I tend to agree that something weird is going on here, just an anecdote: in Hungary the Orbán government recently banned phones in schools and I was confused by the left-liberal scene’s reaction to this. Usually, just by routine, they oppose the government on any issue but there was a quiet, but sensible excitement around this rapid and blanket move to ban phones.
Also I’d love to read more about your take on the uncertainties around the ‘porn addiction’ thesis. Could you direct me to some other sources you’ve found convincing or interesting regarding this? Many thanks!
I think the fact that countries and governments usually looked upon as progressive from East (Central) Europe were the ones who started introducing phone-bans in schools (and not Central Asian -istans) contributed to this sense of excitement (personally I didn't see that, quite the opposite, but I think that was due to the way it was introduced and less about the ban itself).
I'm not sure that tech-sceptics (moral panickers?) are necessarily saying that tech is the singular reason behind certain concerning developments but that they form a part of it.
Personally, I'm utterly terrified of the time when our collective political imagination gets to the point that we really think that unfiltered access to porn and social media apps is what constitutes freedom.
This is like writing an article about the moral panic around cigarettes or heroin addiction or water pollution. You don’t even try to engage with the arguments about why porn addiction might be bad, or why we might be “atomized” but instead dismiss it as a “right wing” panic even though one of the results of our digitized society has been to make society swing far to the right politically. Nor did you name a single positive effect of the mass expirement of transitioning how we write, think, talk to one another, learn, etc in such a short amount of time, you just dismissed people who push back on it as somehow contributing to bigotry. Out of all of the thought pieces I have ever seen this is one of the least thoughtful. Congrats
> social scientific research about the “loneliness epidemic” is in fact highly contested, as are linkages of depression and poor mental health to phones and social media.
THANK YOU
Thanks for this!
I tend to agree that something weird is going on here, just an anecdote: in Hungary the Orbán government recently banned phones in schools and I was confused by the left-liberal scene’s reaction to this. Usually, just by routine, they oppose the government on any issue but there was a quiet, but sensible excitement around this rapid and blanket move to ban phones.
Also I’d love to read more about your take on the uncertainties around the ‘porn addiction’ thesis. Could you direct me to some other sources you’ve found convincing or interesting regarding this? Many thanks!
I am going to start a online petiton to unban smartphones in all schools in Hungary
I think the fact that countries and governments usually looked upon as progressive from East (Central) Europe were the ones who started introducing phone-bans in schools (and not Central Asian -istans) contributed to this sense of excitement (personally I didn't see that, quite the opposite, but I think that was due to the way it was introduced and less about the ban itself).
I'm not sure that tech-sceptics (moral panickers?) are necessarily saying that tech is the singular reason behind certain concerning developments but that they form a part of it.
Personally, I'm utterly terrified of the time when our collective political imagination gets to the point that we really think that unfiltered access to porn and social media apps is what constitutes freedom.
This is like writing an article about the moral panic around cigarettes or heroin addiction or water pollution. You don’t even try to engage with the arguments about why porn addiction might be bad, or why we might be “atomized” but instead dismiss it as a “right wing” panic even though one of the results of our digitized society has been to make society swing far to the right politically. Nor did you name a single positive effect of the mass expirement of transitioning how we write, think, talk to one another, learn, etc in such a short amount of time, you just dismissed people who push back on it as somehow contributing to bigotry. Out of all of the thought pieces I have ever seen this is one of the least thoughtful. Congrats
> social scientific research about the “loneliness epidemic” is in fact highly contested, as are linkages of depression and poor mental health to phones and social media.
I wish there was a citation for this claim. :/