Ima go out on a limb and say treating kids like garbage probably does a lot of the heavy lifting in wrecking their minds. Also working all the adults so no-one is around to parent, and overworking and underpaying non-guardian adults like teachers.
Things like the lack of school lunches, the limit of civil rights on kids, delinquency (that is, state and federal crimes that apply to children only) and so on show that the fucks we give for children in the US are scant.
I remember when the Columbine High School shooting happened, and everyone was so eager to blame it on video games and Marilyn Manson. We make these claims because we don’t want to face the consequences of the choices our society has made.
The other aspect to this is that even if social media is bad it is mostly because people are terrible to each other via social media. They are judgemental, demanding, lack empathy,… Those things were already a problem with social interactions before social media, just not this visible and a bit easier to avoid. And the same is true about companies being exploitative via social media (the ones that run it and the tracking/advertising aspect and companies just acting as regular users on there), that problem wasn’t created by social media, it just became more visible.
The way I like to think about it is that social media has acted as a magnifying lens for many aspects of social interaction, for both positive and negative. The positives include greater sharing of knowledge, better lines of communication with relatives, easier capacity to organise and protest… but the negatives include what you’ve described: bigotry and social division, commercialisation, and exploitation of the dopamine-reward system for profit gain among many others. It’s brought together some amazing people but has rewarded some abhorrent behaviour. Social media has both intensified and distorted our social interactions.
I think if anything could be attributed to social media itself it is probably that whole dopamine aspect but the fact that it is emphasized in the design is of course again due to exploitation.
This doesn’t read like science, but more importantly it is deeply flawed logic:
A person is in a car that is heading off a cliff. While they are naive of this fact, they are content but destined to an untimely demise. They are made aware of the fact and become deeply anxious.
What is causative in this scenario? Ignoring the cliff, we could say that the awareness is at fault for the person’s anxiety. But if the person were better informed about their state and there was no cliff, there would be no anxiety.
A root cause analysis would show that fundamental problem is not that the driver knows where they are going, but the fact that they are headed off a cliff in the first place.
To determine that social media is the root cause of increased teenage mental illness rates, we would need to confirm that social media in a utopian environment still causes mental illness. This is a claim without much evidence, particularly because the more one becomes informed about the world the more the will be exposed to its legitimate problems. What would be more practical, then, is to determine what incidence of mental illness occurs with awareness of these issues where social media is not a factor, and then to evaluate what if any factor remains to be explained by social media. The editorial does not take this approach, but instead appears to attempt a firehose of rationalizations that don’t converge to make a coherent thesis.
Perhaps the editorial author’s book isn’t selling well.
This is an editorial article on a moral philosophy essay site. It’s not science news
Why does this have to be a two sides thing? Is this underpinned by the culture war bullshit? I can’t tell and I can’t be assed to deep dive into every spat to untangle all the reading between the lines.
I’m surprised they found that there is no evidence that using these platforms is “rewiring” children’s brains. Wasn’t it shown that social media companies base pretty much their entire technical decision making on psychologically conditioning not just children’s brains but everyone who uses it? So the evidence now shows that these are benign after all? Zuckerberg and Dorsey and Huffman never had us trapped in infinite scroll fine tuning the knobs to keep us teetering on the brink? There’s some discrepancy here.
I don’t see what the divide is anyways. Social media is all about things like violence, structural discrimination, sexual abuse, substance abuse. It’s odd the book author is saying these are non-issues. Seems like he is taking a rather shallow view.
Also teenagers have been using the broader definition of social media for decades.
It’s becoming another culture war thing yes because he’s starting to pivot towards a more right leaning audience it seems
I’ll have to read this later. This website seems sketchy to me, but I’ll have to actually read it to find out
This is a rebuttal by the author of the book that was the target of that recent Nature article. He’s a professor at NYU who’s been studying this for a long time
Haidt seems to be incredibly whiny for a seasoned academic dealing with critiques of his very popular work. Frankly, he needs thicker skin if he wants to publish at this level. All he needs to do is simply stand behind his research and he will be vindicated as it is duplicated/scrutinized if he’s correct. This “rebuttal” does him no favors and just reeks of an inability to assess his own claims or hear possible alternatives. He sounds like somebody who thinks they cured a disease, when reality is he has contributed to an ongoing dialogue about the impact of social media - which is important!
He needs to accept that his likely isn’t the final word on the matter. He didn’t “solve” it.
Its not good for adults either.
Context: John Haidt recently published a book called The Anxious Generation. I have not read it, but it has been critiqued as being too reductionist and too strict in its interpretation of the issue, as well as too alarmist.
He seems very defensive in this rebuttal. I encourage everyone to read the Nature article he is responding to. Again, I haven’t read the book, but this article is just contributing to my suspicions that maybe his work is more flawed than he’d like to admit.
He recently went semi-viral via The Wall Street Journal and the right seems to be latching on to him pretty hard for a “personal responsibility” argument as well.
His second point in his rebuttal is particularly eyebrow raising.
His second point in his rebuttal is particularly eyebrow raising.
Do you mean this one?
Odgers’ alternative explanation does not fit the available facts.
Because that’s obviously correct. I don’t know where you live, but I live in continental Europe, where issues such as “opioid crisis, school shootings and increasing unrest because of racial and sexual discrimination and violence” simply do not exist or are, at worst, not increasing. (One exception might be a very specific variant of opioids, which is gambling. Edit: Besides, gambling is also heavily promoted online, made easier to access, even packaged into video games, so it’s just a further problem for defending phone-/internet-centric teenage culture.) They also frequently have little to do with how young people feel, think and live in general even in US, as far as I see from the stuff (conversations, media) that I see online. Projecting these very specific issues onto all young people all across the world looks like nothing more than American defaultism.
