It's Always Smartphones

Why are so many negative trends associated with social media? And what should we do about it?

Last week, Slate published an article about how college students are having difficulty with longer reading assignments. The author notes how he used to assign 30 pages of reading per class as a matter of course, but in the last few years he’s noticed students struggling with anything over 10 pages. It’s mostly a good piece and I don’t want to slag it too much, but I did find some of the focus odd.

The piece goes through a lot of potential explanations - the COVID pandemic, No Child Left Behind, Common Core, phonics vs holistic literacy, and book bans in local schools. It seemed strange to me to run through so many topics when the culprit is clear.

It’s obviously smartphones.

The Slate article, to be fair, does mention smartphones as one among many causes. But it’s a lot of effort and a lot of words when three would do - it’s obviously smartphones. The rest is inconsequential. It’s always smartphones.

Derek Thompson writes in The Atlantic about how Americans have stopped hanging out in person as much as they used to. Concerts are weirder and worse than they’ve ever been. Teens are doing great by some metrics - lower pregnancy rates, lower drug and alcohol usage, and fewer fights in school. But young people are also lonelier than ever, less likely to have a driver’s license, and more suicidal. Every time I see one of these trends, I tend to repeat the same three words under my breath.

It’s always smartphones.

The 2007-2014 Turning Point

Some caveats for the literal-minded. “It’s always smartphones” is a punchy way to phrase my thoughts on this, but smartphones here are standing in for the combination of widespread social media, internet culture, and the smartphones themselves. ‘Always’ is also an exaggeration - of course not every single trend is caused by smartphones, and other things like the COVID pandemic also contribute to societal issues. And yet still, to a close approximation, it’s always smartphones. I want to keep repeating that to make it stick in our collective consciousness.

When you see one of these strange new trends - and especially when it’s a trend involving young people - there’s usually an inflection point somewhere between 2007 and 2014. 2007 is when the first iPhone released, and by 2014 we had firmly entered the age of all-consuming social media.

For instance, a chart of teen drinking shows virtually no change from 1991-2001, only a modest change 2001-07, and then it begins to decline rapidly without stopping. The inflection point at 2007 is obvious.

On a much sadder note, here’s teen suicide rates. Again, note the very obvious inflection point.

Or how about the stats on how much time Americans are spending with friends? Relatively steady until about 2013.

Disaggregating by age tells an interesting story - every age enters a decline at some point, but the youngest age groups enter it earliest. Teens are in steady decline from 2010 onwards, young adults in their 20s start declining a few years later, and older groups don’t begin declining until about 2015 or 2016. This lines up perfectly with the smartphone/internet explanation as younger age groups would be by far the earliest adopters of the new social reality.

This isn’t the case for literally every trend - some things like teen smoking and teen pregnancy rates have been in decline for several decades in a row. But the 2007-2014 inflection point happens too often to be a coincidence. It’s the smartphones.

To Doom or Not To Doom?

By my nature, I’m not a doomer. I try to place things in historical context, and the historical context normally reminds me that things aren’t so bad. People have always complained about new technology, new forms of entertainment and communication. We’ve especially always loved to complain about young people. The medieval church was disturbed by the printing press. Movies were corrupting our culture. Mark Twain hated the telephone. Even newspapers drew complaints from critics at the time who bemoaned what they were doing to society.

This used to be a serious argument

It’s important to keep this historical argument in mind when thinking about how smartphones and social media are changing society. But with all that said, I do think smartphones are meaningfully different from movies or newspapers. And we’ll need to think about them differently if we want to address their potential harms.

Why are smartphones and social media different? They’re a more isolating technology. They’re demonstrably addictive. And the scale of social media and instant worldwide communication today is unbelievable. If the telephone was opium, then smartphones are fentanyl. They’re both in the same family, but the effects are turbo-charged. Smartphones are also more individualized - with newspapers and movies, we were largely all reading, watching or experiencing the same thing. With social media, we may all be consuming radically different material.

We also have a lot more direct evidence that social media is actually having harmful effects. The case that movies led to widespread moral degeneracy was a fact-free argument based entirely on vibes, and I doubt it was true. Mark Twain believed the telephone cheapened communication, again based entirely on his personal feelings. There’s no objective way I know of to measure that.

By contrast, we can see clearly all sorts of statistical trends directly correlated with the rise of smartphones and social media. Teens really are more depressed. People really are spending less time with friends. And while correlation is not causation, we’ve also done causal experimental studies. When we ask people to stop using social media, what happens?

[Participants] reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use

Less polarization, more time with family and friends, and higher subjective well-being! And going cold turkey on social media for a month led to less usage after the experiment as well.

Addressing Social Media’s Harms

That last point is fascinating, because it hints that social media can be modeled as an addictive drug. I compared social media to fentanyl above, but if I’m being honest that’s probably not the right comparison. There aren’t a lot of normal people who can regularly use fentanyl in moderation and be fine. Alcohol is probably a better model. Alcohol has had a place in human society for as long as there’s been human society. People enjoy it, and used correctly and in moderation it can be a positive thing - even healthy, if you believe all those studies about the benefits of a glass of red wine a few times a week.

But we do also regulate alcohol. We don’t regulate it all that strictly, to be clear. If people want to drink themselves to addiction or even death, by and large society lets them do it. But we do recognize it’s an addictive substance, and take some basic steps. Probably the most important step is trying to keep it out of the hands of young people.

Alcohol consumption, as a factual matter, is bad for teens. It harms the developing brain. It leads to increased risky behaviors. We also know that this scales with usage - a 17 year old having a supervised glass of wine at dinner probably isn’t a big deal, but frequent binge drinking at that age really is a big deal.

I think an alcohol model of social media intuitively makes sense to me. Plenty of people use it responsibly. For most people, there shouldn’t be much (or any) regulation of how they use it. As long as you’re not hurting others, you’re an adult and we live in a free society. But just like with alcohol, there’s strong evidence that social media usage/smartphones can have a particularly strong and negative impact on younger people specifically. And I think it makes sense to regulate, at least to some minimum degree, how young people interact with social media.

This is an incredibly tricky area of policy to get right. Blanket bans aren’t going to work. And I wouldn’t endorse them even if they did work - smartphones and social media have specific use cases that are valuable, and it would be foolish to get rid of those. Yelling at social media companies to self-regulate also isn’t going to work. Frankly, I don’t know what the right set of policies is.

But I do think there are some simple things we can start with. England is planning to ban the use of smartphones in schools nationwide, and that seems like an obviously good idea. There’s no reason why students during a school day should be obsessively checking social media. Parents should encourage safe usage of social media in the same way they think about safe usage of alcohol - introducing it in very small amounts, clearly warning kids about the danger of binging, and removing it if it becomes a problem. Behavioral nudges like Instagram’s new Go To Sleep notification are a great feature.

None of these ideas are going to stop smartphones from changing society. Technology changes culture, and fighting that fact is like trying to stop the tide from coming in. But if we’re smart we might be able to blunt some of the worst impacts of social media, while still leaving the positive aspects untouched.