You Always Pay For It

A very bright young fellow I'm privileged to know, recently put up a post about how aggravated he gets with the anti tech 'social media is bad for you get out in the world and have a real conversation' attitude that seems very prevalent among certain people... and that, ironically, we seem to encounter most on social media.

I responded with a lot of old people 'tut tut tut' nonsense about how visual entertainment like TV, movies, and video games (plus Youtube videos, etc) really ARE bad for you, in that they destroy active imagination and ruin the attention span, and that, in general, social media and living in a virtual world inhibit the development of real social skills, and don't help people learn how to deal with real world problems.

Now, these things are true.

But it's probably important to remember, also, that individuals from pre-literate cultures generally had much better eyesight and long term memory than people who know how to read and write do.

New technologies change how we live, how we think, how we behave, how we interact with others. It's not always bad or good. You have to judge what you're losing and what you're gaining and decide if the price you're paying is acceptable in exchange for what it's buying you. And you have to accept that a lot of times, YOU DON'T KNOW.

We know now that TV and movies and video games do indeed cause the atrophy of the active imagination and the attention span (to an extent - binge watching TV shows and playing immersive video games until hunger pangs drive you up out of the basement in search of a sandwich would seem to contradict that last). But the fact that watching movies isn't as healthy for my active imagination as reading a book doesn't mean I'd give up the oeuvre of Frank Capra, or THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALENCE, or ROBOCOP, or THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI: ACROSS THE 8th DIMENSION, for anything you could offer me.

Social media can be wonderful. It can also be bad for you. It's neither all good nor all bad, like nearly everything in the world, it's a mixture, and it depends on how it is used. Used to facilitate real world friendships, I think it's great. Used to substitute for real world interactions, I think it's dangerous and unhealthy.

And I could be wrong.

Reading has no doubt weakened my eyes and my capacity to memorize things by rote, but I wouldn't give up CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY or RED DRAGON or EMERALD EYES or LORD OF LIGHT or BLOOD GAMES or "A Book Burns In Citrusville" or the Englehart DETECTIVE issues or "The Cold Equations" or PROMETHEA or any of those other wonderful things I've read in my lifetime for anything.

Not for anything.

So maybe it's bad for you or maybe it's just something new that is changing the world in ways that we don't yet fully understand and we should just be quiet and let people do what they want to as long as it isn't hurting us.

Yeah.

Seems legit.