COVID, global warming, conspiracy theorists, natural disasters, financial collapses — and a sham social media ban. It’s no wonder young Australians are glum.
Modern communication technologies have made all information much easier to access and circulate, globally and instantly. Jorge Franganillo, Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-2.0.
COVID, global warming, conspiracy theorists, natural disasters, financial collapses — and a sham social media ban. It’s no wonder young Australians are glum.
Why are we so angry? The easy, lazy and entirely wrong explanation is that our technologies are to blame: the Internet, smartphones, social media, artificial intelligence, and so on.
That’s the argument behind Australia’s doomed social media ban for young people, which is inspired by the deceptive claims and cherry-picked statistics peddled by pop-psychology influencers like Jonathan Haidt in his roundly debunked book The Anxious Generation, and driven by a moral panic that was cynically manufactured by the Murdoch media.
