zlacker

>>bertma+(OP)
The experience of passive consumption (cable TV, tiktok, etc, pointed out in another comment here) is essentially the experience of psychological obliteration.

When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed. The same psychological phenomena happens to gambling addicts, alcoholics, or users of heroin. It has fewer physiological downsides and side-effects as those things; the only material loss you have is the loss of time.

But far more remarkable than that it's simply a waste of time, and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The destruction of the self. That echoes through a person's life, to their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is those echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass sociological scale.

By the way. "There" has a lot of upsides too. People can be creative, productive, expressive while they are "there" too. Creating, being funny, being social, etc. That's why this is so hard.

>>mlsu+IP
> When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed.

I think many can personally attest that either your use of "you" is waaaaay too presumptive or that your use of sucked into represents a mode of engagement that only certain people experience at certain times.

Your rhetorical flourish of making it all sound universal and damning is pretty, but it doesn't really hold.

Most people, most of the time, even if they are heavy total consumers, are just idly filling bits of time the way they might nervously chew on their lip or pick at a finger. They may get regularly caught up in the behavior without conscious intent but are far from "obliterated" and easily escape it when other concerns arise. That's a long long way from the addictions you compare it to.

>>swatco+WV
pretty optimistic review of the power of the individual/mind contra the really fine-tuned algorithms of engagement. the hook is the “filling bits of (idle) time.” the accounting when all the filling of bits of time is done seems to add up to a huge sum. the extra time definitely would have been borrowed (read: stolen) from somewhere.

>>yawboa+531
I agree that algorithmic feeds and even just having endless distractions in a hip pocket are terribly unhealthy. I thinks its wise to be very mindful with both and that they can quietly steal from other experiences that one might prefer in hindsight.

But I don't have a way to square that perspective with what the original commenter suggested about "psychological obliteration" and "addiction akin to gambling or heroin"

People won't even pay for most of these pocket distractions. They're clearly not consuming or addictive in the same way as those others things, where people often make explicit wantonly destructive choices in service to their addiction.

And realistically, that they're a different kind of risk with a different kind of impact may make them even more dangerous from a health-of-society perspective, because we don't have great cultural insight or hygeine practices to deal with them. If we want to change that, we need to recognize that they don't represent the same danger we're used to.

So I'm not dismissing that they're bad. I'm just dismissing the original commenters' deeply strained and distracting characterization.