Yes, Social Media Really Is a Cause of the Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illness
Yes, Social Media Really Is a Cause of the Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illness
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
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.
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.
Its not good for adults either.
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.
I remember when video games were the root of all evil.
Doesnt benefit the geezers too nuch either
this guy was a co-author of "The coddling of the american mind" which is just a reactionary screed about campus culture (have blue haired libs gone to far?). Here's a podcast that goes into the book https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/id1651876897?i=1000603422829
In this article, he's literally advocating for following the examples set by Utah and Florida with regards to kids and social media. And yes, he's one of those "social contagion" idiots https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/jonathan-haidt-social-contagion-rogd-pbs
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).
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this isn't a scientific article, it's an opinion piece. why is it here?
Not just an opinion piece, but a reactionary opinion piece.
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.