This article/researcher makes claims that:
a) there is a mental health crisis among teenagers which is not parallel to other comparable generations, and
b) that crisis is linked to mobile phones.
I'm not convinced by either claim.
In my experience of working with teenagers over the last couple of decades, there is a general trend that they are now better at communicating their emotional needs and emotional state. If teens are more able to clearly and openly express the fact that they are sad, does that mean they are more sad? I think not.
Teenagers face far greater economic insecurity than before, and are more acutely aware of it. What will the workforce look like when they graduate highschool? Jobs that teenagers would have been invited to do are being replaced with automated checkouts and computer vision algorithms. Teenagers are required to go into more debt than ever, to escape this lack of opportunities via education.
The article identifies that today's teenagers: get in less car accidents, have less risky sex, have a lower rate of teenage pregnancy, ingest less risky substances, are generally less violent - and presents this all as bad because it is different than what came before. Is it bad? Would people 20 years ago have thought this was bad?
The author expresses great surprise that people sleep with their phones beside their bed - whereas, it is a great surprise to me that she doesn't. It has an extremely useful function as an alarm clock.
I suspect that she would find that a vast majority of her generation of 47-year olds also sleeps with their phone within an arm's reach.
Finland has mandatory military service for males so the Finnish army gets sample of approximately 25,000 people in year and they are tested in all sorts of ways. It's a good way to get an idea what is happening. It confirms what you suspect.
Clear and statistically significant trends among young males:
* Younger generations have significantly better communication skills and ability to express themselves.
* More mental problems are reported and they cause more releases, but they are not necessarily increasing. Doctors are better trained to specially seek mental problems and take them more seriously. Other studies support this theory.
* On average young men are 7 kg heavier than in the 90's. Aerobic fitness is in rapid decline. Muscle strength has declined but only a little.
* IQ peaked in 1997 and has been decline but decline seems to plateau. Negative Flynn effect has ben observed in other countries as well (Norway, Denmark,Australia, Britain, Sweden and the Netherlands).
> ...today's teenagers: get in less car accidents, have less risky sex, have a lower rate of teenage pregnancy, ingest less risky substances, are generally less violent - and presents this all as bad because it is different than what came before. Is it bad?
It might well be, depending on the reason. We'd also probably see those effects if there was mass depression. Or if we simply locked up all teens at all times. What other "teen stuff" aren't they doing? Socializing (in person)? Exercising?
What a great summary. Tho I think the part about issues our society faces is a lot bigger than those few examples. Educated people have more than ever reasons to be depressed now:
- pollution
- economic stagnation
- inflation
- antibiotics failing
- global warming
- debt
- automation and artifical intelligence
- politics failing to tackle those issues (its a circus in some countries)
- issues like Brexit
- natural disasters
- hard manipulation via mass-media
- addiction algorithms in modern games/medias/programs
- goverments cutting expenses on healthcare and education
And many more. Im surprised young ppl still have hope, thats very brave of them.
Life is fundamentally about getting resources to sustain yourself. In that regard, humanity is, more and more dependent on the industry. At the same time, the industry is less and less dependent on humanity, since it is deriving more and more of its power and intelligence from machines.
We will probably reach a point the industry doesn't improve its survival ability by feeding and serving people. If that happens we will have reached a point where we do not have the ability to extract resources on our own since machines do all the critical parts of the job and we won't have the know how/or the access to resources.
Specifically:
- mining, farming and transportation is in the process of being automated away, as is manufacturing.
- in a world dominated by renewable energy, the cost of energy will depend on local weather. To optimize the logistic operations, we'll have to integrate weather predictions and adapt the flux of goods. Humans won't be able to compete with machines for that task, and logistics will also be automated away.
Once that part of the industry can work without human input, we'll be in deep trouble. The rest of the human economy is the result of accidental complexity due to the fact that meatware stems from biology.
This is the natural consequence of optimization and growth seeking. The only way to optimize human labor fast enough to be competitive is to optimize it away. If we're not economically competitive we will not survive. We are in the process of making ourselves redundant, and magic thinking makes us believe that it will end nicely.
