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
This is essentially Neil Postman's argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death [0]. The basic idea is that the medium matters, and different media are better suited to different types of messages and discourse. This is why I rail against social media--in particular things like Twitter/X and Bluesky, because their basic structure leads to poor communication outcomes.

It's hard to swallow--TV and social media are the backbones of our culture now--but it's pretty convincing that Postman's predictions came true.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death