The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness? The evidence is equivocal on whether screen time is to blame for rising levels of teen depression and anxiety.
The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness? The evidence is equivocal on whether screen time is to blame for rising levels of teen depression and anxiety.
The evidence is equivocal on whether screen time is to blame for rising levels of teen depression and anxiety — and rising hysteria could distract us from tackling the real causes.
I daresay if young people could afford a home, a car, a family, and had some disposable income, free time, and any fucking prospect of a satisfactory life then they'd be a lot less depressed.
I don't think social media is particularly good but it's far from the worst problem facing young people today. The "phone bad" crap is just a lazy cop out.
It seems you are criticizing to the book the author quotes, not the article itself. "
Two things need to be said after reading The Anxious Generation. First, this book is going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe. Second, the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science. Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people
" - The posted article about 3 ish parographs in.
If I'm mistaken, let me know.
While you have a point you might consider what little free time young people have is largely spent on social media full of dark patterns and negative feedback loops and/or gaming stuffed with gambling. One does not detract from the other problems you outline. "Phone bad" holds true as long as these big corporations insist on regulating themselves when all they do is feed people propaganda to keep anything from changing.
I don't think it's a lazy cop out at all it's recognizing a complex issue that interweaves into the new realities of life for young adults.
What you stated is the lazy cop out, you're dismissing an entire problem space at the wave of a hand without critically thinking about it.
Everything is connected. An example would be heavy social media use being correlated to lower critical thinking capabilities, lower attention span, and more extreme political and emotional swings lead to a population being more manipulable and less cohesive.
Causing them to vote and act against their own interests at the behest of whoever has enough money to influence them though channels they "trust". Thus influencing a degrading social and financial situation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/podcasts/hard-fork-apple-lawsuit-reddit-ipo.html Hump to minute 27 for the intervju with jonathan haidt Point is that the social media problem is global and not only affecting US
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TLDR, less nuanced:
Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews converge on the same message. An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally. Moreover, findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States, has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital-technology use. Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence.
Betteridge’s law of headlines still applies: When the headline is a question, the answer is no.
I can't make sense of bringing this in for this piece.
The headline of this piece is not really a question. Sure, there is a question in it. But it answers the question in the headline. . . .and that answer isn't "no." It's "it's not clear what the cause is."
Blaming teenage mental illness on social media feels to me like the boomers are trying to find a different scapegoat than all the factors caused by their own stupidity, greed and destruction of human habitat.
So does shortened attention spans not count as any type of brain development change or is that not actually happening/outside of this study?
Even though everybody seems convinced our attention spans have decreased, there is no conclusive evidence of it and scientists don’t even really think it is useful to talk about attention outside the context of motivation anyways.
Your attention span is fine, you are just too burned out from modern life to invest energy into things that take a lot of sustained focus that aren’t essential to survival.
You also have to be way more picky with what content you choose to engage with because there is sooooooo much more content now and that may look like a “short attention span” when your brain optimizes for tossing out the 95% off fluff to get right to the thing you actually wanted.
Our attention spans are fine, this has been the most boring moral panic ever but that is really all it is.
Shortened attention span falls under mental well-being.
The older generation has always criticized the younger generation for the same things. And yet again it is done without merit.
This isn't a study, it's a book review refuting the author's assertion. But it looks like the scope was only mental health, not cognitive skill.
Odd when we are also reading how studies are showing increased levels of depression and suicide. Which lie do we believe? I'll just go with what I see happening with my own eyes and experience then.
This piece isn't saying there is no increase in depression and suicide. In fact, the whole premise of the article is that by blaming screen time we might be missing the actual cause of the issue (increase in depression and anxiety) and thus doing our children a disservice.
I would suggest that before trying to decide who to believe, you actually listen to their argument and evidence first. Instead of just thinking that your own perception of the world is perfectly objective and not anecdotal.
Not going out and interacting as freely with people paying direct attention to one another leads to heightened mental issues? Shocking.
I grew up in the 80's and we were super fucking social. Anyone that didnt live it cannot grasp how far we have fallen from what we once had, and we had no idea how good we had it.
Not to mention everything is being recorded to haunt every kid there is.
I feel read bad for modern day kids, my daughter included. An important aspect of humanity has been lost.
Exactly. Sure, we can say it’s not directly related to tech devices, but it’s definitely related to not wandering and having real human connection constantly.
And with the recording of everything - absolutely changes behavior.
That's not a phone issue, that's a place issue. Where can your daughter go (without needing to drive) to hangout with friends? Can she conceivably walk there? Can her friends? I've been hearing my entire life that I just need to go outside and Bla Bla Bla but I don't have anywhere to go. The closest park is a good half hour walk and now there's even sidewalks! How pleasant. There's nowhere for children outside, it's nigh impossible to walk anywhere and it's not like your parents would let you anyway since there probably isn't even sidewalks the whole way.