I’ve read both the review and the response, and I find the response more convincing, supported by much more explicit data and clear arguments.
Racial and sexual discrimination in schools (and elsewhere) definitely exists here in Europe too and with the rise of right-wing parties is increasing in recent years.
Even in extremely homogeneous societies, there is racism and, if there aren’t other races enough, other forms of othering often around socioeconomic standing or even one’s ancestors or even their ancestors’ jobs (looking at you, Japan, and treatment of people who had the audacity to even live in an area with many burakumin, though this issue is getting better and there are more legal protections)
What makes you think homogeneous societies would prevent racism? If anything it is the other way around, if there is extreme heterogeneity there is no real option to be racist.
other forms of othering often around socioeconomic standing or even one’s ancestors or even their ancestors’ jobs
Ok but none of that is new, it is not relevant here.
Who cares if it’s new? It exists. That’s the entire point.
You’ve forgotten what we’re talking about in the first place. To explain the rise in mental illnesses, you have to find what changed in people’s environment that could affect the health situation. If nothing in the environment has changed, the expected result would be that there would be no change in the outcomes either. If the discrimination has been roughly the same for the last few decades, why would it suddenly start resulting in different rates of mental illnesses?
That’s an incredibly narrow and reductionist way of framing it that makes an absurd number of assumptions. I also haven’t forgotten anything. Just because somebody disagrees with you doesn’t mean they don’t have a grasp on the conversation
Racial discrimination - depends on the region. Much of Europe is still fairly homogenous, thus the racism there cannot be statistically as harmful as in the US (which is not to say that those areas can’t be or aren’t quite racist). And yet I don’t believe those areas are exempt from the general trend with mental illnesses, as I see at least in my own country. And even in the more heterogenous areas this probably barely begins to account for the trend, the illnesses are not confined to the discriminated populations.
Sexual discrimination is what I include under things that are “at worst, not increasing”. If it’s not rising , it doesn’t explain the rise in mental illnesses.
In the end, out of four proposed causes two are clearly irrelevant, and two can account for the trend only partially at most.
with the rise of right-wing parties
IMO many of these parties are also symptoms of phone and internet overuse too. Much of the ideas, values and language of many new European right-wing parties is clearly imported from online American conservative discourse, without regard for the reality of local society. In my country where gender transitions are very difficult to undergo, where non-binary people simply do not exist in the public sphere at all, new right-wing parties will still talk about the nefarious “gender ideology”, declaring there can be only two genders, etc. This is literal Internet-induced delusion.
Discrimination exists everywhere in the world. I don’t care how utopian you think your European nation is, you are not immune. If you think you don’t have any prejudices and that it isn’t a problem where you live, then the problem is actually worse than you think.
You’re ignoring the fact I wrote “which is not to say that those areas can’t be or aren’t quite racist”. The racism, no matter how heinous, if it can only affect a smaller percentage of the population, or those who aren’t even the citizens of the country (as it happens with migrants from the Middle East and north Africa), cannot have much to do with the mental illnesses of European teenagers accross all social and ethnic groups.
I do not get the impression you’re even trying to argue against my or Haidt’s position at this point, you’ve simply waved away all the arguments he has brought up, and now are ignoring entire sentences from my comments.
That is a pretty uncharitable way to describe what I’ve written.
He is downplaying other social and economic factors putting incredible strain on American families, and his flippant remark about the Obama years is kind of ignorant.
Yes, the economy was steadily improving. But it was still terrible. Millions of people had just lost their homes, millions more lost their jobs as unemployment skyrocketed from 5% to over 10%, millions lost their life’s savings with some seeing as much as 30 or 40% of their entire nest egg wiped out in a matter of months. A few years of economic growth did not suddenly make all that go away, it just meant it was getting better. That doesn’t even begin to cover the two wars in the Middle East that were going terribly and drawing more and more concern from the American public as we sent countless young people to fight for a vague notion of democracy no one believed anymore in two counties that didn’t want us around.
Either he is being so reductionist as to be dishonest, or he is ignorant.
Nothing like a K-shaped recovery to help the rich get richer.
It’s not not social media… But also it’s the parents, which are also affected by how the ruling class treats the entire planet. Oh, and climate change looks like a load of not fun.
Doesnt benefit the geezers too nuch either
I remember when video games were the root of all evil.
Video games and social media are very different things. Social media is actually a detriment to society.
Exactly.
It is all about the phones, not systemic issues that surround teenagers. But those pesky phones, and the apps surrounding them.
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It is extremely irresponsible to give your minor a smart phone and social media, but the majority of parents do it anyways, I dont get why its happening.
Kinda surprising given the knowledge we have that teens even want to use it.
I hope the next generation of teenagers think social media is cringe boomer shit (because now, it basically is).
I have no idea what you mean about cringe boomer shit. It sounds like you’re going on a Facebook rant but you got sidetracked.
And if you’re wondering why teenagers would want to use social media, it’s a very freeing kind of technology. Kids are trying to understand their worlds, they’re dealing with a ton of stress in various ways, they have situations going on that they can’t talk about, and social media is one very good way for them to try to figure out how to handle it all.
Good for kids. I wish we had some of these tools when I was young.
You sound like a cunt, and I mean that in the nicest possible way.
Don’t talk to people so condescendingly, if you don’t know what I mean, then ask me to clarify, instead of creating a strawman.
Takes one to know one
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