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When we consider how much time young people spend on social media, negative news content may have a bad impact. And those already psychologically vulnerable may be particularly susceptible to the ill effects of a constant stream of negative news. This is because stress responses are often accentuated in those already suffering from symptoms of anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses.
So, it is encouraging to see some technology companies proactively showing concern about their users' mental health. For example, Twitter is teaming up with the youth mental health organisation ReachOut to provide resources to help young people learn about the possible negative impacts of social media, so they won't be overly consumed by it and know how to cope if they are.
This is a good start – Twitter is making more information available. But it can do more, and Twitter shouldn't be the only one doing it.
Yes, I'm certain this is exactly what is needed. Much better idea than shutting your Twitter app.
Source: The Conversation
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 02 2017, @09:25PM (4 children)
Obligatory, if you haven't tried this, you should:
http://chartsme.com/ [chartsme.com]
Still debatable whether nature or nurture is predominant in determining these things, but I think it tracks with the urban/rural divide: lots more disgusting stuff to encounter in a city.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday June 03 2017, @06:05AM (3 children)
Really? Cities are more disgusting? I think they're just different. I know lots of city folk who can't stand the smell of livestock, for example, and walk around a dairy farm looking like they're about to vomit. I've come upon lots of dead animals walking in the woods... Not so many in cities. True, in run-down or poorly maintained city locations, you get rats, roaches, etc. But plenty of "disgusting" bugs out in the country too. More rotting trash smells around the city, though.
Anyhow most of the scenarios in your link don't seem well-correlated with the urban/rural divide.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 03 2017, @11:51AM (2 children)
Short on time now, but the things that stuck with me from the survey involved dead human bodies...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday June 03 2017, @04:17PM (1 child)
Again, I'm not sure how dead bodies are more "urban." I've spent a lot of time living in cities and never randomly encountered a dead body.
Also, I'm not sure what patterns of disgust really tell us other than culture. Psychological studies have shown a lot of disgust is determined by culture, which is why children seem to have so little of it (they'll happily pick up all sorts of things adults might be revolted by). Accouns of feral children seem to show thet develop very little disgust reflexes. So it appears conservatives are likely taught more or stronger signals of disgust than liberals. The specific things that disgust conservatives (gay sex, etc.) are likely substantially learned behaviors.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 04 2017, @07:42PM
When I'm thinking of "rural" I'm not thinking of out in the deep countryside with the chicken factories and slaughter houses, I'm thinking more of Crockett, TX or Starke, FL - people may live "out in the country" and even have jobs in the small towns, but they're not really living an animal husbandry type lifestyle, because, really, not very many people do that anymore, anywhere.
Maybe I just had bad luck in Miami and Manhattan, but the cook at a Chinese restaurant I used to eat at was blown up by a copy-cat terror bomb just after the Atlanta Olympics bombing. I didn't see the body, but I drove by the bus bench with the police tape on it the morning it happened. Then their was my neighbor who murdered his uncle in the front yard, again - I didn't witness the body, but I saw evidence later when walking the neighborhood, same place I had walked days before the murder. The local news station there would occasionally show dead bodies from helicopter footage covering big traffic crash stories, always at places that would be familiar to anyone who lived in the city. The beach condos were filled with really old retirees, you'd see gurneys being loaded into ambulances in no particular hurry then drive away with lights off. Miami street people were generally pretty healthy, but lots of the ones you'd see in Manhattan in the 1980s were near death, and plenty of places in Manhattan were open air latrines at that time. I never saw anything like that when living in smaller towns / rural areas - not that it didn't happen at the same rate per-capita, just that it was kept out of sight better, more actively hidden even, and the lower population density meant that less of it was happening physically nearby.
🌻🌻 [google.com]