Screens Aren't Destroying Young Minds. I Should Know(humanprogress.org) |
Screens Aren't Destroying Young Minds. I Should Know(humanprogress.org) |
All of these, with the exception of fewer high school dropouts, are examples of people doing less. Going outside less, doing less mischief, socializing less. The reason for that is almost certainly that phone use is monopolizing more and more of their time and crowding out these other activities. I would absolutely concede that access to phones is not an unequivocal ill, there are some positive upsides. But these supposed counterexamples I think are exactly what we would expect if phones were changing the behavior of children.
And, on the subject of high school dropouts, I think there’s at least some reason to think this is due to a declining set of standards. This probably varies by state and school district, but there has certainly been a movement to reduce the number of infractions that leads to expulsion, and outbursts that would previously have resulted in student punishment are now allowed to continue unabated in some jurisdictions. I don’t think it’s pivotal to the argument one way or the other though.
Finally, I take the author’s point that the causal relationship between screen time and poor mental health runs two ways. But isn’t the prevalence of mental disorder and social isolation increasing? I would be curious to know what the author thinks is behind that broader background trend, if not the phones.
Also, you point out that these are examples of "bad things not happening" but those bad things are the sorts of things you would expect to correlate with an addiction, if addiction were actually what was happening. On the other hand, for any positive measure of flourishing you want to pick, you can always find one which is going down. You can look at disco declining in the 80s and call the 80s an unmitigated disaster where the youth are no longer doing enjoyable things. So now you need a basket of positives, which you're potentially comparing against each other, which is itself encoding values that people might just not be holding. I know people who live with their parents and are glad to because "why buy a house when you can save that same money or spend it on other things". I think Haidt's arguments often do a sleight of hand between these, where he constructs a cardboard maze where his values are treated as implicitly and unstatedly legitimate and everyone else's are treated as a pathology. Which, the addiction framing is quite convenient for, if that's what one is doing - any self assertion of "Actually, I'm fine" gets turned into "Wow, look at how deep the addiction goes".
I'm not sure the exception even holds. The data indicates that most high school dropouts end up going to work which is more than coasting through high school until graduation. It is not like the would-have-been dropouts have hunkered down working hard to become straight-A students. They're just there for the free ride, so to speak, with, as you suggest later on, no real consequences for just being physically present and doing nothing more. Staying in school is now the path of least resistance, lazy choice.
Or maybe you are one person and one person is never a big enough data set.
It’s in the headline. This is a classic of the “trends” genre — author generalizing their own experience to make a pronouncement about a whole generation or all of society.
I do not think "screens" per se are harmful, but what people do on screens. Read an ebook? Play chess? Watch a film? Doomscroll?
They had participants spend either 45 mins doing normal smartphone use or 45 minutes watching a documentary, and the results were that both increased mental fatigue but the documentary group did not have reduced cognitive function, whereas regular smartphone use did.
"Results suggested that both watching a documentary and using a smartphone for 45 min increased subjective mental fatigue and drowsiness. Watching the documentary did not impair cognitive performance. Reaction times on the PVT and number of errors on NoGo trials in the Go/NoGo task were higher among the participants in the smartphone condition. These results indicate reduced vigilance and impaired inhibition capacities only after smartphone use. "
Would we? A consistent trend is a consistent trend and "rewiring" doesn't necessarily mean all metrics need to go downward.
> So IMHO it's quite unlikely that "social media" is the cause, because they are more global.
Mobile phone and social media use are more or less stable under young people. It practically cannot grow since quite a while now.
It's hard to imagine that the past problems he listed were not at least partially due to his excessive device use.
We don't have great emperical evidence to point to a specific thing between screen time, social media, gambling, counter culture etc on the causes of the reverse Flynn effect and mental health epidemic in general, but we do know that anecdotal evidence does not improve our data one way or the other.
Video gaming, particularly MMORPGs, were highly social experiences. WoW guildmasters received valuable organizational management skills, and I'm aware of a CTO who explicitly said his WoW experiences helps him manage people in professional settings.
Browsing social media is an antisocial activity, given that you're passively seeing what others are doing; reactions and comments don't count as a social activity because it's not real-time interaction with a human. Social media is engineered to maximize engagement by putting mostly negative content (that is, content that annoys you) in your feed interspersed with some positive content. It's weaponized behavioral psychology.
