THE STAR TREK GISMO AND THE DANGERS OF SOCIAL MEDIA
In an old episode of Stark Trek Next Generation, a strange game is spreading among the crew of the Starship, Enterprise. It looks like a small, spinning wheel. Everyone who plays the game gets hooked and spreads it to others. Soon the entire crew is walking around zombi-like, dazed, and controlled by the gizmo – except for Wesley Crusher, the doctor’s son, who figures out how to save the crew.
I assumed the Star Trek gismo was a metaphor for the addictiveness of television, which had already taken over the minds of Starship Earth. But the metaphor fits better with technology and social media which has exploded at warp speed in the last twenty-five years and is doing considerably more damage.
Many Star Trek episodes involved some alien force (like the gizmo) taking over the ship and challenging the resourceful crew to once again emerge victorious. Out here in the real world, all sorts of strange new gadgets have entered our lives and were thought to be taking over and leading us down dangerous paths. In the early 19th century, skilled laborers in England, called Luddites, feeling threated by mechanization, broke into textile mills, destroying machines and burning down factories. President John Quincy Adams considered railroads to be “among the most magnificent and stupendous follies of the age.” In the twenties bobbed hair, short skirts and “movies” led young people astray. In the 1957 musical, the Music Man, a song warned that shooting pool corrupts young people, leading them to gambling, drinking, smoking and slang. “Ya got trouble, my friend, right here in River City,” sings the music man.
A litany of trends and gizmos followed: birth control pills, rock & roll (“rocking” around the clock referred to sex.) Elvis’ sneers, sideburns and gyrations, video games, violence in video games, violence in movies and TV, drugs, R-rated movies, and on to the (admittedly indispensable) gizmos that mesmerize us today.
And let us not forget Miss Rachel.
Who?
If you have small children, you know who Ms. Rachel is: the ultimate electronic babysitter. Put your two-year-old in front of the tube and they will stare fascinated as the saccharine Ms. Rachel teaches millions of kids how to enunciate count, dance and sing and frolic. Ms. Rachel, who started with a simple video camera, is now worth an estimate $25 - $50 million. We KNOW how detrimental it is to expose infants and toddlers to such ongoing, mind-bending sound and imagry, but we do it anyway. Overuse of screen time leads to cognitive impairment of young children, and loneliness, increased anxiety and depression in teens.
I’m not passing judgment. My wife and I do not begrudge Ms. Rachel her $50 million. We KNOW we shouldn’t do it, but it works so well…
Around 2010, Psychologist, Jean Twenge, started seeing behavioral “changes that were much more sudden (than in the past) – I had never seen anything like it.” What did she see? Up to 2012, depressive episodes in teens were barely above one percent; these episodes more than quadrupled by 2017. Last week, a Senate committee shined light on the negative consequences for the millions of kids who have not only been mesmerized by the gismos, but intimidated by them, depressed, bullied, embarrassed, stalked by sexual predators, exposed to pornography and killed by illegal drugs purchased online. All of these social pathologies detract from in-person social interaction.
A recent Pew survey found that one in six teens use YouTube and TikTock as “almost constant.” Last October, thirty-three states sued the Meta platforms for purposely creating features on Instagram and Facebook to addict children to its electronic drug. Or to state it in the starkest of terms, social media sucks the life out of developing young people.
We don’t need statistics to know something is wrong. Louisiana Republican Senator, John Kennedy, said Meta platforms have become a “killing field of information” where users “see only one side of an issue.”
“You have convinced over 2 billion people to give up all of their personal information — every bit of it — in exchange for getting to see what their high school friends had for dinner Saturday night,” he said.
What in the world would we do without our screens to entertain, socialize, date, answer questions, teach, babysit, communicate and more recently, supply lonely men affairs with cyber girls who don’t actually exist.
“Ya got trouble, my friend, right here in River City.”
Wesley Crusher, we need you now.
Author’s Note – As I looked-up statistics for a future piece, something strange, interesting, totally unexpected and initially hilarious, jumped out at me from the computer, and is the subject of the next post to be published within a week. The surprise is particularly timely because it deals with the next great scary gizmo. Please join me next week. It’s all free!