Very interesting thoughts. It does seem we're heading towards some kind of technological dystopia, but there is an increasing minority of people who are aware of it. I can see it leading to some kind of schism.
People still fear the "robots will take all of our jobs!" dialogue. Many societies still have work as a core component of personal value, so the idea of people having to work less doesn't translate to "Great, I can let these robots do the work and I can enjoy myself" but to "I can't find work and so I'm a worthless disgrace."
That is also true, but that is something that can be mitigated and resolved with government policies. However, that is unlikely to happen effectively in societies that have a work as a core component of personal value as they will say "they're not working? Why should we help them?" At some point the policy changes will NEED to happen, but the societies with that core value will have a very difficult time adjusting as value systems can't be changed overnight like laws can.
I'm sitting in a McDonald's right now in the Netherlands. There are about 30 unfilled orders on the TV and only 1 cashier. How is that possible? The other cashiers were replaced by touchscreen ordering kiosks, which there are 4 of in this restaurant. This has happened in McDonalds worldwide, easily eliminating hundreds or thousands of jobs. It is only a matter of time before these ordering kiosks become commoditized. I'm surprised I can't already order on a tablet at restaurants.
I hate those tablets, they play ads. Microeconomics states that prices will always fall right down to the edge where it's barely worth manufacturing the product. Maybe there's another rule that says that the user experience in a restaurant will always fall right to the edge of it barely being worth going there.
Maybe if you only consider the first three bullet points. The rest of the list (maybe minus brexit) is decidedly more problematic today than it was 40 years ago.
Even then, it's arguable about "pollution". Sure, we've cut pollution greatly, but we're still learning how bad we actually screwed <strike>up our environment</strike> ourselves over and how difficult it is going to be to clean up.
Value of dollar now in comparison to 70s and 80s decreased. We also earn now around 30% less than our parents/grandparents and our money is worth less.
And as dollar value influences pretty much whole world, it can be applied the same way in other countries.
> Value of dollar now in comparison to 70s and 80s decreased.
In comparison to what, exactly? Compared to another currency? Compared to itself?
If another currency, then great! We can sell them more stuff because our stuff is cheaper then their own stuff.
If compared to itself: so what? Inflation is a stated policy of the Federal Reserve. My dollars may be worth less, but I make more. This isn't a problem unless you issue loans and failed to charge enough interest.
To itself. And it really depends whether you make more or less. I would argue you earn alot less because now it is significantly harder to support family of five with a single income, which was pretty normal in 70s, 80s (+you had a mortage for a big house on you, now vast majority of young couples starting families have like zero chance to buy such properties). I would love to find HN post about financial situation of young people now, which pretty much painted it all in black color but google fails me as I dont remember exact topic name.
Are you kidding me? 2.5 billion people still don't have access to proper sanitation, and they're not depressed - and you think it "brave" of young people in the West to deal with the horribleness of _Brexit_?!
The commentary in this thread just blows my mind. I'm astounded in an era of regular travel just how sheltered people in the West are.
I wouldn't overemphasis the troubles of the world. The main issues is that people don't get to enjoy progress to the extent necessary to create a sustainable prosperous society. Decommodifying housing, education and health care would solve 90% of the issue. Almost anything else can then be dealt with. Automation for example isn't a bad thing unless you also have accelerating inequality. Climate change isn't bad unless building a more energy effective society affects some people disproportionally. Etc. That people don't understand this is what will cost them.
It isn't technically hard. What is hard is making it a priority. Many countries have exchanged long term competitiveness for short term gains. Decommodifying housing would impact those who made it their business.
The process itself would be a range of options. From removing undue leverage that make people buy things they can't (or don't want to) really afford so they are reliant on rising property values, to absolute government intervention. Of course the most likely would be somewhere in between. Where the government by allocating resource (whether that is building permits, land or directly with construction) competes with the market.
And this isn't really the market not functioning as such. The market is accurately pricing things like housing high because of its importance. The problem is that eventually the market will also reflect the decreased competitiveness of important things being expensive.
