This is no doubt true but smart phones basically give you the option to never be bored, and get instant gratification whenever you feel like it. I don’t think it is limited to social media but I imagine there are pretty profound consequences to that.
TV and video games are also an option but as you implied you may not always have access to them.
However in what situation prior to the internet would a person be forced to be bored. Waiting at the DMV? I guess what I'm saying is it's pretty rare that someone wouldn't have an escape from bordem, even before phones.
Even sitting at home you could get bored. Yes, you would have TV but "nothing is on" and you might have books but nothing "seems right". None of those activities were as carefully tailored to bring you in and actively work to keep you engaged as social media does today.
road trips, standing in line anywhere (toll booth, amusement park, gas station, grocery store etc), riding the subway, waiting room at a doctor’s office, riding in a cab, waiting between customers at your retail job, power outages, camping trips, I am sure I could think of many more.
For the above you could
-listen to music
-talk to someone
-read a book, magazine, or newspaper
-text people (I assume we mean no social media, not no phones)
Now my nitpicks
- How long do you wait for gas? It's also an activity (assuming you aren't using full service)
-Camping is an activity
Sure you can come up with a scenarios where people are forced to be bored. Like waiting in a doctors office that you went to by yourself and they don't offer any reading material. Seems rare.
Let me offer another one: solitary confinement, what happens to people left alone with their own thoughts? They often go crazy.
> However in what situation prior to the internet would a person be forced to be bored.
What? People used to wait all the time. Meeting friends? “See you at 8 at the mall, east corner” and your friend would arrive at 8:13 while you were there since 7:46pm, unable to walk away for fear of missing the evening completely. So people smoked! A LOT!
And sometimes you would miss the appointment, have no way to reach the person, and spend the whole evening by yourself in the city, having also missed the movie time.
It is a self regulating problem, bored people create entertainment until there are no other bored people left. Modern tech makes that process more efficient so you have less bored people, I don't see why that is a problem.
It's a problem if the things that people used to do while bored were useful and now that social media is handling the boredom problem those things are not happening anymore.
TV being a problem was talked to death for years. Now the attention is on streaming binges on Netflix. Not everyone likes or plays video games it doesn't have the same mass appeal
