The founder of an internet safety initiative warned Catholic school teachers and administrators April 20 about the appeal and impact of social media on today’s students.
Chris McKenna, founder of Protect Young Eyes, told participants at the annual conference of the National Catholic Educational Association in New Orleans that the world has changed for children because digital technology has been designed slickly to grab kids’ attention and keep them hooked….
“Please try not to start another conversation, ‘When I was a kid …’ because if TikTok existed when you were a kid, you would’ve been addicted, too,” said McKenna, a father of four.
“When I see a young boy who’s looking at porn and he says he can’t stop, I look at him and say, ‘That’s not all your fault.’ … To me, it is a perfectly predictable response to a perfectly tuned machine. You would have done it, too.”
Contrary to the common wisdom that kids are “resilient,” McKenna said that while children with developing brains are “incredibly adaptive,” the bottom line is that “trauma is trauma.”
“We live in a time, with digital doorways everywhere, where the opportunities for trauma to our young people are more prevalent than ever,” he said, noting that the digital pornography today is of a type far removed from the “2D” pornography of the 1970s….
McKenna said he was exposed to pornography as a child, which led to an addiction.
“I know what it’s like to not be able to stop clicking, with an adult brain that supposedly had a prefrontal cortex that knew better,” he said.
When he explained brain chemistry to a mother whose churchgoing, lovable son was addicted to porn, McKenna told her it was nothing she had done wrong as a parent….
“The brain operates according to a very simple principle: Whatever I feed my precious brain is what it learns to love, especially before age 16, and this is exactly when we give them all of their technology,” he said.
The technology of platforms such as YouTube — the most popular app with kids — TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram know the adolescent brain “full well.”
Snapchat does something very enticing to grab kids’ attention: A feature called “Snapstreak” provides additional rewards for keeping a daily chat going with another user.
McKenna said Snapchat developers have “figured out” that breaking the streak causes stress, and “if I’m a young person, I’m stressed out about losing that streak.” A hormone released inside the brain nudges the teen to release that stress by returning to the “safety” of Snapchat.
TikTok’s algorithm, McKenna said, “is like nothing else I have experienced on earth.” He said he found himself unconsciously intrigued by a video of a woman harvesting bees and he watched related videos for 90 minutes.
“All this means our kids can’t pay attention to anything longer than about five seconds,” McKenna said….
The above comes from an April 21 posting on Angelus News.
Only weak minded people get addicted to social media
Why must all of this money-making garbage be available to the public? And why is pornography not outlawed? A nation must have control over evils that can destroy it!– yes, maturity demands censorship of evils! And the young must be protected from all dangers and harm! Naive, foolish people of today, drenched in a culture of sexual sin, must be taught that sexual sin– and all sin– is a terrible thing! And to avoid sin at all costs! It is also shocking to see young people brainwashed by deviant, misfit, sinful psychologists, who preach “sex” all the time– and a life of being helpless victims to “teenage hormones” — without facing reality, without the necessity of manly self-control, and practice of virtue! These “Freudian quacks,” false “scientists,” should have been run out of our country, long ago! Don’t young men ever feel a sense of guilt and shame any more, gawking at women in a filthy, degraded manner, like a “dirty old man?” And why all the shockingly stupid excuses, like “addiction to pornography is his poor, dumb, immature brain’s fault?” How about learning respect for women, practicing self-control, learning self-direction and responsibility, and growing up to mature manhood, learning to fight life’s battles over sin, like a mature adult man?
You said sin more times than in any homily I’ve heard for the past decade or more.
Linda Maria [posting as Manly Maturity Needed! No More Excuses!]—-Using an exclamation point to end EVERY SINGLE SENTENCE dilutes the impact of your very valid points….
But, most sincerely, thank you much for your defense of Christian values. My observations are motivated to make your testimony more effective.
Petty observations— don’t take a comment too seriously. You are probably worried about someone’s views on pornography.
So do priests
Russia and China have fined many social media sites and platforms for violating anti-gay propaganda and similar laws, against drugs, pornography, child pornography, etc. Lately, Russia has fined TikTok and Facebook. Recently, a famous, young novelist in China, was sentenced to10 years in prison for writing homoerotic novels. Both countries also censor immoral films. The West ought to get going with good Codes of Ethics for all forms of media, as they used to do. “Free Speech” is important, but it should be handled responsibly.