We have destroyed our public spaces, removed places for people to gather, made it illegal for youth to be unaccompanied in many public places, created helicopter parents and insufferable busybodies that call the police if a child so much as wanders outside the home, and have made any kind of IRL socialization either impossible or extremely difficult.
We have influencers and brands flooding social media to show you how worthless you are and how you need to look better, act different, dress this way or that. It creates a sense of anxiety, self-loathing, and hopelessness.
Especially if you’re young, you look around at the state of the world and wonder what fucking hope you have for any kind of future: loans for college that will be a boat anchor around your neck for basically the rest of your life, a climate catastrophe in progress, a fascist coup in progress, the absolute impossibility of home ownership, a job market that’s being torn apart by grifters, and rising inflation and costs of living without any increase in salaries.
The major social platforms are all dominated by algorithmically generated “content” that feeds on rage-baiting. Outside of YouTube, none of the platforms allow for any kind of long-form posts, so you’re limited in what you can say on a given topic, so you reduce it to the most distilled and condensed version. Something is mildly upsetting? Well, 280 characters isn’t enough for nuance, so rage-posting it is. And the more inflammatory, the more engagement it gets, which gets it in front of even more eyeballs.
YouTube actively pushes users down the alt-right rabbit hole.
So you’re already isolated, alone, separated from any kind of sense of community, and you try to find a replacement in social media. But it’s not the same. You’re already feeling hopeless about the world and the future. And this algorithm you’ve been swallowed by is fed by, and rewards, the worst impulses.
It’s not a “kids these days are so addicted to their phones these days and it’s making them depressed or violent” kind of issue. It’s an interconnected web of shit that’s feeding back and forth making everything worse. We’ve made a fucking awful world, and then the place where people are taking refuge is exacerbating all of it.
Oh, it’s not video games and heavy metal anymore?
Social media is far worse.
Some people spend all their time on it arguing and being needlessly toxic, and they’re connected to it all day.
The (incorrect) idea with video games/metal was that they made people aggressive; meanwhile, social media is a platform where people actively go to be aggressive to other people and rile themselves up.
Yeah, but in most countries they can’t then go out and easily buy a gun to take out those frustrations.
So you’re saying social media may be … Accelerating the energy and will to commit homicides? Perhaps like a fuel?
Video games and heavy metal I found is good for my mental health
I cannot believe this has to be said over and over again: It is easy access to guns!
Maybe read the article. What you said doesn’t need to be said again in this articles context, because the issue is more complex and that exact point is addressed as a cause.
Yeah, it is more complex. Hence do not put social media in the title. I read the article. It is superficial and scratches the surface.
I reay do not understand what you are trying to tell me buddy, you have added nothing to the discourse ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So you want every article on any subject to cover the entire issue holistically? Don’t put the focus of the article in the title? Your response doesn’t make any sense.
I do not, and you know that. We do not even disagree on the core issue. But here you are, trying to put yourself on a pedestal by reminding everyone to acknowledge the nuances. This is how core issues get diluted, and I am not interested in that. See you on the next thread where you defend “How mouse farts could contribute to climate change”.
Yes I know that because it’s absurd. But here you and others are arguing that the article needs to be comprehensive.
“I want to see studies on how substantial of an impact this has” is a reasonable critique.
“The author didn’t address every possible contributing factor and so I’m going to ignore any possible thoughts the article presents immediately” not so much.
“How mouse farts contribute to climate change” is a hilarious article idea. There are lots of fun directions it could go from serious discussion of how to analyze climate impact from different animals and industries to the mocking of green washing.
Could it be waning opportunities, falling wages, rising prices, the erosion of democratic institutions, and the proliferation of fear-based marketing to maximise gun sales? No, surely social media is to blame. The US never had social problems, desperation, or poverty before the demonic internet.
“Social problems can’t possibly be exacerbated by socially manipulative systems because I demand that every article discussing anything must be a whole systems view of every possible system contributing to every possible problem.”
That’s what your comment reads like to me. Let’s be a little more nuanced shall we? Maybe the world has many possible inter dependent variables and when someone writes an essay they might focus on just one possible factor.
This article is not even as nuanced as my dismissive comment. This is the closest it comes to nuance:
Criminologists point to a confluence of factors, including the social disruptions caused by COVID‑19, the rise in gun sales early in the pandemic and the uproar following the murder of George Floyd, which, in many cities, led to diminished police activity and further erosion of trust in the police. But in my reporting on the surge, I kept hearing about another accelerant: social media.
