My generation also grew up glued to a screen. We go from One two Three to dallas and of Bill Cosby Show to Feeling of living. We became movie buffs watching cinema club and This movie theater is so big. We became modern with The Golden Age and The Cristal ball. We entered Europe contaminated by Anglo-Saxon pop culture, segregated into seven urban tribes, dreaming of living in London, Amsterdam and New York. Courtships became relationships, sandwiches became pizza. All Saints’ night became Halloween.
But there was no cathodic gap. The screen was a collective ritual; It was seen with the family and, when they arrived at class, both teachers and students had seen the same thing the night before. I remember the pool being emptied at six in the afternoon the summer they opened V: Extraterrestrial invasion. And on Sunday I saw Singing under the rain for the first time, because the next day the entire school went out to recess reciting phrases by the hilarious Lina Lamont. See Lost with the cell phone in hand to debate theories of space-time seemed similar, but it was not. It wasn’t going down to the patio with your classmates to do something together, but rather sitting on the couch to comment on Twitter with thousands of strangers at the same time.
Now everyone ends up watching the same series, but never at the same time. The culture of spoiler It has destroyed even the collective pleasure of commenting. The social network is not a shared pleasure, it is a global individualized addiction. An addiction that separates you from your family, your neighbors, your classmates and your teachers and connects you with a synthetic community, which does not exist outside the platform, designed with the objective of extracting an economic benefit from your attention. The leaked Facebook documents show that they were aware of the damage that this synthetic community causes among adolescents. But, as leaker Frances Haugen said, his greed is stronger than her concern.
They say that it is difficult to prove that something harms the mental health of a group. Is not true. Before attorneys general from 41 states sued Meta, Seattle public schools filed a class-action lawsuit against TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat, with a very smart strategy. They argued that the deterioration in students’ mental health and the increase in behavioral disorders, including anxiety, depression, eating disorders and cyberbullying, have complicated educational work so much that they have been forced to invest in mental health professionals, plans specific study programs to protect children and specific training for teaching staff. In other words: tech companies exploit children and delegate the externalities to their true community.
The crisis exists and we can face it. To do this, we need strong public education and health, capable of detecting, confronting and correcting its effects. We need sensitive media, capable of abandoning opportunism and reporting sensibly. We need strong institutions capable of empowering families in their work. We need to live up to it and show that a community is not TikTok users who comment on dances and leave hearts. It’s the one who looks for you when you go to the bottom and the one who takes you to the doctor when you stop eating.
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#Instagram #TikTok #television