Very often when I discuss it, someone argues along the lines of "yes, it looks different, and maybe even weird at first glance, but everything is indeed fine, and look how access to all that content even makes them more competent than older generations in many ways".
And I'm always asking myself what is wrong with me that all that completely does not reflect my practical experiences at all.
I dunno, hard to say, if our experiences don’t match maybe we’re just in different environments. No particular reason to assume mine is the ground truth of course.
One possible skew could be: often it is professors who complain about this stuff, but the type of person who goes on to be a professor tends to be pretty clever and surround themselves with clever friends. So if you are a professor or a highly skilled programmer or something, keep in mind that you probably have a rosy picture of the average competence of the past.
I'm not clever, no. A few of my friends are, but I never was. I would call myself a skilled software developer, yes. And other, more skilled ones, would maybe disagree. :) But all that says nothing about real life cleverness.
I can clearly see that there are unfortunate patterns, even back then when I was young, and it just got worse and worse. Which is no surprise imho. Of course it propagates. If the parents are already 'social media' addicts, and their friends, and the teachers as well, what shall happen with their children. The issues just 'normalize' - that's what we see, but it doesn't _solve_ them.
The thing is, our societies love to chatter about all kinds of issues and troubles, as long as they are somewhere else or at least the bad guys are far enough away. Something not binding. But as soon as an inconvenient discussion about themselves start, about what they do wrong and what issues we get by them, it turns into silence. So we also do not discuss much about more and more incompetent social media addicts. Since the majority is addicted, and the ground for public discussions is social media only nowadays, who should even start this discussion - and where...
And I'm always asking myself what is wrong with me that all that completely does not reflect my practical experiences at all.