Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/13/internet-access-may-improve-mental-health-as-much-as-a-walk-in-the-woods.html
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Works for me, but I live for learning.
A friend once admonished me, “Don’t put on one of those educational shows!” when we were going to watch tv together. I was going to put on some beautifully filmed thing re: Egyptian archaeology and art, but they insisted, “I don’t want to learn anything!”
I gave up and didn’t even try saying, “It’s the tv equivalent of a pretty picture book!” nor did I offer to kill the sound to make it even more like one.
Years later I explained to them that learning produces tons of endorphins in me, that it’s a buzz, and they were thoroughly confused.
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I’m astonished that they were able to control for confounding variables well enough to venture a conclusion either way.
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Eh, I’ll still take the walk in the woods.
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But now if you combine them.
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Do you want cyber squirrels? Because that’s how we get cyber squirrels.
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Ditto. Especially economic variables.
People without internet access are almost always either poor, physically isolated from large population centers, living under some kind of oppressive authority, ideologically opposed to technology or some combination of the above. So it would make total sense if they were less happy on average even if internet access had no direct impact on their happiness one way or another.
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Who funded this study?
What was the sample size?
Was the happiness data self-reported or was there something quantifiable?
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I’m open to it. But is this one of those flow state analysis? Or poverty (no internet) vs non poverty?
For me, my mental state is improved by making LBO models or playing video games or learning a new skill. Sure. But walking in the woods is very different from browsing the Interwebs. There is an element of movement and the energies of nature.
Without reading the article more or researching more, I’m betting if anything this is a commentary on poverty.
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Great. Everyone hide your cyber nuts!
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It was essentially a meta-study done by the University of Oxford. It examined data from 2.4 million participants over 15 years and 186 countries.
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Webs in woods can be wonderful.
(Unless it is Mirkwood)
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As a regular user of both the internet and er… woods, I have to agree that the argument as stated is broadly true.
However, it also seems to me that on a global scale internet access is is far more damaging to mental health than walking in the woods.
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It seems like the data would be deeply troublesome both in terms of attempts to compare between people at a given location and point in time(as you mention) and longitudinally:
One doesn’t just change the internet penetration rate of a given location without lots of other things happening(some potentially caused by more internet, some the causes required to expand internet access; some unrelated but 16 years is not a short time).
It seems especially fiddly when “internet” and “telecommunications” are virtually synonymous at this point; only separated at a technical level for some weird edge cases; and kept distinct mostly because billing differently for data and voice allows various interesting price discrimination strategies. If you are going far enough back you should be able to find an actual “went from ample telecommunications but no internet to both” group; but only in the developed world where wireline telco buildout was pretty early and pervasive. Substantial chunks of the developing world would just be “nothing; then 3G or later cellular”.
There would also be the problem that people’s reported life satisfaction and social measures tend to change over the course of their lives; so, across 16 years, you would presumably need to do a bunch of futzing to compensate for the fact that being a decade+ older is a known or suspected influence on being more or less happy and social. That, at least, is something for which better latitudinal data are likely to be available(at least in relatively heavily studied locations) so is perhaps easier to compensate for.
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I had an amazing walk in the woods recently. I visited the National Trust bluebell woods at Badbury in the Vale of the White Horse, Oxfordshire.
It was like a mighty cathedral of nature, so beautiful! Genuinely refreshing to the soul and makes you think about your place in the universe, and the way we’re wrecking a mainly wonderful world with our
Then I used the internet to share some pics.
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I will say that, for my independent study with an n=1, internet access has been very good, overall, for my mental health. Of course, my internet usage is largely science shows (and Steeler discussion) on YouTube and BoingBoing, so it is a very limited diet. That is the most likely conclusion. Avoid the shitholes and you’ll be OK.
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