Most of those things aren't really worth getting depressed over however. Economic stagnation? Civilisation was economically stagnant for more than 2,000 years and it wasn't a reason to get depressed. Ditto many other things
Anyone who gets depressed because of Brexit is just looking for a reason to be depressed. It is the lowest-stakes political crisis I could imagine.
Maybe people are getting depressed about those issues; but the solution is read less news and need to get better at filtering out things they can't control. If you consider all the things that can go wrong there never has and never will be an era that isn't depressing.
The only things on the list that are problems are antibiotics, global warming and healthcare - all of which are risks of falling out of the golden age of the last century back towards something that could be considered the normal human condition through most of history. They are also all completely solvable problems.
I do think smart phones affect people. However what people don't ask when the speculate about the young is whether you are better off otherwise. It isn't really a smart phone, college debt or even housing crisis. It is an opportunity crisis. The prospects for people who don't engage in these activities are generally worse. People >40 don't generally understand this because they are already established, so forgoing these things doesn't have much of an impact on them.
My crucial concern is whether the newer generations are expressing themselves in meaningful ways. Social media is ok for talking about ones emotions and sharing experiences through it. But what about expression through music, art, literature? Are they being hampered by consuming media instead of creating or are we just unaware of the vast creative talents that go unnoticed? Given uncertain economic times I'd expect authority figures are still pushing them to follow paths for lucrative careers.
If anything, social media has enabled newer generations to express themselves in "meaningful" ways more than ever. It may not be as a full-time profession, but plenty of people create for hobby. See: the hundreds of thousands of IG/Youtube accounts for musicians, designers, artists, and amateur poets.
Ofcourse we see so many creative people on IG/Youtube I subscribe to those who make meaningful content that inspires me, but there are many more who consume that content, but not create their own, and that's the trap I think a lot of people fall in. That's where people realise they don't actually have any real hobbies.
And that's another thing, we shouldn't need social media to feel validated or to compare, people should feel accomplishment in solace of their hobby. Sometimes the expectations of having a huge following online can even have a negative effect on the mental health of online artists. I see many talk about their own struggles and the pressures of being creative (especially the ones who start to make a living off it).
> This article/researcher makes claims that: a) there is a mental health crisis among teenagers which is not parallel to other comparable generations, and b) that crisis is linked to mobile phones. I'm not convinced by either claim.
You probably should be, because there are objective markers that don't depend on communication:
> The article identifies that today's teenagers: get in less car accidents, have less risky sex, have a lower rate of teenage pregnancy, ingest less risky substances, are generally less violent - and presents this all as bad because it is different than what came before.
If teens are avoiding risk-seeking behaviour due to an increase in underlying anxieties, then yes, it quite literally is a problem and not just because it's different. Maybe you should give the psychologist who wrote the article the benefit of the doubt.
> less car accidents, have less risky sex, have a lower rate of teenage pregnancy, ingest less risky substances, are generally less violent
These are positive changes. All of them. These were literally something bad about older generation. All these things have negative consequences on not just risk accepting person, but also to other people around.
If you are more anxious but less violent, then it is a good trade off.
Merely repeating something does not make it fact. It's shortsighted to evaluate good and bad purely by outcome. Plenty of psychological and physiological pathologies drive reduced violence, less risk taking, etc.
For instance, are you going to suggest people should become more psychopathic because it's correlated with success?
Are you going to suggest all men take testosterone suppressants because that would reduce violence, risk taking and teenage pregnancy? If the outcome is all that matters, then why not right?
I would strongly prefer anxious person in the same room over violent one. It is that simple.
If what you need is testosterone suppressant to not hit me, yes I strongly prefer you taking it over me being beaten or me doing things I did not wanted to for fear of your aggression. It is better for you too, assuming cops and courts will do the thing they are supposed to - putting you in prison.
Fortunately, men generally don't need testosterone suppressant to not be violent. Adult men violence is choice and occasionally mental problem.
Teen pregnancy rates are again result largely of sexual education, girls better able to resist pressure to have unprotected sex and boys better knowing it causes problems to them too. There is literally nothing to gain by not using a condom in that situation.
