I’m surprised by the comparisons to pearl-clutching over comic books and D&D and stuff here in the comment section. Perhaps its my child and education research bubble, but the negative effects of social media, greatly aided by smartphones, seems to be getting really clear, and I thought it was accepted by most.
I don’t care about Haidt, I’m not going to read his book, I’ve only ever heard of him in a negative light on forums like these. But the core thesis that social media and smartphones are causing negative mental health consequences is much bigger than Haidt.
I see two arguments here. One is dismissing the idea that depression has gotten worse, the other is saying that there’s no link to social media.
For the first, the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System is a massive yearly survey done by the CDC. It surveys hundreds of thousands of kids a year.
From 1999 to 2013, the depression data was basically flat, or declining slightly. From 2017 to today it’s risen from 27% to 34%. Suicide consideration or attempts had been falling until 2007, and then it’s been climbing again ever since. (2021 surpassed 2017 as the highest year, contrary to the claim above).
Number of minutes per week spent with friends has also dropped sharply since 2012 (and was doing so before the pandemic) from about 150 minutes pre-2012 to just 70-minutes in 2019 (pre-Covid). That’s less that half the time spent hanging out with friends, and it is not perfectly replaced by IMing with friends, but is for the most part replaced by anonymous social media.
Now the data connecting this directly to smart phones and social media is more circumstancial, and obviously other things can also be causing depression – Trump, climate change, etc etc. But I don’t see how we can be blasé about what’s clearly an addiction by many young people.
My wife is a teacher and recounts these stories, and as an Ed researcher I’ve seen it and notice when it comes up elsewhere, but in a huge number of high school’s it’s become impossible to separate kids from phones. Strong policies to ban cellphones are few and far between, in part because parents demand that their kids have them. Schools have policies about not checking phones in class, but every classroom I visit has kids scrolling Tik Tok or watching YouTube. Teachers have generally decided that it’s not worth their energy stopping class over this, so it becomes a series of gentle reminders. “Please put your phone away.” “Again, please don’t look at your phone while we’re talking.” If kids phones get taken away they tend to turn themselves off completely.
We can blame schools and teachers, but I honestly don’t believe teachers themselves are worse than they used to be, but the problem is just severe. It seems that many of these kids just have a really, really hard time separating from their phones for more than a few minutes, to a degree that we didn’t see with TV, books, comics, D&D, or any other moral hazzard that some try to compare this to.
Can’t be too careful on the web.