I don't think there's much of anything you can look at, or do, or think about, without brain activity being somehow involved. What with the brain being where thoughts live.
I mean there is the introduction of a chemical into the blood stream that acts on neurons. This does not happen with screens and speakers. It is not meaningless. In fact it's a super important distinction.
By pretending that multimedia can directly alter someone's behavior you throw out the entire idea of human volition. Even if it were true on some level our entire legal code and indeed western society is based on the idea of humans making choices and being responsible for them. Unless they're directly altered like with psychocative chemicals (and sometimes even then). The stimuli you see and hear are not drugs and regulating them as drugs will do more harm and cause more use of force then it prevents.
> I mean there is the introduction of a chemical into the blood stream that acts on neurons. This does not happen with screens and speakers.
What are the actual mechanics behind how scary movies make people jumpy? Or behind news articles pushing people to "I'm literally shaking" levels of anger? Or to stick with the theme from ancestor comments, behind the thing I've heard called "post-nut clarity" (whatever it's actual proper name is)?
I’m going to try with a counter argument here that might seem trivial at first but encourage you to think a bit more deeply on it.
Multimedia consumption does directly alter your behavior.
You see an add for fries and you want fries and you go out and buy and eat them. If you hadn’t watched that video you wouldn’t have done that. Yes, it was still your choice to do so (avoiding the question of free will), but it was also the choice of the addict to shoot up one more time. Seeing the burger introduced psychoactive chemicals (endogenous ones): dopamine is one of the most relevant and well understood.
And to be clear - it’s not unique because it’s related to food and therefor a substance you put into your body like a drug. As others have pointed out gambling and porn addictions rely on similar mechanisms, and doom scrolling/compulsive news checking are tied to the same chemical mechanisms in the body.
From a medical perspective this is pretty well understood. Social expectations and norms that feed into regulations and laws are wildly subjective, so it’s not surprising that there is a lot of inconsistency in how and what is regulated and illegal when looked at from the perspective of biological mechanisms.
That's rather meaningless.
I don't think there's much of anything you can look at, or do, or think about, without brain activity being somehow involved. What with the brain being where thoughts live.