Clicked the link when this popped up in my feed because this is one of my favourite songs. Wasn't disappointed. Yes, social media is terrifying. I have a 2.5 year old and I hate how drawn she is to smartphones, how easily she's sucked in (I don't let her use mine, but my MIL and husband are more lax and will let her watch kids' music on the YouTube app on theirs). The exact same content on the TV doesn't have nearly the same attention-sucking effects. The smaller screen activates the cones more, and the left hemisphere more ...
It's not just social media, it's also text messaging. So many young people nowadays are conducting their relationships over writing, social media, instant messaging. This activates the language centres of the left hemisphere, but the right hemisphere is neglected in written communication (the RH processes non-verbal communication, tone of voice, body language, facial expressions etc, all absent in a text message). And RH dysfunction and hypo-function underlies most diagnoses currently on the rise, including autism, borderline personality disorder, anxiety disorders, multiple personality disorder, and eating disorders and body dysmorphia. (See Iain McGilchrist, The Master & His Emissay). Are you familiar with the double-slit experiment? How light acts as a wave until it's observed and recorded, upon which it collapses into a particle. Humans are waves, and when we communicate face to face, we communicate as waves. When we record ourselves, we create a particle. Text messages, social media etc are all communication-by-particles, and when we communicate by particles, we mirror particles, we become more particle-like ourselves, more static, more autistic. We start to put our image, our particles, before ourselves as waves.
Parenting in the West has been corrupted since at least the 1600s. Issues really started to build with the invention of the printing press and the rise in mobility associated with travel technologies and colonialism. More mothers raising children away from extended family. More mothers taking god-awful advice from parenting books.
It's too optimistic to hope for collective change. Hang on to your kids (without suffocating) is good advice. Give them the information they need to protect themselves. Nurture the right hemisphere, so the RH is strong and not overwhelmed by the mechanistic, machine-loving, black-and-white-thinking left.
(If I'm making little sense, I explain a lot of this stuff in long, science-heavy essays on my Substack).
I’m glad someone came here out of appreciation for Manic Street Preachers, who are one of the finest British bands, and certainly the finest Welsh band, to hit the charts in the 1990s. This may be the first in a series of essays loosely inspired by memorable song titles. I’m also rather fond of the Manics’ “The Intense Humming of Evil.”
I haven’t read McGilchrist, but your comment got me thinking about neuroplasticity, which is both a mindbogglingly liberating and frightening concept. I dug out my copy of The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, who writes that “The possibility of intellectual decay is inherent in the malleability of the brain.” The declining ability to sit still and read books, the growing discomfort with face-to-face communication and even phone calls: these are byproducts of the portable distraction machines and anti-social social networks that are constantly rewiring our brains. And how much worse for “digital natives,” who never had to learn to sit quietly in a room alone, or to be fully present for someone without reaching for their phone.
I’ve developed my own fragments to “shore against the ruins”: habits of reading and writing, time devoted to reflection and human interaction, in hopes of retaining my attention span and shaping my brain in a positive way. But when you have young kids, it’s hard to escape the feeling that regardless of the guidance you provide or the example you set, opposing cultural forces are too powerful. Still, I believe it is human nature to want to be fully human, and the more technology alienates us from ourselves, the greater the possibility for change—even on a mass scale.
Great quote by Carr, thank you for sharing. I agree with you that it is human nature to want to be fully human; the issue is that so many of us are disconnected from nature, and disconnected young. Technology disconnects us. Processed food disconnects us. So many pharmaceuticals disconnect us. Anything that disrupts the gut microbiome, really. Lack of access to nature (for many people). Avoiding the sun (including wearing sunscreen all the time ... Vitamin D deficiencies have cascading effects). Some people seem very separated from those human instincts.
I think the best way to protect your kids from the influences of social media, the culture etc is to nurture connection. Really, *especially* the gut microbiome stuff. I've noticed a lot of the people getting sucked into toxic online communities / cults have poor diets, substance abuse issues (REFINED SUGAR!!) that would cause gut issues, and gut issues ... thinking fractally, our gut microbiome is to us (our consciousness) as all humans, plants, animals, fungi are to the earth. As above, so below. When the gut is disrupted, the connection to nature is disrupted.
