From XPLAT:

What if social media is causing permanent mental retardation for those who grow up with it?

We know that there are developmental windows where neuro-development must occur for many different human developments. Motor development. Vision. Learning a language. If you aren’t subject to the stimulus that leads to language acquisition during those few years of developmental opportunity, you can never learn to understand speech. Not enough stimulus can cause severe developmental disorders in many areas, if the critical windows are missed.

What if a lack of unsupervised play causes developmental harm? What if a lack of face to face communication during our major neurological developmental open window, which lasts up until about age 21, causes permanent developmental delay – or social and mental retardation in other words?

Will we wind up with an older generation scratching their heads at the mass hysteria of a new generation of college students who can’t snap out of their collective group think identities?

As the older generations die out, will they leave the planet to a bunch of retards?

Read the rest here

Though tangentially related to my RP Raising Children Series of posts (will you let your kid on facebook?), this raises an even broader point that I think needs to be addressed.

TRP itself is a symptom of a greater cultural shift of guys (and gals) who don't know how to interact with each other. This year it was reported that fewer teens are having sex, it can't be ignored that these teens are some of the first to grow up with social media at 8 years old.

Whether it's a real, physical, developmental roadblock, or simply that these teens now have their need for validation fulfilled by twitter and snapchat that otherwise would require actual human contact, the effects remain.

Actual human bros hit up askTRP and ask "there's a woman coming to my house tonight, what do?"

We are in a world of hurt.

Sure feminism is pushing women and girls to embrace masculinity and anti-male behaviors as their primary modus operandi. But what we didn't expect was that both boys and girls would equally fail to learn how to talk to each other.

Every day I see Tinder chats on reddit that end a successful opener with "What's your snapchat?" rather than "what's your phone number?"

Take a second to think about the implications of this. Sure, you can "share" snaps between each other, but the primary purpose of snapchat is not dialog- it's broadcast and spectatorship. It's not a closer that ends with sexual activity. It's a closer in which two parties can quietly watch each others' broadcasts indefinitely with no human interaction whatsoever.

The new generations of children are not learning to interact and communicate with immediate feedback (aka reading the room). Instead they are learning methods of broadcasting and spectating as their primary social activities. Learning social interactions and social calibration is key to forging friendships and, of course, getting laid. If I could sum up the biggest problem askTRP has, it's this: Nobody there knows what calibration is. They get a mental checklist and try to go down the list one by one, without reading the reactions of their target. And it's a miss every time, because they simply don't know how to think on their feet.

I have a few friends addicted to snapchat- I don't personally see the allure. They often get a queue of videos lined up of their friends talking about how great their lives are. It's a culture of millions upon millions of miniature celebrities broadcasting their social lives instead of living them.

One of my friends will literally start playing snap chats during a conversation at a bar. His thumb is always on the screen during conversations. You'll know it's snapchat when suddenly there's audio coming from his phone. During a conversation. He doesn't think it's weird or antisocial.

I wonder if he does that around women.