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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.