No, it’s not normal that we’re watching World War III outfit inspo on Instagram
It is 10 p.m. and I open Instagram just before bedtime (terrible idea, I know, but we move). In the space of a few minutes, here is what I see: an influencer of AI eating the lava of a bowl, the Second World War “Tentifit Inspo” (mainly camouflage), missiles flying in the sky while someone plays Saxophone in Lebanon, news on syringe attacks in a festival, “10 panels of the hand of someone, the girls. XCX and “Check the notes * an AI gorilla with cocaine in a forest. And then, I close my eyes and settle down to sleep.
We all knew that the end of time would ultimately come. Global warming documentary An embarrassing truthWho presented all the ways whose climate disaster was imminent, is now almost 20 years old. The rise of artificial intelligence – which is wreaking havoc on both the environment and our critical thinking skills – has no signs of slowdown. The Second World War probably never seemed so possible. And yet, despite all this, despite the existing pre-couing signs as long as they have done, none of us could have predicted that the apocalyptic vibrations of the 2020s would manifest themselves in such a way that we watched the soldiers dance on Ellie Gould on Instagram before seeing a roller board Corgi in China.
It is not only Instagram who feels particularly dystopian at the moment – and by “dystopian”, I mean the live broadcast of major global disasters juxtaposed against the videos “what I eat in one day”. Such extremes have always occurred in the world, and it is not as if violence and daily ordinance had not existed side by side so far. But the pure inlasia of the extremes that we are witnessing via our phones feels not only unprecedented, but also completely standardized. In the space of a few seconds, I could meet an incredibly overwhelming image of a hungry child in a country torn apart by the war alongside certain Tumblr style photos of Kate Moss and Pete Doherty in the 2000s, quickly followed by someone dancing to Michael Jackson in the middle of a Hurricane of category 5.
It is quite difficult to measure what this is all about our brain because, well, what do we measure exactly? Our desensitization of brutality? Our levels of collective anxiety? One thing that scientists and psychologists can Agree on is that social media has the propensity to contribute to bad mental health More generally, especially among young people. A recent study found that adolescents who were “dependent” of social media were almost double the risk of suicidal behavior. Another study have found that social media could be as harmful to children as smoking or game. Research also suggests This media coverage of traumatic events can affect the mental health of viewers. A study Even found that those who looked at the repeated information coverage of terrorist attacks had signs of SSPT a few years later. And so, although we cannot say exactly what the social brain does exactly what is present in our brain, it cannot be good, isn’t it?
