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Matthew S.'s avatar

There were some interesting data that came out recently in a study from Columbia that shows that while all teens are reporting more anxiety and unhappiness, conservative teens, on the whole, are happier than liberal teens, and I think that's an interesting aspect here.

I don't envy teens now. When I was in middle school, I was mercileslessly bullied, but at least when I got off the bus at my house, I knew it was over for the day. I cannot imagine how bad it would have been if I got bullied at school, and then I got home, jumped on my phone, and then realized that people were talking shit about me to each other on public social media accounts in veiled terms.

This is an issue that strikes very close to home for me, because my son is a junior in high school now, but when he was a freshman, we had a serious issue where he was being viciously bullied IRL and on social media, and some of the people bullying him on social media were pretending to be his friends in real life. And my son, while not autistic, does exhibit some of the difficulties in picking up on nuanced social cues that autistic people can sometimes exhibit, and these little assholes were taking advantage of it.

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Jeremiah Johnson's avatar

The liberal/conservative thing is something I've seen a lot in the context of "liberals are more likely to get caught in doomloops on social media".

I've also seen it tied to resilience. Being tough and self-reliant are typically more conservative coded, as is the type of advice that you need to suck it up, 'man up', don't express your feelings, etc. In contrast, visibly expressing one's feelings, or having empathy for others and expecting empathy in return are more liberal coded. There's a larger conversation about whether we've gone so far into empathy and understanding that we end up encouraging sadness among young liberals.

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Matthew S.'s avatar

I think it's important and necessary to instruct younger people on the structural disadvantages that different groups of people are born into, and the historical reasons for them, and why they persist to this day. Those are important facts about American history and growing up in America, with no doubt...buuuuttttttt if all you are doing is pounding into kids that message, It's not surprised that they would feel more bummed about life. While "pull yourself up by the boot straps" can be taken way too far, and can ignore the real life structural issues that people face, there's no doubt that it's a much more empowering message then "the system is designed to work against you".

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jabster's avatar

Is it the smartphones, or is it social media?

The toxic tendencies and ideological framing of social media have been well-documented. If social media is pushing one kind of belief and morality system as an echo chamber, complete with positive reinforcements and punishments, then that can cause a painful amount of cognitive dissonance if one does not agree with every jot and tittle. And I haven't even gotten into the bullying as just plain meanness, without an agenda.

The biggest indictments of smartphones seem to be twofold:

1) the "electronic pacifier" that prevents ad hoc, random social interactions. Some of this is "not new"--why going to the movies has long been a bad first date.

2) Replacing the need to go into "meatspace" and "touch grass". As an older person, I have long had to make socializing a deliberate activity and not wait on ad hoc opportunities, due to the omnipresence of grown-up tasks like work, housework, etc.. Maybe the young don't quite grasp that. I know I had to learn that when I got out of college. Maybe smartphones are replacing that lesson, or delaying the need to learn that lesson, or teaching the wrong lesson.

You mention alcohol and driver's licenses. Ever since Generation X entered adolescence, we have branded kids and young adults (18-20YOs) as terminally irresponsible and incapable of making decisions for themselves. Have young people taken all of this MADDness to heart, and internalized this sense of learned helplessness far beyond what was intended? We have young people literally afraid to "adult", as a verb. Maybe we've scared them out of meatspace and into cyberspace.

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A Special Presentation's avatar

I think this is a good point. A lot of this is an overcorrection to the problems seen in like 1993, when teen violence/pregnancy/bullying were considered the big issues.

As a mid-millennial it's kind of wild to me what a good time the 00s were to be an adolescent. Too young to be lead poisoned, too old to have been thrown into the social media maelstrom.

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Veets's avatar

I really appreciate you attempting to parse out out social media vs. smartphones, as it's something I'm often thinking about. It's tough for me to take the pushback against the "smartphone theory for everything" seriously, as it often relies on studies that are specific to one social media platform (Facebook, for example). Quitting Facebook (or Instagram) might be helpful, but there so many other unhealthy smartphone-based activities you can substitute for. The overall goal should be moderating screen time, in my opinion.

Personally, I quit Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter years ago, and never started on TikTok. I consider myself "off social media", yet I still use YouTube, Reddit (only on my iPad/computer and not phone), Substack, Goodreads, and some other things. I absolutely adore subscriptions for journalism (The Atlantic, NYT, The New Yorker), music, podcasts, and texting friends. Quitting the traditional social media is a decision I love years later, and I've seen tangible benefits to things like attention, but I still struggle with how much I use my smartphone. I can barely take out the trash without putting a podcast on. Outside of smartphones, the proliferation of SCREENS everywhere also has an affect, with things like news playing no matter where you go.

