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Howard Lewis's avatar

His broad thesis is correct but hope is not altogether lost. About three weeks ago, I was sitting on the subway in London when a gaggle of schoolchildren entered my carriage. As there was a spare seat next to me, a young Indian boy about 12 years old took it and then asked me directly “how has your day been so far?” I told him it had been good and enquired of his own. He was in very positive spirits and informed me that he had enjoyed a great morning! He was returning from a school outing to Shakespeare’s Globe, upgraded on the site of the original Elizabethan theatre and retaining many features of its illustrious past. We chatted a few more minutes about his experience, what he loved most and, indeed, what he knew of Shakespeare’s plays! This delightful interlude lasted no more than five minutes as his party were changing trains but it was a reminder that kids do not automatically stare at their phones at the first opportunity. They are happily distracted by a sense of physical discovery. The real problem is adult behaviour which has normalised mobile usage and given it absurdly elevated status. One could survive quite comfortably with a dumb phone. The pace of life might change but, as the Indian boy displayed, more observation and curiosity invites us to be more human and reap the benefits.

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Tran Hung Dao's avatar

"The Internet often brings out the worst in humans. Social media is not successful because it forces us to use its platforms against our will; it is successful because “it gives us what we want.” Whether we like it or not, algorithms are “adept at reading the human id and satisfying its desires, however twisted.”"

I think the "brings out the worst" framing is a bit wrong and the rest of your paragraph gets closer to the truth. I think the bigger problem is that we are all horrible (to greater or lesser degrees) underneath but that real-life social shaming has most of us keep it under wraps. Think of how even long ago when culture was different alcoholic, abusive husbands/dads wouldn't do it in public, instead keeping it for the privacy of home. Or consider how, when we're feeling frustrated with our children, we tend to be better parents when it happens in public than when it happens at home.

But now we've all become so atomised, spending so much time alone in our homes, that we've lost some (or all) of that social shaming conformity that, despite the warts, was actually civilizing us.

I think there is some (small) hope that the current (slow) shift from broadcast-to-the-world social media to smaller group-based chats might replicate some of the small scale tribal vibe that humans seem to require. It's not perfect because a big part of reality is that it is harder to carefully cultivate what you present to other people -- even in a group-chat of friends it is easy to elide the messy or ugly things.

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