I did a BIG long historical deep dive into the history of moral panics surrounding kids and media/technology and tried to unpack the real motivations behind the latest freakout over kids and smartphones!
I worked on this video for months and it’s the first in a multi part series I’m launching covering the current moral panic around kids and tech.
Please watch, like, comment, subscribe to support my work 🙏 https://youtu.be/sNxV4UMRYQA?si=rSoGGckPHffEOLwk
@taylorlorenz It is not exactly a "youth" moral panic, but I was introduced to Plato writing about how writing would rot people's brains. You can find a translation at:
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/plato/dialogues/benjamin-jowett/text/single-page
, ctrl+f for "Naucratis"; the long paragraph is all you need.
Not an exact match, but I love how it's 2400 years old...
@taylorlorenz I’m 42 now and I was in social media during school. In mailing lists.
But that was a time when hate wasn’t spread by Musk and people online were not targeted as much by fascists in gaming channels.
Though what I wrote back then would still be following me around if Geocities hadn’t died and if online surveillance had been as strong back then as it is now.
And I would not write today what we did back in the German Shadowrun email list. That would risk self-SWAT-ing.
1/2
@taylorlorenz so yes, the internet itself is not the problem, but many of the platforms we have today are harmful to people using them. Including the older people who follow religious pundits on news websites.
And while saying that yes, this happened before, we shouldn’t forget that radio actually was used to radicalize youth.
Yes, that’s by the Nazis who spread the Volksempfänger:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksempf%C3%A4nger#Legacy
Now think about what it means that Musk uses X to incite riots in the UK.
2/2
@taylorlorenz Really interesting topic. I only got to about 30 seconds, though, because the pace of speak and clips made me uncomfortable - and feeling really, really old.
Is there a version of this made for slow thinking, patient people?
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