And i'm still getting enough social media toxins from the cracks. I can't imagine how anyone can actively be a part of these platforms daily and be able to stay sane.

In the late 90's the internet was like an "escape from the real world" but today i rather walk outside and deal with whoever is in my radius instead of having to deal with the cesspit the internet has become, which was the real real world all along.

This might sound like an elitist talking here, on a high horse and all, but that's how i honestly feel, sorry.
 
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NecrosaroIII

Ask me about my terrible takes on Star Trek characters
In the late 90's the internet was like an "escape from the real world" but today i rather walk outside and deal with the real world instead of having to deal with the cesspit the internet has become.
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Ain't that the fucking truth. I'm craving some authenticity. Back in the day, everyone was chill. All you had to do was avoid pedos, which was easy enough. Everyone was much more chill. Sure there would be the occasional troll. But most people usually just laughed at them.

Now everyone is so high strung?
 

OZ9000

Member
Twitter is hit and miss - I find it useful for specific topics I follow but I don't interact with the idiots that plague it
Tiktok is cancer
Instagram is shit
Facebook is both good and bad however I no longer use it. I am embarrassed by what I have posted 10 years ago.
 
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StueyDuck

Member
it does make me laugh that Murica saw their kids all buying into the CCP propaganda app and Decided, "let me join in and pretend i'm a flim/flom for internet points".


the West lost a social media influence engineering war they didn't even know they were fighting in.
 
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