alt Hacker News>In the 1860s, Charles Baudelaire bemoaned what we might now call doomscrolling: [...] The poet’s revulsion was widely shared in 19th-century France. Amid rapid increases in circulation, newspapers were depicted as a virus or narcotic responsible for collective neurosis, overexcitement and lowered productivity.
On one hand, one could think "oh, the current social network bashing is just the same doom and gloom reaction to more communication, it will pass".
On the other hand, if you know well the period, the newspapers of the time - which were closer to the tabloids of today, but worse - did a lot to stir hatred of foreigners, of Jews, of Poor, and contributed massively in causing wars, colonialism and pogroms.
Emile Zola published "J'accuse !" in a newspaper, but it was newspapers who stirred rabid antisemitism everywhere.
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I still can't get over the fact that there were Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard bicycle racing newspapers.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_V%C3%A9lo
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Auto
The anti-Dreyfusards won, put the Dreyfusards out of business by starting the Tour de France, and eventually went on to support Vichy.
They had opium, we have fentanyl.
It's not all bad but it's more potent now by far.
> On one hand, one could think "oh, the current social network bashing is just the same doom and gloom reaction to more communication, it will pass".
I never understood this argument.
It's obvious that the pace and scale of "progress" increased dramatically, making things much harder to contain/study and making them much more potent to a much larger group of people
Were was he proved wrong that tabloids made people more stupid? Humans are very adaptable, the fact that we're still here doesn't invalidate his opinion.
The logical progress from these things gave us 24/7 opinion news channels and they definitely make people stupid, much more than paper news.
Finally even if he was wrong, there is no logical way to use it to prove that a tiktok ban is wrong, someone being wrong about something vaguely related in the past doesn't automatically make every future vaguely related opinions wrong for eternity
I’m totally fine saying newspapers, conceptually, are just net negative.
They are a tool that can be used for good or evil but largely inevitably end up in the hands of selfish commercial or political interests.
>oh, the current social network bashing is just the same doom and gloom reaction to more communication, it will pass
One might ask if it wasn't just down hill from the tabloids to social media in our current time. I tend to think that the development from tabloids to radio, television and social media is actually a consistent and logical development. The aim has always been to generate as many readers / listeners / viewers and engagement as possible, and the possibilities have become increasingly effective and efficient thanks to digital information processing. However, the side effects that each new medium introduces are becoming more extreme.
> the newspapers of the time - which were closer to the tabloids of today, but worse - did a lot to stir hatred of foreigners, of Jews, of Poor, and contributed massively in causing wars
Sure, but this is just as true of the earliest printed works in the 16th and 17th centuries. So this really is a fallacious argument unless you also think that we should be dispensing with freedom of the press in general.
Any idea where I could get my hands on such records? Lately my voracious reading appetite has been encouraging me to seek out first hand accounts
And on the grasping hand, one could think they were right - so instead of defending social media by pointing at the past and saying it's "just the same doom and gloom reaction to more communication, it will pass", or - conversely - instead of claiming social media is a new and uniquely bad thing, we could perhaps consider that their observations were valid then, and are even more valid now; that we've been going down the wrong road for the past 100+ years, and social media is merely an incremental worsening of a mistake made so long ago, we can't even conceptualize correcting it now.