The question I was responding to was "Is a life of mindless clicking ever going to be as good as a real one, spent in the company of real people who aren’t endlessly distracted?". And the answer is obviously yes, because some people are shit, and some virtual content is great.
> It's: how does it affect mental health? One way of looking at it is: are we so social we need contact with a physical human being for certain aspects of our well being?
No I don't think that's a good way to look at it. By that metric anything that is not socializing with other physical human beings is equally bad. Reading a book is bad. Eating is bad. Showering is bad. The way you've phrased this question, you've assumed that digital content is so pervasive that you don't get enough physically present socializing, which isn't necessarily true to evaluate the question "does it affect our mental health?". If we're open to extreme cases, everything affects mental health. The question you really want to be asking is "does it materially affect most peoples' mental heath?". Personally, I think the answer is no not really. Obviously it becomes a vice for some.
> The question you really want to be asking is "does it materially affect most peoples' mental heath?". Personally, I think the answer is no not really. Obviously it becomes a vice for some.
The real question is how would you know if it did?
Addiction thinking sounds a lot like self reflection too: “I’m not addicted, I just like it very much. I can stop at any time I want, I just don’t want to”.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting everyone who likes something is addicted. It is just the means of finding that out is pretty tricky, especially for hyper-normal stimulus like processed food, porn, cocaine or some bits of the internet.
We can’t infer our ways out of self-deception, if we could it wouldn’t be self-deception.
Hence the requirement of proper objective tooling to measure such effects on (mental) health.
> It's: how does it affect mental health? One way of looking at it is: are we so social we need contact with a physical human being for certain aspects of our well being?
No I don't think that's a good way to look at it. By that metric anything that is not socializing with other physical human beings is equally bad. Reading a book is bad. Eating is bad. Showering is bad. The way you've phrased this question, you've assumed that digital content is so pervasive that you don't get enough physically present socializing, which isn't necessarily true to evaluate the question "does it affect our mental health?". If we're open to extreme cases, everything affects mental health. The question you really want to be asking is "does it materially affect most peoples' mental heath?". Personally, I think the answer is no not really. Obviously it becomes a vice for some.