I was just thinking the other day that it must suck to have been born after the internet was taken over by a bunch of corporations. To never know what it used to be, how it was welcoming and user-centric. How there were many communities everywhere, where people could talk about everything without faceless corporate moderator oversight.
I think kids today would agree with this, it's just that no one tried to explain it to them. Engagement-driven social media is addictive because it's designed to be so, but once you've understood the difference, there's no going back to it.
Kids today spend their time in Snapchat or whatever, kids before them were into Facebook, those before who had access to forums, and before that there was TV, and radio, and Beatles. It is easy to arrive at the conclusion that things were better back in the days, but in reality there were just less things to do.
Engagement-driven kids are not dumb. They live in a different world, and it's their world now. The way we look at older people who can't figure out computers, they will soon be looking at us.
Engagement-driven web keeps pushing you to see content outside of your network because that's what makes them money. So, yes, it's a substitute for TV in a sense. I used to watch TV in my young teens, but now YouTube replaced it. The problem is that it effectively discourages person-to-person communication that people want and rely upon.
It's as if your phone line was free, but your calls with your friends and family would get interrupted with commercials and news broadcasts every 5 minutes.
I think kids today would agree with this, it's just that no one tried to explain it to them. Engagement-driven social media is addictive because it's designed to be so, but once you've understood the difference, there's no going back to it.