I think there's a broader psychological effect of consistent access to a firehose of information, communication, and entertainment across society, which includes but is not limited to social media.

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jabster's avatar

I think you're right. It may be a different problem--it is a different problem--but still a problem. It all comes down to smartphones being an attention magnet.

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Julian's avatar

Here is a bunch of reference to high power studies that show its not social media: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/18/yet-another-massive-study-says-theres-no-evidence-that-social-media-is-inherently-harmful-to-teens/

From that link:

"The Journal of Pediatrics recently published a new study again noting that after looking through decades of research, the mental health epidemic faced among young people appears largely due to the lack of open spaces where kids can be kids without parents hovering over them."

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Mike Kidwell's avatar

Love the idea of regulating smartphone use in school; its a straightforward way to create a part of the day when kids aren't on their phones and need to interact with the people near them.

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Andrew Basil Bereznak's avatar

Back in my day, we could watch a man get f*cked to death by a horse on the family desktop, and just walk away after. Now, kids can watch a man get f*cked to death by a horse, whenever, wherever they want

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Matthew S.'s avatar

This is a funny comment, but I do think it highlights an important difference. When I was a kid on the internet in the mid to late '90s, you had to seek that kind of stuff out, or maybe a friend would expose you to it, but you wouldn't just accidentally stumble across it on social media like can happen now.

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Andrew Basil Bereznak's avatar

The point is that the internet was a place you could walk away from after you were done. Now, it's on you 24/7. And, if you don't have it on you 24/7, you're considered a non-entity, really. It's not even being able to access calls or texts, you honesty need the internet on your person, at all times.

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Matthew S.'s avatar

I just started a part-time job a few nights a week to make some extra money, and so much of the training and onboarding assumed that you had access to a smartphone and/or the internet on your person. It's not a faulty assumption, but I did wonder during the process how they would deal with a person who was just 100% not online.

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Andrew Basil Bereznak's avatar

Easy. You don't have an job, or at least have a harder time maintaining one. You either conform to the technology required by the economy to perform essential functions, or You struggle extremely hard to just stay afloat. (See the personal automobile for reference)

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Matthew S.'s avatar

100%.

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Caperu_Wesperizzon's avatar

So young people are having less and less fun, but smartphones are still too much fun for them—we have to find something to replace them with that will keep them properly miserable, without reverting to their old ways of having fun, that we never liked, or inconveniencing us with messy things like committing suicide.

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Chasing Oliver's avatar

Given rates of death and injury associated with driving in general and teen drivers in particular, I see the decline in driver's license rates as a very good thing. Young people are rejecting car culture, and the need for physical presence in the age of the Internet.

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Julian's avatar

The problem with this is that there is a lot of evidence that social media is not *causing* any of these problems and may actually be *helping* kids do better.

Here is a good round up:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/18/yet-another-massive-study-says-theres-no-evidence-that-social-media-is-inherently-harmful-to-teens/

We have to move on from posting charts like those you have in this article. They can, at best, show a correlation. But it's not even a strong correlation. We need to include data on smartphone adoption, comparisons between kids with and without kids, comparisons of before a child has a phone and after, how does this same data look outside of the US, outside of the West? I am not sold on this theory and think using smartphones is downstream from the underlying problem.

From that link above:

"The Journal of Pediatrics recently published a new study again noting that after looking through decades of research, the mental health epidemic faced among young people appears largely due to the lack of open spaces where kids can be kids without parents hovering over them. That report notes that they explored the idea that social media was a part of the problem, but could find no data to support that claim."

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Andrew Keenan Richardson's avatar

It's worth noting in this context that the graph showing "time spent with friends" presumably means in-person time, and is not counting time spent hanging out in voice chat or whatever.

It seems plausible or even likely to me that total time spent with friends, including virtual time, has gone up over the same time period. But that probably doesn't come with the same benefits.

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Valentin's avatar

Hi Jeremiah,

I definitely agree with you. Just a few remarks to expand on our smartphone addiction:

It seems to me that it's getting harder and harder for younger generations to live without smartphones. As a young father, I see around me a LOT of young children, sometimes under 2 years old or even babies, playing for a few hours a day with their parent's smartphones. The problem is parents being addicted to smartphones and sharing their addiction to their children. And it's hard to do anything against this phenomenon. Of course, being responsible for a child is not easy and sometimes you need to get some rest. However, giving a 3 years old a smartphone to prevent him from crying isn't a good behaviour. When growing up, these children will have a severe addiction to smartphones.

Also, I have no proof of that but I tend to believe that smartphone addiction also plays a key role in the level of success of a student and/or a professional. The more time you spend on Instagram and/or TikTok the less time you can't invest in your personal development.

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