And, TV was the baby sitter of the last three generations. The technologies aren't 1:1, but letting your kids passively consume video seems is just as popular as ever.
I think there's one huge difference. TV gets boring, fast. The only time it would remain remotely entertaining was Saturday morning. And even that would get boring relatively quickly. And so you end up turning to other things to entertain yourself, or just be bored. Both of which are probably much better for one's development.
YouTube can probably provide entertainment to a child for an arbitrary length of time, on demand, anywhere. So I don't think it's especially comparable to TV. It also seems to trigger behavior that seems borderline addictive in many people - let alone children. Ultimately I expect online media of this sort will probably be treated in a way analogous to something like drugs or gambling, whereas right now we're just living through "Let's put cocaine in everything, because it feels goooooood!" phase.
TV may seem boring compared for those of us who have grown accustomed to consuming video over the internet, but a lot of older people just leave their television on all day. Maybe they're not glued to it the whole time, but it it's a constant din. I guess they're hoping something worthwhile may come on and they'll get a squirt of dopamine.
> Maybe they're not glued to it the whole time, but it it's a constant din. I guess they're hoping something worthwhile may come on and they'll get a squirt of dopamine.
What? Youtube is exactly like television. The only significant difference is that it includes a comment section where people can interact. I don't think that makes it worse.
And it is certainly not analogous to drugs. Trying to compare the stimuli of looking at a screen is entirely different from taking drugs that bypass your senses completely to hijack the neuronal populations which determine the salience and motivation of stimuli.
Stop comparing passive watching through normal senses to drugs. They are not the same. Saying they are the same invites the same kind of highly immoral "war" against "screens" which would necessarily involve violence of the state against people.
Just because an activity has a similar means of interacting doesn't mean it's the same, or even really comparable. Doomscrolling and reading a good book are both just "reading." But of course the consequences and benefits of each are quite different.
YouTube is millions of videos available on demand, instantly, across virtually any topic imaginable - with lots of high quality content available. And it's fueled by an algorithm designed to maximize "engagement", which is of course little more than a euphemism for addiction. That's quite different than TV which has a micro-sized selection of time-slotted, generally poor quality media, generally repeating on intermittent loops, that the user has to manually tune into to.
Youtube Kids disables all comments, and algorithmic recommendations. What they're recommended is 'kids' content maybe based on age. This is roughly the level of demographic targeting for broadcast television.
