Weren't people saying the same thing about MTV a generation ago?
I remember the internet and social media used to be so much better than TV. TV was controlled by big corporations who wanted to brainwash everyone. 1/3 of the time was ads that only stupefied you, and the rest were shows that did the same. They would do anything for ratings-- CNN was a bastion of treachery dividing the country by presenting politics as sports for the sake of viewership. People were glad Crossfire got canceled (now all of CNN is essentially Crossfire).
But social media? What a tool for free speech and change! It was the breath of fresh air that fought away big corporations, that gave us the Arab Spring, that let anyone with something to say become famous and have a voice and an audience, for free! It provided a platform for critical thinking instead of passive consumption! This data "dance" was the 8th wonder of the world and news articles were being written about how clever Obama's campaign had been to use analytics and "research" to get the edge on the campaign.
I'm not saying any one view is right and the other wrong but something I've noticed about Americans is that they are a very scared people and are very quick at painting things black or white (: The world is not so scary, and most things lie somewhere on a grayscale.
This can be seen a lot and it seems quite like the Christian narrative has deep roots in some parts of the world even among non-believers. The idea that everybody is looking at the world through a good-vs-evil lens explains a lot. Mythology is a powerful force, it can't just be dumped, it needs updating.
But without it, it is difficult to say that damage did or didn't happen.
You could certainly do a study of some metric and X's effect on it and find a few that were affected negatively, call that 'damage', and write blog posts about it. X would continue to thrive, adults would continue to complain about it, and the next generation would find a new X to use, abuse, and irritate their parents.
Philosophically, 'damage' is more like 'change' and there are a lot of people who like complaining about it because they have forgotten or misremembered what it was like to be young and have limited capacity to empathize with a different generation. If there are things about the change which are right and wrong, they probably aren't the ones being discussed or even understood until enough time has passed to see the change with the perspective of time and by then whatever problems have likely resolved themselves anyway.
Over time I have grown increasingly irritated by the talk about things being "bad for you". At this point if you don't have a decades long history of studies holding up to meta-analysis backed up by a philosophy of life and what is good and bad for it, I really think what is being said is nonsense. I'll believe hyper-specific cause-and-effect data, but I just don't care about the latest opinion about if something is bad for me.
Until you can show me a study proving that listening to that sort of constant what-I-call-nonsense leads to quantifiable improvements I can be convinced to care about, I'd rather people spend their energy doing something other than complaining about change and/or the status quo. It holds the same status, in me, as celebrity gossip.
>"The MTV Generation," Lazin said, directly addresses the pros and cons of MTV, which has been criticized for everything from placing too much emphasis on image to promoting short attention spans and the need for constant entertainment in its audience.
http://articles.latimes.com/1991-11-10/news/tv-1845_1_mtv-ge...
That sounds EXACTLY like a criticism you'd hear about facebook. s/MTV/Facebook/ and you couldn't tell if that was written in 1991 or 2018.
>"They have consciously destroyed a generation attention span using psychological tricks"
MTV at the height of music videos in 1980s and 1990s was never accused of using "psychological tricks."