All of these are kids making better choices. That absolutely should count for something.
More anxiety does not mean constantly trembling from fear either.
Difference against violence of past generation is NOT kids rough housing. It was real fights, real hits, real injuries. Real robbery, real violence toward (say) partners, real knife or real gun. Nice manipulative technique you used. But you know what? If there are less kids bullying other kids, that is good thing too. Because while "rough housing" between two consenting kids is fine, one kid bullying the other is often called rough housing by those who want to pretend every thing is fine.
Keeping control over natural impulse to not use condom, to have random sex, to take heroin, to hit other people is a good thing. We have many natural impulses that are better off to be controlled. All of these harm not just the person who is doing it, but others too.
It's anxiety that drives national-socialists for example. Do we want them to rise again? I don't think so!
Also your example with the psychopath is a very good one. Success and money are not the most important things in the world even when instragram & co are bloated with pictures of "happy", rich, dumb people who have nothing but their looks.
If men wouldn't have taken risks probably they'd never have left Africa in the first place.
Very interesting. When I was working with young people I noticed something completely different (in europe).
They tend to be better at communication with technologies but a lot worse in real face-to-face communication.
They stand some meters apart and rather text each other than standing up in front of a group of other people to just talk to the other person.
I also see greater economic insecurities but I don't understand how this is connected to less or later gains in self-sufficiency. Shouldn't it be reversed?
In my time it was so important to get some extra bucks to spend on more/better clubs, booze and gas that we did nearly every shitty job to earn some.
What I think the article got right is the risks involved with this tendency towards less risk taking. Many activities we took part in our youth forced us to deal with unknown situations and people and we learned to cope with things. We spent hours at the riverside, in the forests etc. getting wasted, building stuff and doing nasty things that teenagers do - I think it was for the better of our development and a friend of mine who works with young people professionally supports this hypothesis.
When there are no insecurities and problems to tackle you don't learn to stand on your own feet. Learning to cope with stressful and strange situations and people at least helped me to find ways out of trouble instead of ending my life or get killed.
When we were bullied at school we met the bullies at the yard and beat the sh*t out of them instead of being overwhelmed by pseudo-anonymous groups of people on the net. I think that was easier as a mechanism of coping and at least you could do something about it.
I wouldn't underestimate the psychological stress they have to deal with nowadays and I think I also wouldn't want to switch positions.
I'm happy I grew up before this digital revolution just early enough to know the differences.
> Teenagers face far greater economic insecurity than before, and are more acutely aware of it. What will the workforce look like when they graduate highschool? Jobs that teenagers would have been invited to do are being replaced with automated checkouts and computer vision algorithms. Teenagers are required to go into more debt than ever, to escape this lack of opportunities via education.
Sometimes it blows my mind that even in "educated circles" of the west there's such a blatant lack of perspective on the rest of the world. We still live in a world where 3 million people a year die of diarrhea - and you think economic insecurity is the reason Western kids are depressed?
No, this is not why teenagers are depressed. If that were even remotely true every teenager on Earth not from a G8 or Scandanavian country would be jumping off a ledge by the time they're 14.
People in area where their friends die of diarrhea are depressive too. They get sad, they suicide, they have traumas and mental problems. They self medicate with alcohol, drugs, excessive risk and what not to make pain go away.
That does not make it impossible for rich countries people to be depressed due to economy going down relatively.
Is it as simple as "phone bad, sunshine good?" No probably not, but there are studies out there linking social media to depression, and many studies linking loneliness to poor mental health.
You claim 'working with teenagers over the last couple of decades' while making the delineation of 'her generation of 47-year olds'.
Even if you began working with teens at 20, 'decades' would put you in your 40's as well? If that is the case, why try and separate your self from the same demographic?
> The author expresses great surprise that people sleep with their phones beside their bed - whereas, it is a great surprise to me that she doesn't. It has an extremely useful function as an alarm clock.
You misread the article. Not beside their bed, but in the bed with them.