For perspective I live a very reasonable 10 minutes walk away from the elementary school I went to. I think you'll agree that's a reasonable distance for at the very least the older kids to walk. However it took them till I was a senior in high school before they put in the side walk. You literally couldn't get to the elementary school on foot without walking on the side of the road for ~4 minutes. Even now the experience is awful and the crossings are unsafe. This is the world us phone kids grew up in. It's not that we don't want to go hangout in person, there's just nowhere to go and by the time people can drive it's far too late.
Also the high school is about 40 minutes walk, there's even sidewalks the whole way (now (only on one side))! It's an awful experience as there's absolutely no shade and about half of it is down a stroad.
Yeah, everyone in this thread saying the phone bad is a Boomer cop out is oversimplifying the issue.
Yeah, there’s probably a component of taking the blame away from decreased quality of life by blaming it on phones—but you can’t neglect the effect that lack of social interaction has. I’m from the same era, and it’s overwhelming to think how much more complex everything has gotten.
world is collapsing
must be that damn phone
I was mentally ill as a teen in the 1980s though I didn't get diagnosed (that I know of — the US paychiatric sector tells minor patients their diagnoses much less often than they tell their adult patients.) until my twenties.
However all the reasons that I thought that might contribute to my melancholy, my delerium, my outrage, my hopelessness and my suicidality were valid. I might have been prone to major depression due to heredity and early-life family dysfunction, but school life was downright toxic and hostile. And then I was expected to learn the curriculum.
US schools are still about as conducive to education and healthy development as a toxic waste dump. This is not a place of honor. No esteemed are buried here. etc. We're still blaming other things for the same reason we blamed Doom for Columbine and attributed delinquency to Elvis. We just don't want to admit how much the establishment shortchanges its children.
Considering society's ongoing response to the climate crisis, we just can't find a single, solitary fuck to give.
I feel like they're trying real hard to blame "screen time" when in reality people are able to keep up with all the horrid shit corporations are getting away with now. It's like some form of pseudo censoring. Blame too much screen time because people are more informed now than ever.
Kinda reminded me of this bill Hicks bit.
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Teenagers were always mentally ill, we just make more efforts to report such nowadays.
The education system is not a place of mental wellness, and the transition to adulthood is innately disturbing.
Not sure if you are talking about your country or generalising all over the world. What you said is not true where I'm from, if the latter.
We're (American's specifically, but I see echoes in westernized European countries) propagandized into thinking angst is the natural state of teenagers rather than the natural state of teenagers within this specific system. I think teens can just more clearly see the brutal society they're about to be forced into and don't have the cognitive dissonance of benefiting from that brutal society yet.
I feel like even if you get rid of the screens, what else do teenagers have?
I feel like this is the crux of it. do they think we WANT to be glued to our screens? social hubs are dead or dying, wrung out for profit. people have less time than ever, having to work and spread themselves thin just to stay afloat. mental healthcare is inaccessible to huge swathes of the population and our parents who can afford it refuse it. outside is a car dependent hellscape with increasingly unpleasant weather and increasingly agitated people. as a neurodivergent person it feels impossible to navigate. the phones don't exactly help, but they're certainly not the root of the issue. everybody on social media at this point is well aware of the drawbacks.
Agreed. It's a notable correlation, but there's a lot more that goes into it.
What else do any of us have? If I want to go out to a place, most places will have someone ask for money for me to be there. And it's usually not "some" money, but a "lot"of money, that always only goes up. Some people can't or don't want to spend money.
Being bombarded by corporate propaganda and fear is cheap, so that's where all your friends are if you have any.
Lol wow
Perfect! League of Legends and World of Warcraft will surely save them.
Very well written piece, thanks for sharing! I'm one of the people that would be very fast to believe social media is one of the big reasons behind this rising levels of depression and anxiety. This text made me reconsider some thoughts I had
Yes. I remember having conversations with a woman in the early 2000’s who was telling me how social media was fucking her brain up by pushing ungodly amounts of beauty bullshit into her feed. This was before iphones.
I believed it then and I believe it now especially with the landfill full of articles pointing to it being the case.
I believed it then and I believe it now especially with the landfill full of articles pointing to it being the case.
It's like you want to admit you didn't read the article. Fuck, even the headline says the evidence isn't clear.
The question to me is, across all demographics, if social media is driving the narcissism epidemic?
and then, is that exacerbating issues traditionally present in teenagers?
There are lots of reasons it could be, or could not be this. It could be related but not directly, like a lack of sunlight. That could be as a result of screen time instead of sunlight, but that's not necessarily screen time's fault—anything could keep you from going outside. The evidence that screens in particular are causing these problems is lacking. Same with social media, though I'd be more open to believing that.
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I wonder if it works on adults?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/podcasts/hard-fork-apple-lawsuit-reddit-ipo.html Jump to 27 minute mark for the talk with jonathan haidt.
Kids used to grow up playing outside and getting slapped by their parents when stepping out of line.
Now they're grown inside social media isolation bubbles and eventually meet the real world, leading to mental illpreparedness.