Those graphs look more like: availability of guns in US households except for the decrease in 2017 among teens. Is it me or does that roughly line up with California and New York increasing the minimum age for handgun purchase?
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As a parent, it’s entirely the former and not the latter. My Gen Z kids have had smartphones for half of their lives but don’t do social media. They’re fine. It’s a tool.
I don’t even think the problem is social media, per se, but unmoderated, hate- and commercial-filled social media that enables general and targeted bullying. Shit, if I read the YouTube comment section for an hour a day I’d go down a dark hole and pull a rock over it.
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…and are they perfectly representative of all Gen Z kids?
I’m in rooms with dozens of Gen Z and younger kids every week. Many of them are scrolling through tiktok on their phones. If they didn’t have phones, they would not be scrolling through tiktok, and (if human nature for the past n thousand years still holds) would probably be talking to each other.
No one is saying it’s impossible to use phones or social media responsibly. It’s also possible to drink, or smoke weed, or gamble responsibly. But that doesn’t mean every kid should have unlimited access to those things.
And again, you can blame the parents, or the schools, but it’s a battle that’s much harder than previous battles, because of the insidious, ever-present, and highly-engineered and very deliberate nature of the addiction.
Nope. It’s anecdata, but one perspective.
You’re missing the point. That is kids talking to each other. Just because they are doing it differently than you’d like doesn’t mean it’s bad or wrong.
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And the ability to find communities that reflect yourself (LGBTQ, POC, etc) in the midst of physical communities that reject you is of huge benefit, one of the reasons the fascists want to end a/o control it. It’s the ability to bully and harass that is the issue, at least for my kids in my area. That should be something that has a solution other than “burn the whole thing down.”
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I also kind of wonder just how horribly isolating not having a phone would be to someone during events like the pandemic lockdowns. It might be nice to see a look at all this based on evidence, but people we know pick their answers by ideology will only keep that from happening.
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We’re going to have to agree to disagree. Passively scrolling through influencer-generated content is not “talking to each other” in any meaningful sense of the word, to my mind.
Two separate things there. They are communicating with each other, just as we are here. That’s (usually) a good thing, if the harassment and bullying can be weeded out. There is also the passive consumption of vapid bullshit, as well as actually harmful drek. Conflating these two issues is not productive. As I said above, being able to talk with folks like yourself when those are in short supply where you are can be lifesaving. Allowing 24/7 harassment and bullying can be fatal. Being able to access information that your repressive government is actively trying to keep from you is vital. We should be capable of avoiding the “throw the baby out with the bathwater” sort of error here.
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Wikipedia is horrible on those articles, on purpose. (Running the IP addresses of editors against IPs of Koch network groups would probably have a lot of hits.)
“Classical liberalism” is a 1950s invention.
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Haidt also minimizes to the point of outright dismissal the sick-making potential of the unabating storm of miseries that Gen Z has endured in its not-terribly-long life span: 9/11 and its fearful fallout, the Great Recession, the climate crisis, hundreds of school shootings, crushing student loan debt, increased economic inequality, the opioid epidemic, and the spike in words and acts of hate targeting nearly every vulnerable group in turn. All are toxic stressors, and in the 2010s, all acted upon kids’ nervous systems, affecting them to different degrees, depending on their life experiences and their genetic propensity for mental illness.
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For the most part, that’s not what they are doing. They are interacting with each other and with the creators, more than they have in generations. And unlike ever before, as @docosc points out, they aren’t limited by geography or even language like they were when that interaction with creators and each other was stories told around campfires.
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Think it’s a coincidence that Haidt overlooks all these crises that conservatives would rather not pay any attention to, and instead blames something related to the social media they’ve been attacking? 
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I hope these are well-grounded cases.
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