I’d say that since teen suicides are significantly up, yes they are sadder today. And by far the biggest change in young people’s lives today versus previous generations is being constantly connected to the Internet via their phones, more specifically social media.
The suicide rate is a horrible judge of sadness among a generation. The rate is never very stable, and the "three times increase" described for girls is going from 2/100000 to 6/100000. And constant internet access could also cause a change in methods, accounting for some amount of that rise.
More than a mental health crisis or go outside more, the biggest harm that social+smartphone has ever done is end of creating things. The new generation is spending huge amount of time in consumption and very little in creation. This is going to be a boon for the producers (book writers, movie makers etc) who will be in short supply for much larger consumption crowd. This will eventually be reflected in massive wealth gap where someone mints out large some of money out of 5 minute YouTube video becoming money sinks and while consumption crowd simply becomes money sources.
Look at the number of musicians, photographers etc complaining they can't make a living nowadays because someone else is willing to do the same thing for free.
Nobody being creative you say?
Though I share skepticism on smartphones. Off to read a book to my daughter now.
As a gigging pianist who struggles to get performances, I often think back to before recorded music. There was a musician playing or there was no music. Think of all the functions and events that automation, via recordings, has eliminated. It is not surprising, therefore, that the careers of musicians have been hollowed out and I must code to pay the bills.
Article has got me thinking that when the little one is old enough, she can have a laptop with ableton, Photoshop, Python, office tools and access to (the sfw parts of) Wikipedia
There isn't enough research out there that distinguishes between different types of screen time.
Do you have a source for that? Young people have way more access to creation tools than ever before. Blogs (writing), memes (photo editing), vlogs (film creation), Instagram (photography)... Not to mention YouTube is the most incredible source of tutorials on just about every topic imaginable. The internet and smartphones have made all these cheaper/freer than ever before. Anyone with a creative itch has a ton of avenues to learn, share and monetize their creative interests. I find it hard to believe that young people are creating less than earlier generations.
There's more creation but virtually all of it is ADHD-driven - shallow quick-hit micro-entertainment designed to drive analytics.
And a lot of it is interchangeable and repetitive - like all those Instagram photos taken in the same popular locations with the same few stock poses.
The same thing applies to music (generic watered-down techno with bass-drum-under-samples and maybe a bit of synth), visual art (digital paintings of pretty anime-influenced girls, lone heroic fantasy figures dwarfed by an impossibly huge menacing monster, relatively trivial generative code animations), and short movies (generic sci-fi settings and tropes, generic scripts, pro-quality CGI.)
Unusual talent, deep mastery of a medium with some awareness of its history, non-trivial content, and an original voice are very rare.
It's not that it's all terrible, but there's far more superficial trope mimicry than powerfully resonant original creative work.
This reeks of "things were so much better in my day". 20 years ago teenagers would watch copious amounts of TV, anime tropes were already around, it was the decade of shitty superhero movies and trashy TV shows. I give you the gamefied dopamine releasers, but it was never so easy to participate in online communities, find maker spaces, set up a kickstarter/patreon and go nuts creating whatever you feel like.
Sturgeon's Law - 90% of everything is crap. This has always been the case.
To make a compelling argument, you have to show that it's somehow worse than it used to be. For my money, the peak quality now attained by art is definitely better than it used to be. Why, even just in music, within the past decade the musical genres thoroughly burst their banks and now I find most new music defies classification - I can only listen in wonder. Not all of it is good, to be sure, but vast amounts of it are at least interesting.
My 12 year old is very creative in Kerbal Space Program. And what he's trying to do is hard - things never work first time, and you have to spent a lot of time trying to figure out why. Sure, it's not how I learned, building go-karts and tree houses and simple electrical stuff, but it's still learning how to create and debug.
A bigger problem for me is that today's generation have no hope in figuring out how things like a smartphone work from first principles. At least when I was growing up in the 1970s, I had the fiction that I could understand how things work, and so I didn't give up trying.
I would say they still do have ways of figuring these things out - even incredibly complicated things. It just takes a little longer. It also depends at what level of abstraction you want to look at things anyway. You probably didn't know the physics behind the stuff you built in the 70s; it was just an abstraction of it using capacitors, diodes and resistors. Or the biology of the wood you used for the tree house, at a cellular level. In my opinion it's the same premise.