I think the way modern societies are configured, that is very hard to do. Especially with peer influence and all. My oldest is only 2.5 so keeping her from a smartphone is quite easy. I am still in control of her entire social life and she doesn’t much care for peers yet. She doesn’t have school friends to feel excluded from if she didn’t have her own device and social media accounts and I don’t really expect other parents (whom we will be largely unfamiliar with) to take collective action against smartphones and social media, especially faced with relentless demand from our own kids. I’m NOT saying that is an excuse not to hold the line. But on the other hand, faced with this kind of pressure, many parents will simply give up the fight.
One of the bigger problems I see, and a much more intractable one, is that these days our kids live completely compartmentalized lives. Then spend all of their best, most alert hours in school with unrelated peers. Parents are at work. By the time both are home, everybody is too exhausted to do much beyond dinner and bed. As Gordon Neufeld notes in his book “Hold On To Your Kids”, that’s why kids are actually much more attached to their peers than their parents. Peer relationships used to exist within the context of a broader, stable, mixed aged community where you know the parents of all the peers your kid knows. Parents who know and trust one another have a common standard.
There used to be a stable cadre of adults kids can turn to as well. Neighbors who don’t move away. Uncles. Aunts. Grandparents. Now the only stable adult influence are the parents, and many of us are too burnt out by life and work to be good mentors to our own kids. Largely because, I really don’t believe parents are meant to be the only adults raising our kids. And now it’s all on us. We are both too tired to discipline, and terrified of losing our children (which, faced with the onslaught of peer attachment, is a very real possibility. Parental estrangement is higher than ever)
And this is why I think collective action against social media is unlikely to happen. If nothing else, it’s too convenient of a babysitter. I have heard of so many parents in my baby group who were like “I used to be 100% against giving my kid an iPad, but it’s the only way I can stay sane now, so I do it.” And in a few years, these kids will discover social media. And they will have relatively unfettered access to it.
It is very hard. As Jonathan Haidt has said, collective action problems require collective, even legislative, solutions. Banning smartphones from school seems like an obvious one, especially since, as you write, kids spend the bulk of their day there. Such a ban has been enacted in France and is being planned in England. But I agree that focusing entirely on technology misses the larger context of a more atomized society that affects all of us, but children especially.
Even if we don’t live near extended family (I don’t), we can try to embed ourselves and our kids within what you call “a broader, stable, mixed aged community.” Religion, approached agnostically (ie, without accepting its every truth claim), is a time-tested means of doing so. On a personal level, we can try to model appropriate adult behavior. Even my two-year-old notices when I’m on my phone and will try to imitate me, which has encouraged me to put it down more.
We’re unlikely to change the fundamental structure of modern society, but some combination of collective action (eg, supporting tech legislation, joining like-minded communities) and personal behavior (eg, modeling Luddite practices like reading books and spending time in nature) seems to be the only way forward. Modern society itself was not always with us (Virginia Woolf: "On or around December 1910, human character changed”), and given the rate of technological and social change, will not remain in its present form, either. We can push it to get better or resign ourselves to it getting worse.
That’s very true. To your point, I will also add that in my albeit limited experience, kids prefer real interactions to phones. Granted, life is tiring and we don’t ALWAYS have the bandwidth to invent activities for them, or 100% focus on them. But whenever my kids start to be drawn to devices, I noticed it’s because I haven’t truly interacted with them for a while. Once I do that, and give them something physical, tangible or social to focus on, they are far less drawn to devices. Even if it’s as simple as being outside. My kids have NEVER asked for devices on a nature walk.
The social hierarchy of the teenage world is as competitive as any other, but is even more defined by interpersonal chaos. It even echoes the definitive Sun Tzu expression about knowing yourself being half of what guarantees victory in combat: a teenager can't know themselves because they haven't yet even become properly acquainted with themselves.
While teens need to learn from their hidden experiences of independence, it seems completely insane that the internet became social media, and that became constant digital media creation and sharing in every child and teen's pocket. It's like you mention, this reflects a degeneration of "adult society" into immaturity and irresponsibility and unwise foolishness. The reason young people seem to have crossed boundaries with regards to this insane tech is because there are no boundaries to it in the adult world—for example, answering work emails at 9pm, or having multiple phones for a job that is a "side hustle" that doesn't pay a liveable wage.
The Sun Tzu connection is apt. Beyond not knowing themselves yet, teenagers aren't even finished becoming complete selves (which, from a mystical perspective, is only a preliminary step to seeing beyond the self, but I digress). That makes them particularly vulnerable to false promises of self-improvement or self-invention (think malign online influencers) and to pressure and bullying from their peers (because they lack the self-confidence to go against the crowd).
