The US House of Representatives is preparing to vote this week on legislation to force TikTok ownership to change. TikTok has direct ties to the CCP, China’s communist ruling party. For several years, many technology experts and US lawmakers have made allegations that China is using this platform to feed propaganda to American young people. Reports are this current bill being considered doesn’t ban TikTok in America, but will force TikTok to cut ties to the CCP. Here’s a Time article explaining the proposed bill: What to Know About the Bill That Could Get TikTok Banned in the U.S.
TikTok has recently waged a massive advertising campaign to convince Americans that TikTok is as American as apple pie and a force for good in the world. I’ve seen TikTok ads of a nun talking about how she can reach people with her Christian message, a ranching couple, who claim TikTok allows them to share their food production stories, and others. These ads are trying to sell TikTok as a positive force in American culture. Of course, there are many prominent right-wing influencers, who rant about TikTok and yet make their living scouring TikTok for the craziest liberal videos, to incite their right-wing followers. They rely on TikTok for their bread and butter, to create right-wing Outrage Theater content.
I don’t use TikTok.
The potential for insidious hostile foreign efforts to poison our kids’ minds certainly alarms many Americans, but will a new law forcing TikTok to be sold, in an effort to sever the CCP’s control, really save our kids’ minds? I don’t have any strong opinion about this legislation, other than I don’t think TikTok or hostile foreign propaganda is the real threat to the minds of American young people. We have chosen to allow our popular culture to become a wasteland. It’s easy to blame evil Marxists, but for all the alarm and outrage, most people, right-wingers included, go with the flow – especially when it comes to social media, entertainment, and tech gadgets.
Over the weekend I listened to an audiobook of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451. The story is set in an America in the future, where people’s lives are consumed by non-stop entertainment and a life filled by technological distractions. This constant noise and distraction have rendered people unable to concentrate and engage in critical thinking or have any meaningful conversations. Personal relationships have devolved to shallow and hollow interactions. People spend their days just reacting to technological and pharmaceutical stimulation.
The main character, Guy Montag, is a fireman and his wife Mildred lives her life staring at her “parlor walls,” where they have wall-sized TV screens coving three walls and her big dream is get a parlor wall for the fourth wall. They paid for some adapter that “personalizes” the broadcasts, with the broadcasters calling out to “Mrs. Montag” constantly. Mildred considers the characters on the screens to be her family. When she’s not in her parlor, she stuffs “seashell radios” in her ears that block out the real-world noises.
Without giving away the entire plot, Montag being a fireman no longer means putting out fires, but instead the firemen set fire to books, which are banned, and to the homes of people who break the rules.
Bradbury’s 1953 story envisioned wall-sized TV screens, which exist today and we have air pods to stuff in our ears, but he didn’t envision small cell-phone screens that keep many people and kids trapped for most of their waking hours today. In recent years there have been numerous studies that detail how damaging the social media and online scrolling/clicking behavior is to our attention spans. This article, Your attention span is shrinking, but you can grow it back, reports:
“Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s professor in the Department of Infomatics at University of California, Irvine, wrote a book about the disappearing attention span. Her just-released “Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity” says that nearly 20 years ago, people averaged 2.5 minutes of focused attention when they were working online or doing something involving screens, before switching to a different screen. By 2012, that time span had shrunk to 75 seconds. And by 2021, it had compacted to a measly 47 seconds.”
I spend too much time online and have been working to wean myself away from some of the screen time. All that scrolling hasn’t been good for my attention span and most of my online time isn’t productive in any way, shape or form. While many people take pride in their ability to “multi-task” and flit between various tasks online and in real life, all at the same time, I’ve found that my brain needs less distractions for better performance of most tasks. My attention span, after being online years, first with a PC, then also using a cell phone, isn’t what it used to be, where I could read many hours at a time. I’ve been carving out more quiet time now, where there’s no technological distractions.
Millions of kids and young adults only know this online life and fixating on screens. For years, studies have come out highlighting all the negative effects of smart phones on personal communication and social skills and for years other experts counter and point out all the marvelous good electronic devices bring to people’s lives. From personal experience, I do believe screen time can easily become both a huge time waster for me and has decreased my attention span. I also notice that many people hide behind their smart phones rather than make eye contact or speak in public. And I’ve also been in social situations where I felt totally alone, because other people around me were constantly looking at their phones. These behaviors before the digital age would have been considered extremely rude. There’s also something disconcerting to see young people sitting together with none of them speaking to each other, as each one stares at his/her cell phone.
How all of this came to mind listening to Fahrenheit 451 was I kept thinking it probably wasn’t necessary to ban books or burn them, because once the people are hooked on technological stimulation constantly, books become like obsolete junk, that few people even pay attention to. A character like Mildred Montag, who isn’t content with 3 wall-sized TV screens chattering constantly and dreams of a fourth “parlor wall,” isn’t ever going to curl up in a quiet corner with a book – even if books were legal.
The only Bradbury work I recall reading was Dandelion Wine, when I was a kid and sci-fi/dystopian was never one of my favorite genres, but I recommend this novel. It will make you think. Bradbury was a short-story writer, before writing novels, so Fahrenheit 451 is a quick read, being a little over 200 pages. I listened to the audiobook version on Hoopla and it was under 6 hours.
There’s a reason shorter and shorter social media formats, like TikTok, are replacing longer forms – like outdated blogs. People want to scroll by quickly. It’s unlikely they’re going to read a news article that’s several paragraphs long, so them sitting down to read books that are hundreds of pages is unlikely. Sure, there are still many bookworms around, but I’d bet there are fewer among younger people, who only know the digital age. Perhaps, we think in outdated terms about totalitarian control, when often people voluntarily give away their free will, preferring to be swept along with the fads and cool, shiny gadgets advertisers assure will make their lives better, in every way. Too many people rush to adopt all the weird new words, phrases, hashtags that partisans and activists amplify. They also rush to plaster emojis behind their username on social media to express their solidarity with causes most know nothing about.
For all the noise many people make about their “freedoms,” it often seems to me that most people allow themselves to be held captive by bright, shiny tech objects and crave more and more and more of them, especially if everyone they know has them. If one social media platform disappears or changes, assuredly another one, that’s just as bad or worse, will fill the void – and millions upon millions of Americans will rush to download the app. The other uncomfortable truth when it comes to protecting our children online, for many reasons, from being clueless on technology to not seeing any harm, most parents don’t carefully monitor their kids online activity. A new law or banning TikTok can’t fix that.
Note 3/12/2024: Here’s a Pew Research link from November 15, 2023, More Americans are getting news on TikTok, bucking the trend seen on most other social media sites , which states about a third of US adults under 30 are now getting their news on TikTok. TikTok usage is growing in the US.
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