And how does that change anything? Most people can play sports and stay perfectly normal -- there's an increasing number of people who can't say the same about their addiction to technology.
Too many people here are trying to rationalize away the fact that they have an unhealthy addiction to these things. I'm fairly guilty of this as well.
What about legions of crazy sports fans, arenas where the crowds will throw rocks at the players or rush the field, the famously mocked redneck culture in the US that camps out at every sportin' event, crazy fans who flood city streets and riot when their team
wins?
The difference is that sports are now 'old' and taken for granted, so nobody really raises an eyebrow at the stupid stuff in culture that sports is steeped in. And there's a ton of stupid there.
Every time something new comes along and people act dumb with it, that new thing is heralded as the destruction of civilization, relative to some supposed 'higher' state it was just ate and has now declined from. Every single time.
What really happens, is that people's behavior changes, and if there's a negative aspect to it that's new, it's easier to become annoyed at it because one is not already acclimated to it. And that's when the change in behavior is really negative. People tend to react with resistance to ANY significant deviation even if, in the long run, it turns out to be an improvement. That's how small a human being is, and how much a creature of habit it is.
Hell, it's biological. Evolutionary. A change in the environment, a shift in the group behavior of the tribe, represents a threat. Something is wrong. We're all gonna die! Grab a club and run climb the nearest tree!
This thread reminds me of the statistics that show, contrary to
extremely entrenched popular belief,
more people read today than sixty years ago.
What social media, the internet, et all have really done, is merely expose people to the mass of humanity. You're seeing for the first time how many people actually disagree with you, how many people are actually dumb, and how small your opinion is. And it's scary. It's not surprising it's causing shock and denial, and even making people say "it's ruining everything! Society is in decline!" No, for the most part you're just becoming aware of what's out there.
Which isn't to say that many people are not acting stupid in new ways. But rather than assume there's a net increase in stupidity or a general "decline", it's more rational to assume that as with everything, people who were given to be dumb are just being handed new ways in which to express themselves.
If Facebook didn't exist, do people actually think those who act like idiots on it would be smarter people today? That they wouldn't be making the same dumb social choices, just in a smaller and more local pool? Perhaps, an argument could be built about new technologies enabling the great fried stupid to spread further, but that seems specious. In the end, perspectives are merely shifting and people are becoming aware of things that make them uncomfortable.
It was a mother who remarked on that in relation to video games once. It was observed that in the supposed good old days, some never-existed 1950s Beaverville, the kids ran out into the park and played cowboys and indians... and were really violent little shits about it. They mimed getting scalped, stabbing one another, writhed around on the ground in exaggerated death throes, because it was exciting. But people were conditioned to not pay attention to such things. It was in a context assumed to be irrelevant, or at least harmless. Fast forward to Little Jimmy playing a shooter on his game console, and now a parent walks in and sees this realistically rendered battlefield and suddenly freaks out because they see what Little Jimmy was imagining in his head all along, and they're disturbed. So they blame it on a video game and take the game away and go cry to their friend about how those evil video games are corrupting the youth.
"But what about all the 12 year olds on Xbox Live who yell homophobic slurs! Surely that's a decline!"
Where did the homophobic slurs come from? Where did those darling children learn them? ... from video games?
No, don't think so. They're just repeating what they've learned from culture and shit like that far predates the modern era.
Funny enough, seems like it comes back around to parenting. Kids soak up what their parents do and say, not just their peers.
I've oft wondered, how many parents - though they'll deny it to the bitter end - actually make shallow, retarded comments about other people that the kids pick up and repeat. How many mothers talk about how everyone is fat and ugly, then act shocked with their daughters go to school and tease and taunt the chubby girls. How many fathers actually grumble about the 'fairy boys' and gays or foreigners and then step back into the shadows when their sons go out and help contribute to teenagers spewing shit at school or on the Internet.
Any decline in culture starts with people. Not with the tools the people use or have available. And in a lot of cases, there never was truly a 'better' culture to begin with. Only the illusion, the narrative, the story of such. Today, right now, we probably live in as a whole the most enlightened global culture in human history. All that has decayed, on the whole, is a worn social facade over various problems that were already there, and always have been there.
