Instagram and TikTok are not TV

My generation also grew up glued to a screen. We went from One, Two, Three to Dallas and from the Bill Cosby Show to Feeling Alive. We became cinephiles watching Cine Club and Qué grande es el cine. We became modern with The Golden Age and The Crystal Ball. We entered Europe polluted by Anglo-Saxon pop culture, segregated into seven urban tribes, dreaming of living in London, Amsterdam and New York. Dating became relationships, sandwiches, pizza. All Saints' Eve became Halloween.

But there was no cathodic gap. The screen was a collective ritual; He saw each other as a family, and when he arrived at class, both teachers and students had seen the same thing the night before. I remember emptying the pool at six o'clock in the evening the summer they released V: Alien Invasion.And the Sunday I saw Singin' in the Rain for the first time, because the next day the whole school went out to recess reciting phrases by the hilarious Lina Lamont. Watching Lost with your phone in hand to debate theories of space-time seemed similar, but it wasn't. It wasn't going down to the yard with colleagues to do something together, but sitting on the couch to comment on Twitter with thousands of strangers at once.

Now everyone ends up watching the same series, but never at the same time. Spoiler culture has destroyed even the collective pleasure of commenting. The social network is not a shared pleasure, it is a global individualized addiction. An addiction that separates you from your family, your neighbors, your classmates, and your teachers and connects you to a synthetic community, which does not exist outside the platform, designed with the aim of extracting a financial benefit from your care. Leaked Facebook documents show that they were aware of the damage that synthetic community causes among teenagers. But, as leaker Frances Haugen said, their greed is stronger than their concern.

They say it's hard to prove that something harms a group's mental health. That's not true. Before attorneys general from 41 states sued Meta, Seattle Public Schools filed a class-action lawsuit against TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat, with a very clever strategy. They argued that deteriorating students' mental health and the rise in behavioral disorders, including anxiety, depression, eating disorders and cyberbullying, have so complicated educational work that they have been forced to invest in mental health professionals, specific curricula to protect children, and specific training for teachers. In other words: tech companies exploit children and delegate externalities to their true community.

The crisis exists and we can face it. To do so, we need strong public education and health, capable of detecting, coping with and correcting its effects. We need a sensitive media, capable of abandoning opportunism and reporting sensibly. We need strong institutions, capable of empowering families in their work. We need to rise to the occasion and show that a community is not TikTok users who comment on dances and leave hearts. It's the one that looks for you when you go to the bottom and the one that takes you to the doctor when you stop eating.

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