Notice that the didn’t mention anything that I mentioned in the above quote or throughout the rest of the article. The article is framed in a way that suggests homicide is primarily the result of interpersonal conflicts within a community its audience probably assumes is predisposed to violence. It only talks about one community, by the way. The premise of the article is that if not for social media, these already violent people would have fewer reasons to bring harm to one another. The article never asks why there would be violence in these communities or any community and it doesn’t investigate why things are different today than they were in the 90s. I wouldn’t have said anything if this was not a trend in American media. The actual cause of these issues can’t be the issue, so we need to scapegoat something else that may as you said be aggravating the issue but is absolutely not the cause of the issue.
So an article talking about one specific factor talks about one specific factor. I’m not sure you really responded to my comment here. Quotes from the article.
Smartphones and social platforms existed long before the homicide spike; they are obviously not its singular cause.
When the pandemic led officials to close civic hubs such as schools, libraries and rec centers for more than a year, people — especially young people — were pushed even further into virtual space.
The current spike in violence isn’t a return to ’90s-era murder rates — it’s something else entirely. In many cities, the violence has been especially concentrated among the young
Yes this article focuses on violence in black communities and I have no doubt there’s a bias at play there both on the authors part and a lot of the audience. But the actual point of the article isn’t incorrect, though it wades into rap music as some building arguments it’s pulling specific examples and making specific arguments about them. To engage with the article in a reasonable way you’d need to actually respond to those points.
The article isn’t trying to scapegoat social media, I didn’t get that impression at all and it seems king outrage manufacturing to be focusing on that interpretation.
To focus exclusively on the incomplete sociological perspective provided by this particular article would be to totally ignore the much more significant and empirically supported factors at play which go unmentioned. This is specifically why I consider this article to be a diversion rather than a reliable critique of a modern issue. If this article were to do any exploration of why the violence was taking place in the first place and how new technology was related to those actual reasons I would consider this an actual analysis. The headline and the framing of the argument in my opinion are extremely misleading considering the reality of these issues. The reason I used the term “scapegoating” is that this article seems to suggest that social media itself is a driver or homicides rather than the context and content of whatever is in these communications which appear on social media that result in violence.
article seems to suggest that social media itself is a driver or homicides rather than the context and content of whatever is in these communications which appear on social media that result in violence.
A wild misrepresentation of the article. It is strange to take “impersonal communications make aggression easier combined with physical isolation has an effect on violence” to be “Twitter is killing people”
To focus exclusively on the incomplete sociological perspective
Every perspective is incomplete. That’s impossible to avoid, just because in this specific case you’ve decided to care about that fact doesn’t make their article wrong.
would be to totally ignore the much more significant and empirically supported factors at play which go unmentione
They don’t even to unmentioned.
OK so you’re really at this point just looking for reasons to talk about rhetoric and complain they didn’t write the entire article about xyz problem that’s easier to discuss since it’s already been sound bitten to oblivion. This isn’t productive. Cheers.
I had a feeling we were talking past one another. No hard feelings. Cheers.
People should really read the article. It feels like I’m reading broken records in these discussions because people take a headline, refuse to read what the article has to say, and then say “but what about x?” When the article has a section literally dedicated to say, how social media can contribute to rising violence in the presence of easy gun access. Like that’s literally a component of the thesis here.
This, the very first sentence of the article describes social media as an accelerant rather than a root cause too
Clickbait headlines 101: if something was confirmed they wouldn’t use hedging language. If social media caused homicides they wouldn’t put “Could Be” in the headline.
!designporn (can’t remember what instance)
Are homicides up in the rest of the developed world among youths? I feel that here in Australia, while we have our own fair share of domestic issues, it doesn’t seem anywhere near as widespread that Aussie youths murders/homicides are higher than say, 10 or 20 years ago.
I don’t have any sources for that, I am writing this up five minutes before I go to sleep, but I think it’s a potential talking point, and if data does corroborate with my hunches on this, maybe it’s not the social media alone and maybe something USA does differently? Maybe the lax gun control?
The article doesn’t claim it’s social media alone. In fact the headline doesn’t either.
Oh for sure, the US is totally cooked when judged by most important metrics
What the heck
Sensational bullshit
Suuure. I believe you THIS time
Really no different from youth culture for, well, forever I guess. It just moved from in person social cues and “turf battles” to online.
It’s the same stuff that made the kids throw down in West Side Story 66 years ago, and that was based on the same stuff that made the kids throw down in Romeo and Juliet 426 years ago.
When keeping it real goes wrong… Wasn’t this covered 20 years ago
Yeah, it is more complex. Hence do not put social media in the title. I read the article. It is superficial and scratches the surface.
I reay do not understand what you are trying to tell me buddy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Have you ever said something to yourself like, “Wow, that clown is lucky I can’t reach through the friggin’ screen and smack his face off?” If the technology keeps on advancing, maybe one day there will be mass homicides all over the place.