Clicked the link when this popped up in my feed because this is one of my favourite songs. Wasn't disappointed. Yes, social media is terrifying. I have a 2.5 year old and I hate how drawn she is to smartphones, how easily she's sucked in (I don't let her use mine, but my MIL and husband are more lax and will let her watch kids' music on the YouTube app on theirs). The exact same content on the TV doesn't have nearly the same attention-sucking effects. The smaller screen activates the cones more, and the left hemisphere more ...
It's not just social media, it's also text messaging. So many young people nowadays are conducting their relationships over writing, social media, instant messaging. This activates the language centres of the left hemisphere, but the right hemisphere is neglected in written communication (the RH processes non-verbal communication, tone of voice, body language, facial expressions etc, all absent in a text message). And RH dysfunction and hypo-function underlies most diagnoses currently on the rise, including autism, borderline personality disorder, anxiety disorders, multiple personality disorder, and eating disorders and body dysmorphia. (See Iain McGilchrist, The Master & His Emissay). Are you familiar with the double-slit experiment? How light acts as a wave until it's observed and recorded, upon which it collapses into a particle. Humans are waves, and when we communicate face to face, we communicate as waves. When we record ourselves, we create a particle. Text messages, social media etc are all communication-by-particles, and when we communicate by particles, we mirror particles, we become more particle-like ourselves, more static, more autistic. We start to put our image, our particles, before ourselves as waves.
Parenting in the West has been corrupted since at least the 1600s. Issues really started to build with the invention of the printing press and the rise in mobility associated with travel technologies and colonialism. More mothers raising children away from extended family. More mothers taking god-awful advice from parenting books.
It's too optimistic to hope for collective change. Hang on to your kids (without suffocating) is good advice. Give them the information they need to protect themselves. Nurture the right hemisphere, so the RH is strong and not overwhelmed by the mechanistic, machine-loving, black-and-white-thinking left.
(If I'm making little sense, I explain a lot of this stuff in long, science-heavy essays on my Substack).
I’m glad someone came here out of appreciation for Manic Street Preachers, who are one of the finest British bands, and certainly the finest Welsh band, to hit the charts in the 1990s. This may be the first in a series of essays loosely inspired by memorable song titles. I’m also rather fond of the Manics’ “The Intense Humming of Evil.”
I haven’t read McGilchrist, but your comment got me thinking about neuroplasticity, which is both a mindbogglingly liberating and frightening concept. I dug out my copy of The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, who writes that “The possibility of intellectual decay is inherent in the malleability of the brain.” The declining ability to sit still and read books, the growing discomfort with face-to-face communication and even phone calls: these are byproducts of the portable distraction machines and anti-social social networks that are constantly rewiring our brains. And how much worse for “digital natives,” who never had to learn to sit quietly in a room alone, or to be fully present for someone without reaching for their phone.
I’ve developed my own fragments to “shore against the ruins”: habits of reading and writing, time devoted to reflection and human interaction, in hopes of retaining my attention span and shaping my brain in a positive way. But when you have young kids, it’s hard to escape the feeling that regardless of the guidance you provide or the example you set, opposing cultural forces are too powerful. Still, I believe it is human nature to want to be fully human, and the more technology alienates us from ourselves, the greater the possibility for change—even on a mass scale.
Great quote by Carr, thank you for sharing. I agree with you that it is human nature to want to be fully human; the issue is that so many of us are disconnected from nature, and disconnected young. Technology disconnects us. Processed food disconnects us. So many pharmaceuticals disconnect us. Anything that disrupts the gut microbiome, really. Lack of access to nature (for many people). Avoiding the sun (including wearing sunscreen all the time ... Vitamin D deficiencies have cascading effects). Some people seem very separated from those human instincts.
I think the best way to protect your kids from the influences of social media, the culture etc is to nurture connection. Really, *especially* the gut microbiome stuff. I've noticed a lot of the people getting sucked into toxic online communities / cults have poor diets, substance abuse issues (REFINED SUGAR!!) that would cause gut issues, and gut issues ... thinking fractally, our gut microbiome is to us (our consciousness) as all humans, plants, animals, fungi are to the earth. As above, so below. When the gut is disrupted, the connection to nature is disrupted.