I'm on the younger end of the HN spectrum, so I grew up playing Minecraft pretty regularly. I remember stumbling into low-level hardware design with a thing in the game called Redstone. You could combine it in numerous ways to make various Boolean logic gates. That progressed into making memory, ALU's, and the like in said game. Fast forward 8 years and I'm a hardware engineer IRL. Once you understand the basic 'building blocks' of how something works you'll develop an interest in the rest of the abstraction generally.
I suppose the best way to see it would be to think of it like a program. You can build a program from bunch of functions, not knowing how those individually "work", and have a finished product at the end. That's still an enjoyable process. You might enjoy it so much that you jump into the library and look at how the functions work. You might go further and look at how the code works at a lower-level language. Then down to machine code. Then at a part level (graphics card, processor, RAM etc). Then a component level. Then at an electro-dynamics level. You can keep going further and further into deeper levels of phsyics.
A kid is still going to have a grand old time plugging in all the parts of their computer and having it turn on, as much as they do building tree-houses and go-karts.
Boy, is it hard to return to first principles for anyone now. Just my little student room contains thousands of laws I'm not familiar with yet vaguely dependent upon.
I guess it depends a lot on the question whether you call a short message about your neighbor's hairstyle or a photo of the food you are currently eating as "creation".
Isn't this just observation/ignorance bias? We have a generation raised on Minecraft, and on secondary and tertiary content around Minecraft. Even with Fortnite, children don't just want to play the game, they want to stream and make videos around Fortnite. Or take social media where creative decisions about expression (filters, gifs, memes) are made all the time. "Creative work" is far more accessible now than ever before and children are participating in it.
That is simply not true. All my generation could do was read (consume) books and create small useless projects that lead nowhere. There was no way to find likely minded people, cooperate and share.
Kids today can create many things: mod games, work on scientific project even start businesses... Some voluntary work done by teenagers is surpassing professional companies in quality. Even taking pictures with phone creates something.
And with niche hobbies one can get at some level (for hobbyst) just by watching a few hours of youtube videos. Again it is not "consumption" but learning.
Gaming is the same thing, kids are learning cooperation, new skills, husttle etc.
It is not just media consumption. Computers and internet do not work the way books or TV works. It is dialog, two way communication that takes user feedback.
Do you have some statistics to back that up? Without statistics it's pretty just s much meaningless about how kids these days are lazy... A complaint which every generation has made since long before smartphones existed.
> The new generation is spending huge amount of time in consumption and very little in creation.
I think that's true for the current generation, so many adults I know don't appear to have any hobbies (creative or otherwise) whatsoever and spend every second of their free time consuming and not creating, not even consuming good content but crappy reality shows. I do more than most people I know (less than I'd like and mostly coding stuff) but I still come up way short of my perception of my fathers generation, of an evening I could generally find them hacking away at something out in the shed.
Is that really new? Most adults I knew growing up didn't have hobbies. They sat around watching TV. Maybe people who see a decline had exceptional role models and weren't aware of how things were for other people.
I got into all kinds of creative hobbies because everyone around me was so boring. We were always the exception. It's been true through human history. The weirdos who go out and build a plane or a car or start a movement were always mocked and pathologized before they were venerated.
I don't think that's true for the new generation. I think it's true for the generation before - when I was a kid all we did was watch TV until we got kicked out then we biked around and played outdoors. Not so much creation going on.
Kids these days OTOH want to become YouTubers... and they actually CAN and DO with free video editing apps, 4K cameras built into their phones, etc. They're making memes (just look at all the creativity coming out of something as inane as TikTok), and just look at Minecraft.
I say wait. I see this as a wave, and it's not only mainstream smartphone users. The whole world has seen decrease in craft. My father's generation did a lot more themselves, but large scale everything and offshore meant => buy everything at a store.
For instance, IIRC, MIT or CMU reopened glass making factories that were retired. They too felt that people need some tangible work for their own good.
