Recommendable! Food for thought! The alarmism and hysteria surrounding social media and smartphone use!
George Santayana's 1905 famous quote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" fully applies here! How often in the past were then new technologies decried as causing mental health issues. Very often, too often like superstition! Why is superstition still alive at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century? No matter how many PhDs, true human intelligence and knowledge is rare and highly distributed across the entire population irrespective of formal education! Stupidity is much more common across all strata of human society.
"The United States has serious issues with mental health, but many popular explanations for the problem—such as loneliness, screen time, and social media—are built on thin evidence and inflated comparisons. ...
These measures of time spent alone also revolve around physical proximity, literally being in the room with someone. But what about hanging out online? I’m a pretty big geek, and I play Dungeons & Dragons online with friends from around the country. We’re talking, we’re laughing, we’re having a good time, but we’re thousands of miles away from each other. Shouldn’t that count as time spent with others? ...
met over 100 people [online] that I’ve not met physically. So, I feel, in some ways, more socially connected than I would have been without this technology. On the other hand, it’s probably true that if none of these online avenues were afforded to me, I would go out and meet more people in person. ...
Usually, time spent on social media and on smartphones draws teens and young adults away from television. So television is really the big casualty of the social media age. ...
Now, fifty years ago, people worried about television drawing people away from real-life relationships.
The landline was also the subject of a similar panic 100-plus years ago, but it was about women. There was a sense that women were going to neglect their household duties and find lovers via the telephone.
People also worried about the telegraph.
And at the beginning of the 19th century, people were worried that young people would spend hours looking into kaleidoscopes and ruin their lives. So, there is a cycle of panic that goes on and on without anybody worrying too much about evidence. ...
First, in most countries that have adopted smartphones and social media, we do not see a pattern of declining youth mental health. It seems to be something very specific to the United States. For various reasons, I think the best metric to track is suicides, because a body is a body, and self-report tends to be rubbish. And in most European countries, and in Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, we don’t see any evidence of a youth mental health crisis. In the United States, there was an increase in youth suicide in the 2010s, but it has now begun to reverse. Maybe it will reverse again, but so far, we’re seeing an improving trend for youth in the United States.
Second, the increase in suicide was actually much worse for middle-aged adults than it was for teens. Everybody’s worried about teenage girls, but a white male from 45 to 55 has roughly a three to five times elevated suicide risk compared to a teenage girl. ...
We also have hundreds of studies that look at time spent on social media and mental health. Generally, across this literature, we do not find that time spent on social media or smartphones is predictive of negative mental health outcomes, nor do we find that reducing social media time improves mental health in experimental studies. ...
You can also technically say that Americans are spending the most time alone that has ever been recorded. But the decrease in time spent with others over the past 20 years was 1.7 percent. So, one version of this story sounds horrible, and the other sounds like not a big deal.
This issue of effect size is a consistent problem with a lot of research in medicine and the social sciences. It’s entirely true that a study can find a statistically significant effect that has no meaning whatsoever in the real world. There’ve been a couple of unpublished studies of cell phone bans in schools that have been hyped as if they provide evidence for these bans, but they don’t, because the effect size is near zero. The actual impact of cell phone bans on student learning is zero. It does not improve student standardized testing scores, grades, or anything else. But when you run 600,000 kids through an analysis, everything is statistically significant. Plucking a hair out of their head once a day could’ve been statistically significant. ..."
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