The article mostly seems to blame social media, but I also think that the lack of good social spaces is also key. There's fewer and fewer spaces that a group of teens can just hang out without spending money (due to "no loitering" policies/signs), and that number is even smaller if you count spaces in walking distance of most families. I've also heard/read plenty of anecdotes about malls shrinking or closing down completely, which was historically a common teen hangout spot.

Social media just removes the incentive of isolation, imo. It provides just enough social interaction that there's less reason to go out and see each other in person. I'm in my late 20's and I haven't seen some of my best friends in months, but we all chat in Discord and play games together frequently, almost daily. It's not the same as actually hanging out, but it's enough to make not hanging out less painful.

> “Going to the mall has gone down. Driving in the car for fun has gone down. Going to the movies has gone down,” she said. “We’re talking about kids who are spending five, six, seven hours a day on social media.”

The malls are dead, gas is overpriced, helicopter parents don't let kids out of the house, and movies (sitting next to each other in the dark staring silently at something else) is barely social interaction anyway. That all assumes teens can afford to do anything anyway.

Give teens more freedom, give them places to hang out, give them more autonomy and trust when they're younger so they have more confidence, but they'll still be staring at their phones a lot of the time because there is a ton of pressure to respond to everything immediately. Phones are designed to encourage it and to pull our attention back to the screen every few minutes. Teens want the instant validation and some semblance of connection.

School systems have also been moving to starting high school later which has an effect. My high school daughter starts her school day at 9:18am and gets out at 4:08pm. If you participate in any after school activities such as a sport you aren't getting home until 5:30-6pm. She then has 2-3 hours of homework a night. Doesn't leave at lot of time social get togethers during the week.

When I was in high school we got out at 1:50pm and had maybe 1-2 hours of homework, not that I did any of it, per night. There was a lot more free time during the week for social interaction outside of school.

> Adolescents are spending less time gathering in shopping malls, movie theaters and rec rooms, and more time connecting on Instagram, TikTok and Discord.

On this point, I’d say the problem lies with the former becoming irrelevant. This is why I’m really interested in creating new types of IRL social spaces and shared experiences. There’s just not a lot of options really, and for The Kids, bars are out.

I blame most of this on the rise of suburbs. There are so few places for children to hang out. Car-centric infrastructure that forces kids to sit inside results in this. Bad for adults too.

We're letting technology direct us to social interactions in ways that are pretty scary actually.

Oh but soon they'll all have Vision Pro goggles and will facetime their friends' avatars!

The whole concept of Third Places[1] is kind of dying out. Like you said, bars don't work for kids, and other common places are either dwindling or just don't allow loitering - which is basically what teens are doing when they go hang out somewhere.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

Bars (and cafes) have also learned to absolutely blast music to stop people talking and make them drink up.

So not only can you not afford to drink at many bars as a teen, you can't talk to your friends there either.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1530-0277.2008...

About the only place to hang out that doesn't demand money is a library, assuming you can find one, and that's not exactly the right place for chattering and larking about.

Also, let's be honest - we older generations set this scene. It's us who began this pattern of behaviour, starting with the home computing boom in the 1980s. Game consoles. Handhelds. It's us who truly began to normalise the behaviour of spending significant amounts of time in leisure at the desk or couch. It's us who were entirely enthralled and captured by the early years of the internet, and digital content. We're doing it right now, as we speak. I'm not sure we can talk of the younger generations as having coined a problem, when it's our very example (and the products we made and marketed) that they learned from.

I suggest we need to broaden our gaze - the recent decades of digital social revolution have greatly affected the behaviour of us all.

Pokemon Go had a unique approach to shared experience in augmented reality. Arcades are dead, movies are for the wealthy, but you can still make your own fun chasing invisible objects around the city.

Almost like it's a shared hallucination experienced by multiple users. (We could call the concept...a SHMU.)