Playing devils advocate. The consumer group has to make money from work, and in theory that work has to provide value to society. I think the amount of people doing creative pursuits has always been a minority, not everyone was a painter, writer or musician in the past which was partly why the art had value in the first place.
If/when I have kids, I think I'll be doing everything I can to keep them off smart phones (or at least, YouTube + social media + games like Fornite).
All these platforms seem explicitly designed to exploit insecurities and encourage a mindless mob mentality. It's the antithesis of individualism and I cannot see how it could possibly improve one's life (at least, before you have the maturity to be comfortable in your own skin).
The more I read articles like this, the more I think the whole thing is pure toxicity.
I don't know how realistic or practical it's going to be to ban smartphones/social media, while still encouraging programming, internet research, experimentation and so on.
If you don't give your kids smart phones you cut them off of people. It's a conundrum.
You will only be able to keep your kids off smart phones if you live in a community not using smart phones much for example the Amish. I think parents of the one percent could also create such a community for their children if they are diligent and choose the right private school.
My 6 year old son will go to a summer camp where smart phones are expressly forbidden. Not that I give him a smart phone but at least the older children won't have smart phones, too.
I think we should think holistically, this means, don't only look at school but also at family, peer relations and society at large.
In other words I propose that we should completely forbid functional smart phones for children below 10 years then officially introduce smart phones in school as a part of the school's curriculum. The curriculum also limits usage and relaxes the rules when the children get older. Children also should have a say about rules.
Also needed are places where children and teenagers can meet and these places must be autonomously accessible (for example near the school but independent from school).
Such a community allows the children to learn about internet and social media in a safe and controlled manner. I think the children would prefer to play together instead of staying alone in bedrooms anyway.
By common values and mutual consent. What you're proposing, in the context of broader society, would have to be imposed top-down. Maybe I misunderstood and you're just saying it as a nice what-if, in which case I would agree that small children should be grounded in the physical world first.
> If you don't give your kids smart phones you cut them off of people. It's a conundrum.
You cut them off from people if they don't have a $1000 computer in their pocket?
Dumb phones are still a thing. They can call, text, and many have a camera that can send lower-res images. I think that's way more than enough to stay in touch. They don't need "Apps".
Sorry to tell you this, but teenagers don’t text anymore. They use apps instead - Instagram, Snapchat, Whatsapp, Telegram - because texting is a broken system that doesn’t work reliably. If you cut your kid off from a smartphone, given today’s teenagers, you would be excluding them from anything social outside of school.
Does your friend group include both iPhones and Androids? From experience, any group chat that includes both is going to result in splits (like in IRC), messages simply not going through, and messages arriving multiple days late. In addition, they don’t have the usability features that you get from apps, like read receipts, or being able to add a person to a group message and them being able to see the entire history.
EDIT: That said, you don’t need a $1000 iPhone. A $200 used smartphone (easily found for iPhone or Android) is good enough.
Point well taken. Apps do provide some usability boost and it's true that in a mixed iOS/Android setting things can get funky sometimes, but I always assumed that it was a carrier issue.
As much as I hate Facebook, Messenger is pretty damn solid.
I don’t think it’s smartphones, I think it’s the fact that the entire ecosystem of our most used apps is a walled garden. Our entire experience is made up of proprietary corporate apps. We have little choice to change or create our own information flows - everything is dictated by hidden code/algorithms. If I can’t see the code, I am not the one doing the controlling, I am being controlled. The most detrimental app we all use - banking and money creation, is the most hidden and unchallenged one so far. We’re still using the legacy Industrial Age money and banking system.
I think it’s time that we evolve to a more compassionate world.
To help build the distributed, cooperative and open source economy check out The MetaCurrency Project (Ceptr, Holochain), Secure Scuttlebutt and Manyverse, DAT, Loomio, CoBudget and others
What does the ‘More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible’ (Charles Eisenstein) look like to you?
Does having a closed source system for our communication, banking and governance tools help keep the ‘smartest’ people at the helm, or is this grandiosity and immature magician energy? Does it create an oppressor, victim and savior triangle?
