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I think the word "moral panic" makes it sound made up. Like people were manufacturing concern for their own gain when none was warranted. I think current internet usage makes it clear there was good reason to be worried about tv watching and reading novels. Like, spending 4 hours a day (28 a week) watching soap operas is probably bad for you. At the time, there was enough friction that people would eventually get back to their daily life. Besides, as long as the activities are done in moderation, there are certainly worse ways to spend your time. But in excess, it turns into vegetating and losing your life to escapism. In the modern day, content has been optimized for engagement, so moderation is becoming increasingly rare. I believe this has very real negative impacts on people that result in negative consequences for society.
Less socializing means less dating and fewer children. People become isolated and easy to manipulate. Their physical condition worsens, which results in worse health, thus more time spent sick, which puts pressure on health care, and reduces quality of life. Your military worsens as an increasing amount of recruits are couch potatoes with no emotional resilience, as they have always been able to escape their problems on the internet. The list goes on.
I don't know how to solve this without resolving to extreme measures, but I think it is overall a good thing that people are noticing the problems.
Are you sure you don't mean it the other way around? Most of your arguments are examples of negative externalities for society, not of things that are primarily negative for the individual. I'll grant you worsening health from lack of physical activity, but what else? At the end of the day, I think if you're concerned about the consequences of excess of a pleasurable activity on society, you should bite the bullet that what you really care about is society, and you would support moderating it even if it genuinely made the individual happy with no personal downsides. The fact that staying in front of the TV all day turns you into a diabetic couch potato is incidental; you would still see negative effects on society if people were spending too much time on a more photogenic, healthy or #inspirational hobby, just because they'd be doing that when they could be working, raising families, etc.
And looked at it this way, I think it becomes important to emphasize that human beings are not ants. Pleasurable leisure pursuits are not some annoying cost-sink that screws up functioning societies, they're what a functioning society exists to provide for its citizens. The central trade-off of civilization is the question of how much painful drudge-work we are willing to undertake today so as to buy ourselves leisure time tomorrow. Of course, maybe we're currently living beyond our means in this sense - maybe the amount of fun TV-watching we're cashing in is outstripping our ability to maintain that standard of living. But in and of itself, four hours of leisure out of twenty-four don't seem trivially unsustainable.
I would think the negative consequences for the individual are obvious: Worse physical health due to a sedentary lifestyle. Vitamin D deficiency when too little time is spent outside. Worse social skills and fewer friends due to not socializing. Worse mental health due to not not socializing and being constantly bombarded with viral posts and articles that are often emotionally charged, leading to compassion fatigue. This all leads to lowering the quality of life. These all seem fairly obvious and pretty serious.
I did say I granted you "worsening health from lack of physical activity".
Not necessarily a negative in and of itself, except in the trivial sense whee spending your time on one hobby will prevent you from getting very good at another. If people prefer television - and/or online interaction - to having real-life friends, that might genuinely be what makes them happy! It's not the case that hanging out IRL is inherently preferable to watching TV and people only do otherwise because TV hacks the addiction centers in their brain, it all depends on the quality of television and the quality of friends. Lack of socialization might be a problem for society, but it's not inherently a problem for the individual.
Well, I was mostly talking about fiction - TV binging, gaming, even reading novels or comics - as distinct from real-world-politics-oriented social media. That's what I took you to be talking about as per "losing your life to escapism"; I will more readily call doomscrolling an inherently negative experience, but it seems kind of the opposite of escapism.
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