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.
I remember when video games were the root of all evil.
Video games and social media are very different things. Social media is actually a detriment to society.
Exactly.
This is an editorial article on a moral philosophy essay site. It’s not science news
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
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.
This doesn’t read like science, but more importantly it is deeply flawed logic:
A person is in a car that is heading off a cliff. While they are naive of this fact, they are content but destined to an untimely demise. They are made aware of the fact and become deeply anxious.
What is causative in this scenario? Ignoring the cliff, we could say that the awareness is at fault for the person’s anxiety. But if the person were better informed about their state and there was no cliff, there would be no anxiety.
A root cause analysis would show that fundamental problem is not that the driver knows where they are going, but the fact that they are headed off a cliff in the first place.
To determine that social media is the root cause of increased teenage mental illness rates, we would need to confirm that social media in a utopian environment still causes mental illness. This is a claim without much evidence, particularly because the more one becomes informed about the world the more the will be exposed to its legitimate problems. What would be more practical, then, is to determine what incidence of mental illness occurs with awareness these issues where social media is not a factor, and then to evaluate what if any factor remains to explained by social media. The editorial does not take this approach, but instead appears to attempt a firehose of rationalizations that don’t converge to make a coherent thesis.
Perhaps the editorial author’s book isn’t selling well.
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).
I have no idea what you mean about cringe boomer shit. It sounds like you’re going on a Facebook rant but you got sidetracked.
And if you’re wondering why teenagers would want to use social media, it’s a very freeing kind of technology. Kids are trying to understand their worlds, they’re dealing with a ton of stress in various ways, they have situations going on that they can’t talk about, and social media is one very good way for them to try to figure out how to handle it all.
Good for kids. I wish we had some of these tools when I was young.
You sound like a cunt, and I mean that in the nicest possible way.
Don’t talk to people so condescendingly, if you don’t know what I mean, then ask me to clarify, instead of creating a strawman.
Takes one to know one
My mistake. When I said I “have no idea what you mean”, I was trying to say that you were saying things that just don’t make any sense. But that sounds a little harsh, so I tried to soften the message a little. Oops!
No, I think you were right the first time, when you said you don’t know what I mean.
It is extremely irresponsible to give your minor a smart phone and social media, but the majority of parents do it anyways, I dont get why its happening.
It is all about the phones, not systemic issues that surround teenagers. But those pesky phones, and the apps surrounding them.
I don’t know if you’re joking, and there definitely is other problems. But it’s the fucking smartphones too mate they are a huge issue.
Removed by mod
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
Its not good for adults either.
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
Haidt seems to be incredibly whiny for a seasoned academic dealing with critiques of his very popular work. Frankly, he needs thicker skin if he wants to publish at this level. All he needs to do is simply stand behind his research and he will be vindicated as it is duplicated/scrutinized if he’s correct. This “rebuttal” does him no favors and just reeks of an inability to assess his own claims or hear possible alternatives. He sounds like somebody who thinks they cured a disease, when reality is he has contributed to an ongoing dialogue about the impact of social media - which is important!
He needs to accept that his likely isn’t the final word on the matter. He didn’t “solve” it.
Frankly, he needs thicker skin if he wants to publish at this level
Au contraire. He’s not writing for a scientific audience, he’s writing for the NYT bestsellers audience. Thin skin somehow helps with the promotion of these books.
Fair. To be clearer, if he wants to be taken seriously as an academic/authority he needs to develop thicker skin. Pop science book or not.
If the critics are wrong, he’ll be vindicated over 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 it, but this article is just contributing to my suspicions that maybe his work is more flawed than he’d like to admit.
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.
Doesnt benefit the geezers too nuch either