I think the way modern societies are configured, that is very hard to do. Especially with peer influence and all. My oldest is only 2.5 so keeping her from a smartphone is quite easy. I am still in control of her entire social life and she doesn’t much care for peers yet. She doesn’t have school friends to feel excluded from if she didn’t have her own device and social media accounts and I don’t really expect other parents (whom we will be largely unfamiliar with) to take collective action against smartphones and social media, especially faced with relentless demand from our own kids. I’m NOT saying that is an excuse not to hold the line. But on the other hand, faced with this kind of pressure, many parents will simply give up the fight.
One of the bigger problems I see, and a much more intractable one, is that these days our kids live completely compartmentalized lives. Then spend all of their best, most alert hours in school with unrelated peers. Parents are at work. By the time both are home, everybody is too exhausted to do much beyond dinner and bed. As Gordon Neufeld notes in his book “Hold On To Your Kids”, that’s why kids are actually much more attached to their peers than their parents. Peer relationships used to exist within the context of a broader, stable, mixed aged community where you know the parents of all the peers your kid knows. Parents who know and trust one another have a common standard.
There used to be a stable cadre of adults kids can turn to as well. Neighbors who don’t move away. Uncles. Aunts. Grandparents. Now the only stable adult influence are the parents, and many of us are too burnt out by life and work to be good mentors to our own kids. Largely because, I really don’t believe parents are meant to be the only adults raising our kids. And now it’s all on us. We are both too tired to discipline, and terrified of losing our children (which, faced with the onslaught of peer attachment, is a very real possibility. Parental estrangement is higher than ever)
And this is why I think collective action against social media is unlikely to happen. If nothing else, it’s too convenient of a babysitter. I have heard of so many parents in my baby group who were like “I used to be 100% against giving my kid an iPad, but it’s the only way I can stay sane now, so I do it.” And in a few years, these kids will discover social media. And they will have relatively unfettered access to it.
It is very hard. As Jonathan Haidt has said, collective action problems require collective, even legislative, solutions. Banning smartphones from school seems like an obvious one, especially since, as you write, kids spend the bulk of their day there. Such a ban has been enacted in France and is being planned in England. But I agree that focusing entirely on technology misses the larger context of a more atomized society that affects all of us, but children especially.
Even if we don’t live near extended family (I don’t), we can try to embed ourselves and our kids within what you call “a broader, stable, mixed aged community.” Religion, approached agnostically (ie, without accepting its every truth claim), is a time-tested means of doing so. On a personal level, we can try to model appropriate adult behavior. Even my two-year-old notices when I’m on my phone and will try to imitate me, which has encouraged me to put it down more.
We’re unlikely to change the fundamental structure of modern society, but some combination of collective action (eg, supporting tech legislation, joining like-minded communities) and personal behavior (eg, modeling Luddite practices like reading books and spending time in nature) seems to be the only way forward. Modern society itself was not always with us (Virginia Woolf: "On or around December 1910, human character changed”), and given the rate of technological and social change, will not remain in its present form, either. We can push it to get better or resign ourselves to it getting worse.
That’s very true. To your point, I will also add that in my albeit limited experience, kids prefer real interactions to phones. Granted, life is tiring and we don’t ALWAYS have the bandwidth to invent activities for them, or 100% focus on them. But whenever my kids start to be drawn to devices, I noticed it’s because I haven’t truly interacted with them for a while. Once I do that, and give them something physical, tangible or social to focus on, they are far less drawn to devices. Even if it’s as simple as being outside. My kids have NEVER asked for devices on a nature walk.
The social hierarchy of the teenage world is as competitive as any other, but is even more defined by interpersonal chaos. It even echoes the definitive Sun Tzu expression about knowing yourself being half of what guarantees victory in combat: a teenager can't know themselves because they haven't yet even become properly acquainted with themselves.
While teens need to learn from their hidden experiences of independence, it seems completely insane that the internet became social media, and that became constant digital media creation and sharing in every child and teen's pocket. It's like you mention, this reflects a degeneration of "adult society" into immaturity and irresponsibility and unwise foolishness. The reason young people seem to have crossed boundaries with regards to this insane tech is because there are no boundaries to it in the adult world—for example, answering work emails at 9pm, or having multiple phones for a job that is a "side hustle" that doesn't pay a liveable wage.
The Sun Tzu connection is apt. Beyond not knowing themselves yet, teenagers aren't even finished becoming complete selves (which, from a mystical perspective, is only a preliminary step to seeing beyond the self, but I digress). That makes them particularly vulnerable to false promises of self-improvement or self-invention (think malign online influencers) and to pressure and bullying from their peers (because they lack the self-confidence to go against the crowd).