"By 2015, it was becoming normal for 12-year-old girls to spend hours each day taking selfies, editing selfies, and posting them for friends, enemies, and strangers to comment on, while also spending hours each day scrolling through photos of other girls and fabulously wealthy female celebrities with (seemingly) vastly superior bodies and lives. The hours girls spent each day on Instagram were taken from sleep, exercise, and time with friends and family. What did we think would happen to them?"
Jon Haidt says there is an epidemic of mental illness among teenage girls and social media has been its major cause.
Andy Boddington mourns the death of BBC local radio as we know it.
Callum Mason on the warning from the Association of School and College Leaders that Department for Education guidance is taking away schools’ ability to make exceptional decisions on pupils’ leave of absence and damaging trust with parents.
"Useful idiots on the right were tricked into thinking that the risk of Twitter mismanagement was 'woke shadowbanning,' whereby the things you said wouldn't reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter's deep state didn't like your opinions. The real risk, of course, is that the things you say won't reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter can make more money by enshittifying their feeds and charging you ransom for the privilege to be included in them." Cory Doctorow explains 'enshittification' - the process by which commerce kills social media platforms.
Lizzie Dearden reports that armchair sleuths were a threat to the police investigation of the disappearance of Nicola Bulley,
The Monks Wood Wilderness experiment is now 60 years old.
Richard K. Broughton says that, as a rewilding study before the term existed, it shows how allowing land to naturally regenerate can expand native woodland and help tackle climate change and biodiversity loss.
The Doctorow piece on the decline of social media platforms is fascinating, but I found it rather difficult to read. I wonder if there is a translation into standard English anywhere? I found the complexities of tech-speak, American slang, youth culture references and the like really difficult to navigate. Nevertheless, worth the effort - and I was interested to see that someone else thinks that their Tweets aren't getting through to the desired audience anymore.
ReplyDeleteFurther to Unknown's post, I actually found Doctorow's pull out quote hard to understand so I think I'll pass on her analysis of Twitter trends. I would like to add, however, that a few years ago The Economist ran an article on the decline of Facebook (anyone remember Facebook?). This noted that take up had started to decline amongst teen and pre-teen age groups. The increasing politicisation of Facebook was becoming a problem - young people found the crazed conspiracy theory wackjob ramblings of their aunts and uncles to be a major turn off. The angry, outraged tone taken by many to attract attention works to generate cheap clicks amongst a certain constituency but may repel in equal measure after a while.
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