jjulius

It doesn't remove our ideological differences, no. Nor should it. What it does is make us more likely to understand and communicate better with one another. That's the first step towards getting along and finding a path forward together in spite of our differences.

Differences of opinion are okay, but it's harder to get along when our lives are lived in spaces that silo us off and encourage distrust and anger. Screens do that to us, meatspace doesn't.

Media illiteracy coupled with the sweet, sweet comfort of a screen. People love screens. Just look at how much awe young children (I say this as a parent of two littles) have when they first see a TV. Now look at how much we all love to look at screens of any kind.

We're absolutely fascinated by them. Gobsmacked.

And many people blindly believe what they see on their screens because they don't know any better. They trust the article they read without thinking too deeply about it or looking for alternative perspectives. They gobble up the reel they just watched and are irate about whatever it told them to be irate about. But this isn't anything new, just look at how easily grandma and grandpa gobbled up whatever Fox News fed them in 1998, or what heavily edited images designed to manipulate their thoughts and opinions they were exposed to in the 70s, the 80s when they turned the television on.

Screens have always, and will always, be used to manipulate people, and that's been incredibly amplified over the past 15-20 years.

Yet if you take the screen away and spend time connecting with people on a deeper level, really spend time getting to know them, life feels a hell of a lot different than what the screens show you. Understanding one another is a hell of a lot easier. Everyone can see exactly the same thing as the other person - the analog, meatspace world around them that isn't being manipulated and twisted in an effort to get them to think a certain way.

It's the screens.

We do most of our communicating via phones on platforms that encourage flip, nuance-free takes, are hotbeds of disinformation, and so on. Nothing about the environments we exist in foster positive, meaningful communication that collectively benefits us. Everything we used is designed to divide.

Our inability to collectively get along ramped up exponentially as smartphones took off. Phones, and the platforms within that people have become dependent upon, are the root.

Edit: Instead of getting to know people at a deep level, understanding what shapes their core views and how they view the world, and constructively communicating with them to shape their worldview over time for the better, we prefer to yell and scream at each other in 140 characters for the sake of upvotes.

Real change and progress takes time and effort, but for some reason we're collectively deluded into thinking that it'll happen via upvotes in 45 seconds and without ever having looked one another in the eye.

Assuming that's true, why are they more unhappy without them? Sounds akin to dependency/withdrawals at that point.

I very much am, feel free to engage! :) I was genuinely interested in how you made that leap, or we could talk about how parents navigate the logistics of balancing an emphasis on books vs. exposing them to challenging scenarios, or whathaveyou. Had you maybe discussed how you made that leap when I asked, perhaps we'd be having that conversation right now. ;)

You seem to prefer flip "Ooh, gotcha!" responses as opposed to having an actual conversation.

So, they screamed for 30 minutes. They're kids. I'm not gonna give my 4 or 6 year-old something that's gonna take a hatchet to their attention span just because they're doing a thing that's completely normal for that age.

That drive fucking sucks ass, don't get me wrong, but oh well, that's part of life - the kid has to learn that sometimes shit's not gonna go their way and they have to figure out how to get over it. I'll be damned if I'm gonna teach them that the way they can calm themselves down and regulate their emotions is by the sweet, sweet blue hue of a tablet.

We're a two working parent household and we keep screen time limited to a short amount of TV time. We'll expose them to screens more and more so that we can properly educate them over time, sure. But man, I don't get the whole, "even a two working parent household barely has time for anything and is stressful," bit because - yeah, that's exactly what parenting is.

Parenting is hard. It's exhausting. If you don't have a village, the onus is on you to do it right. That's what we've signed up for, is giving our all to our kids until they're out on their own. That's what we're supposed to do. It's not supposed to be easy, it's a constant stress the likes of which you will never know until you're in it. But we're here, so let's do the hard work and do it right. We owe it to them.

Edit: You're right, we need time and space and the ability to make good choices, but neither of those should come at the expense of my kids.

"My kids still like books" = "I'm not teaching them how to control themselves in front of addictive software"?

>The reality is that majority of kids have always been allowed some form of screen time and todays screentime is going to at least be more interactive than yesterdays screentime.

I say this as a parent - hogwash. Fred Rogers looked into children's souls and spoke to them deeply at a nice comfortable pace and kids felt that, whereas today's modern screens utterly eviscerate their attention spans.

>One does not need to be a part of the enshitiffication of the internet.

Likewise, what with your shot-from-the-hip response that lambastes OP in a non-constructive way, the very kind of unhelpful "dialogue" that is all too common on the Internet these days.

Perhaps someone is genuinely ignorant and it could've behooved you to have kindly offered suggestions as to which of the "thousands decent science fiction and literature sites out there" your strongly opinionated, holier than thou self finds most valuable? Seems like a better place to start than whatever... this is.

Wow.

Giving up on Google and moving away from them is the way.