I was part of an in-between generation (originally tail end of Gen X) and raised as a latchkey kid. It was the early 90s and thankfully I was able to travel without parents at 12 on airplanes very effortlessly. This allowed me to get out of my midwest (Wisconsin) bubble and meet in SF every year around New Years for MacWorld and SF2600 gatherings. It was a magical time. I'm not at all against communicating online and meeting people there, but social media as controlled by a singleton (e.g. Meta, Weixin, Weibo, Twitter/X, etc) seems awful. Sometimes I miss the fun of IRC (Dalnet and others), BBSes, and even AOL Chatrooms. It's hard to put the genie back in the bottle, so many people have adopted Facebook for small business and rural communities in the US rather than having a website they control. I can't find out what specials are happening at my local restaurant (Ember) or my favorite food truck (Chairman Bao & Eat on Monday) without having an Instagram account. I still resist Meta.
This author misses the point that some parents value critical thinking and independence. Not everyone joined the greek system in college! Same for social media, not everyone needs to be "connected" in social media before age 16. The algorithms at these singletons, often end up restricting and narrowing the world for many young minds (echo chambers for their cohort). It's not about censorship, but a little guidance and oversight reviewing social media from a 20,000 foot level rather than in the weeds.
I fully expected this author to talk about the importance of computing access for education and development, but it seemed to just be about arguing for this hot mess we have now. Yikes!
That being said, we cannot discount the manner in which social media do affect people once they've been pulled in. I think most people who have left social media have noticed the reduction of what you might call psychological turbulence. Social media companies are for-profit and morally nihilistic, and like drug dealers, they have an interest in keeping people hooked, often through harmful means. Social media companies are not acting in the best interest of their users. They are acting in the financial interest of their clients and their own pockets. And the software architecture of phones can act as an enabler, like a pocket slot machine, by design.
So it's not either/or. It's more of a question of where you ought to assign responsibility for which observed facts.
"Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts."
I don't know how impressive these statistics are. What needs to be considered are the causes. Like, sure, fewer teen pregnancies and less drug use sounds good on paper, but why are these the case? Is it because teens are more virtuous and responsible today? Is it because they've become more selective about who they hang out with, avoiding contact with bad influences? Is it because family life is healthy and models healthy relations? Or is the reason simply a lack of opportunity, because of total social isolation, social underdevelopment, lack of access, or pornography use? The murder rate might drop if you cut off everyone's hands, but I would hardly consider that a victory.
While centering individual responsibility and calling out the weird dynamic where people unnecessarily embrace a personal narrative previously associated with debilitating conditions to feel a sense of belonging is refreshing, this is a heavy lift.
I mean, come on.
First claim in the article:
> But correlation is not causation, and research suggests that some of the supposed mental health crisis is an epidemic of overdiagnosis.
Linked paper doesn't support this. Only one study found evidence of overdiagnosis, and the data was both noisy and only focused on ADHD. It literally said "Most reviewed studies suggest that misdiagnosis does occur; however, only one study was able to examine overdiagnosis in child and adolescent mental disorders from a methodological point-of-view. This study found significant evidence of overdiagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder."
Another claim from the article:
> Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts. If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.
This kind of muddled thinking is prevalent in the article. The vague term "rewiring" is being argued against, and the author expects that only one specific outcome should be consistent with it, and doesn't admit the obvious other explanation is that social media and internet addiction is replacing the other addictions.
I read the whole article and could deconstruct it more, but I won't--it's tinged with the author's own anecdotal conclusion that they turned out fine, so everyone else will.
What?
Also from article:
> They were coping mechanisms for [my] preexisting problems: loneliness, family instability, social anxiety, ...
I would also suspect that some of those may be partially caused by second order effects of modern digital landscape. Even if we assume his own screen use is healthy that doesn't mean everyone else is the same.
Lets not pretend modern internet addiction is the same, you are facing a fine tuned algoritm designed to keep you isolated and glued to your screen. Even boomers are fallibg for it, my mom is watching ai slop shorts on facebook now...
And everyone thinks they're fine. When I was 25, I was still afraid of eating at restaurants. But I thought I turned out fine.
I would imagine computer programming does cause a mental fatigue, but your brain is very awake (unless you're just pulling the handle on the slop machine...)
Look man, businesses can do no wrong, because a business that did wrong would immediately fail, therefore we can infer that all existing businesses are doing good things that people want. QED, science fact.
The real problem with society is all those uppity people who are racist against businesses and the wealthy.