A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
Socrates bemoaned those young'ns who had the audacity to read their Homer, instead of memorizing it.
I hope we can all agree that media, like drugs, exists on a spectrum of less harmful (books / weed) to very harmful (torture porn / bath salts). As time passes and more things are added to our lists we should no longer generalize and say everything in our once very small category is all good or all bad.
As always the issue is loneliness. This has been proven since the 1970's with the rat park experiment.
Meanwhile, parents are on all of these believing every conspiracy theory they see.
Social media in general and TikTok specifically have had major impacts to both our attention span as well as things like anxiety disorders.
Everything else in this list from reading to videogames is a different way to absorb a story, but social media isn't built for that. Its designed on FOMO, and the idea that you have to keep posting and engaging or you'll disappear. The algorithms are also toxic and designed like a gambling addiction. Books don't do that, even TV can't really do that. Videogames can, but not all are. Social media absolutely is, though. Everytime.
Wholey depends on the content of said delivery platforms. Tik-tok content does tend to lean towards mindless entertainment. If it was a bunch of learning or information content as the majority, people would have less of stink about it.
Too much of anything is bad obviously.
That's the thing though there's loads of that on there and some really intelligent debate, it's not as fun to write a story about though and the media companies certainly aren't going to advertise their competitors like that.
When I was a kid my parents said you shouldn't belive anything on the internet, all they'd seen is exaggerated media stories about terrible things and 'anyone can put anything up' type comments - obviously now they understand it more they know what can and can't be trusted online
It's ironic how that article mentiones reading as a good think children should do but when children books written in second person were first published people were using the exact same arguments against them
I feel like the actual danger is too much of a single kind of stimulation. So if you ONLY sit around and read books, literally never go outside, never take a walk, never go out with friends, stop working... Is your contention that people were wrong to warn against doing that?
Now, have you seen how some people consume TikTok? They will literally do almost precisely what I've described above. Just sit and stare and scroll for hours. Neglect other life activities.
If you scroll TT for an hour per day, you're never going to experience negative effects from it. If you scroll it for 14 hours a day, you will probably become a vegetable. Find a happy medium (for me it's 0 hours per day but everyone is different), eat, go outside sometimes, spend time with real life people, go to work or school, etc.
Argumentum ad antiquitum. Shame on you.
Full circle with the book banning.