When does a vice of society get created and the creator not know of its harmful effects? Rarely, it seems.
In actuality, though, as much as I think it's obvious that Instagram was designed specifically for the mindset of teens (and incidentally the countless with Peter Pan syndrome), it's too easy for us to simply blame Facebook. We are also responsible for raising our children to a certain level of emotional maturity and ego awareness, which I believe isn't necessarily a solution but may prevent some from getting sucked into the void of social media. My parent's generation pretty much failed at achieving that with their children, and their children haven't done much better with theirs. Maybe it's an overreliance on institutions which has made us complacent and often careless; as a society we seem to only react to problems rather than be proactive, acting like a deer in the headlights long after the symptoms of the illness have manifested.
I guess the fact that every generation seems to have moral panics about new technology (radio, tv, video games, internet), and every generation seems to complain about the decline of pop culture, led many reasonable people to adopt the heuristic that this is all just the talk of old curmudgeons, and new fads are no worse than old fads.
But what if facebook, instagram, youtube etc. are actually harmful? What if modern pop culture is toxic trash compared to that of the previous decades? What if popular music has, in fact, been getting worse?
It’s because every generation is very good at teaching the platform of comparison. Take just software developers for a second, we are drowning in the Leetcode unrealistic beauty standard. Young men/woman/teens are comparing and narcissistically validating on these social networks. The extra sad thing is some don’t grow out of it and keep doing it into middle age, on the same childish platforms.
In actuality, though, as much as I think it's obvious that Instagram was designed specifically for the mindset of teens (and incidentally the countless with Peter Pan syndrome), it's too easy for us to simply blame Facebook. We are also responsible for raising our children to a certain level of emotional maturity and ego awareness, which I believe isn't necessarily a solution but may prevent some from getting sucked into the void of social media. My parent's generation pretty much failed at achieving that with their children, and their children haven't done much better with theirs. Maybe it's an overreliance on institutions which has made us complacent and often careless; as a society we seem to only react to problems rather than be proactive, acting like a deer in the headlights long after the symptoms of the illness have manifested.