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Social media addiction affecting boomers, BBC hears (www.bbc.co.uk)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 20 points 1 month ago (12 children)

You and me are pretty similar ages.

I do have some Gen X friends who I think are not doing much better.

I wonder it being a “digital native” gives some level of defense against this kind of stuff versus people who were born when information was newspapers, radio, and the TV news one hour out of the day.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Digital natives know to be more skeptical. These people lack basic literacy and don't understand that people can lie on the internet. In fact, it's mostly lies, always has been.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    Agreed. They also in many cases remember when the Internet "was good." When every single website, tool, or product wasn't tracking every microinteraction, when your email spam was Re: Re: Re: Re: forwards, when social media was a microcosm of what it is today , and when bots didn't make up like more than half the user traffic. So the shit purpose built to engage kids and boomers falls flat.

    And to your point about lying on the Internet, they forget (or flatly refuse to acknowledge) that like a corporation or government can and have easily create user accounts that look like normal people to convince people of things. Just because the name "John Goodbrown" sounds like a down to earth American and his picture is of him and his truck and cowboy boots doesn't mean it's not one of thousands of bot accounts created specifically by the FSB to cause chaos and stir opinion.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago*

    I'm gen x, and I'm about as close to a digital native as possible, been around computers since 1981 and ever since.

    My advantage in this allows me to have conversations online and with actual digital natives, so I think you're right that being around the tech and using it yields a cultural advantage.

    Most people my age (over 50) are hopelessly just sucked into any little app or service with zero thought about repercussions. And they are now the absolute worst to deal with because they have a strong sense of entitlement on top of the ignorance. It's embarrassing.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Yeah, have family who 80% of their retired day is sitting in the lazy boy with an iPad locked on Facebook in one hand and cable news on the tv. We’re in Canada, but it’s a lot of CNN.

    And it’s not just my family, lot of friends have the same.

    It’s a Skinner box. We need to ban these companies, but the government doesn’t have the spine to ban the obvious foreign interference.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Part of the problem here is that too many people live to work, instead of the other way around. Once they retire, they have no idea what to do with themselves and take the least-effort path to occupy their time. Which makes them perfect targets for the addictive aspects of social media.

    Maybe what we need to do is flood Facebook and Instagram and all the rest with material about the rewards of volunteering for charity.

    (Sometimes I'm almost thankful my mother is a technophobe.)

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    GenX here - certainly in my friendship circle we're doing better because we grew through both the start of home computing and the beginning of the home internet etc... we remember what it was like before the social media and 10 second videos crap and are generally using the current tech without it

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    I hope it's not an aging issue that comes for us all. Digital native or not.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago

    I’m 50, and on my computer an awful lot. I use Reddit/Lemmy/X/Mastodon but that is about it social media wise. No Facebook/Insta/Tiktok/etc. I also haven’t had cable/satellite TV in 25+ years, so perhaps not typical for someone my age.

    My dad is almost 80 and has zero interest in social media/tv. He’ll watch the occasional YouTube video about something sciencey or about whatever project he’s working on, and might catch a movie on my plex server or a DVD from his small collection once a month or two.

    I do see others my age (or his) glued to social media, but from my very limited data set I don’t think it’s some age related brain rot that will get us all.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Gen X here. Newspapers, radio and TV news is what made me sceptical about stuff in the first place. Moving to the internet and forums where that stuff was being peddled by random amateurs didn't make me less sceptical, that's for sure.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    I think this is an important comment.

    I also was becoming skeptical of what was and what wasn’t being reported through those channels right about the time that I got access to the Internet. That skepticism towards what we now call “legacy media” did prime me to be way more open to hearing people on the Internet claiming to know “what’s really going on”. Not proud to say it, but I did have a brief season where I was tuned in to what Alex Jones was saying.

    Had smartphones been a thing then? Maybe I would have turned out like the very folks this thread is talking about.

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