this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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Every generation this stuff is brought up. And it always means nothing. Of course it's wrong.
Rock and roll. TV. Videogames. Social media...
Indeed, but to riff on the article a bit - the thing that's different is that social media has demonstrative harm.
We need to be teaching kids to use it responsibly, regulating tech companies to give it away responsibly, and not just banning it and grabbing screens out of hands.
Is that actually a difference?
Rock and roll causes harm: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8580930/
TV causes harm: https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/too-much-tv-might-be-bad-for-your-brain
Video games cause harm: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2000/04/video-games
Pretty much everything kids do that their parents didn't has been "proven" to cause harm. Radio, cinema, comic books, even newspapers were "proven" to harm young people.
Authoritarianism is a far bigger threat than any of these.
I do want to point out that social media use may be one of the first of these 'evils' to meet actual statistical significance on a large scale. I've seen meta-analyses which show an overall positive association with negative outcomes, as well as criticisms and no correlation found, but the sum of those (a meta-analyses of meta-analyses) shows a small positive association with "loneliness, self-esteem, life satisfaction, or self-reported depression, and somewhat stronger links to a thin body ideal and higher social capital."
I do think this is generally a public health reflection though, in the same way that TV and video games can be public health problems - moderation and healthy interaction/use of course being the important part here. If you spend all day playing video games, your physical health might suffer, but it can be offset by playing games which keep you active or can be offset by doing physical activity. I believe the same can be true of social media, but is a much more complex subject. Managing mental health is a combination of many factors - for some it may simply be about framing how they interact with the platform. For others it may be about limiting screen time. Some individuals may find spending more time with friends off the platform to be enriching.
It's a complicated subject, as all of the other 'evils' have always been, but it is an interesting one because it is one of the first I've personally seen where even kids are self-recognizing the harm social media has brought to them. Not only did they invent slang to create social pressures against being constantly online, but they have also started to self-organize and interact with government and local authority (school boards, etc.) to tackle the problem. This kind of self-awareness combined with action being taken at such a young age on this kind of scale is unique to social media - the kids who were watching a bunch of TV and playing video games didn't start organizing about the harms of it, the harms were a narrative created solely by concerned parents.
Well thought out and written. You bring up valid points. Thank you.