I don't think it's smartphones either. I think it's a philosophical issue with digital systems in general. The over-simplified abstractions, physical distancing, and flattening of affect lead to superficiality and constant unfocused distraction.
Open/closed isn't even an issue compared to the limitations of the medium itself - because there is no such thing as a truly open digital system.
Only the smartest people can create industrial-scale digital systems by definition, so the idea that opening up the source code will somehow change this is very hard to take seriously.
Smartphones and social media have begun to represent this weird post-modern phenomena of the destruction of social relationships.
So few social experiences happen through a non-cybernetic medium now. The average number of interactions a person has online now must be higher than those offline. Platforms like Facebook or Twitter don't connect us with more people, they detach us from more people and connect us to their platform.
On the other hand.....surely there is some value to being able to communicate instantly with people from vastly different geographies and backgrounds? Like, I'm talking daily to two guys from about 4000km away, and I don't even know what they look like - we just help each other on a gamedev group. If I have an issue with my car I can go to a dedicated group for that model on FB and ask literally hundreds of owners a question - when my dad had an issue with his soviet-made MZ motorcycle the best he could do was just take the thing apart and hope for the best.
Like, when I'm away "on my phone" I frequently actually talk to someone - there is human interaction in there.
This point always gets made in any similar discussions. I think on it's face it makes sense; why wouldn't a freer flow of information be good? But I've come to believe that maybe this is too simplistic a view of the actual effects. History teaches us that people are strongly tribalistic. While it's true that disparate groups can sometimes come together and augment their success, it's also true that proximity often causes conflict. There's probably a strongly evolutionary mechanism behind this. So while it might feel like the free availability of information and the free availability of empathy are one and the same, they really aren't. And might it turn out that such a misconception could do real harm?
I agree. It's true that it is easier than ever to have instant access to just about anyone in the world, but because it's so easy, we become less interested in actually investing in people and forming lasting bonds. Why bother when we can get what we need without? What used to be genuine connections formed by necessity and shared experiences have now become quick and easy transactions. Social media and the gig economy have made interpersonal relations into fast food, and the world feels smaller and less fullfilling because of it.
This is a bit different, in my opinion. If you're interacting with someone over text message or phone call, things are very different in comparison to interacting over Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
In one case, you're directly interacting with someone. In another case, you're interacting with someone over the context of a Facebook post or a tweet or whatever. The former is an actual interaction (arguably, a simulation), the latter is quite literally a simulacrum of one (or many). Thus my point about this being a post-modern phenomena.
This phenomena was aptly described by The Invisible Committee's call to insurrection in one of their manifestos titled "Now"[0].
> The necessary condition for the reign of the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) is that beings, places, fragments of the world remain without any real contact. Where the GAFA claim to be “linking up the entire world,” what they’re actually doing is working toward the real isolation of everybody. By immobilizing bodies. By keeping everyone cloistered in their signifying bubble. The power play of cybernetic power is to give everyone the impression that they have access to the whole world when they are actually more and more separated, that they have more and more “friends” when they are more and more autistic. The serial crowd of public transportation was always a lonely crowd, but people didn’t transport their personal bubble along with them, as they have done since smartphones appeared. A bubble that immunizes against any contact, in addition to constituting a perfect snitch. This separation engineered by cybernetics pushes in a non-accidental way in the direction of making each fragment into a little paranoid entity, towards a drifting of the existential continents where the estrangement that already reigns between individuals in this “society” collectivizes ferociously into a thousand delirious little aggregates. In the face of all that, the thing to do, it would seem, is to leave home, take to the road, go meet up with others, work towards forming connections, whether conflictual, prudent, or joyful, between the different parts of the world. Organizing ourselves has never been anything else than loving each other.
It'd be interesting to see usage statistics about that. During my commute, I'm often talking to friends (both from the same city and from other continents) - but I also spend some amount of time on HN and Reddit, the latter being a lot more "time-filler" and less social activity. And even the more personal social networks (like Facebook, excluding Messenger) fell strongly in the latter category last I used them.
Social media and mobile are as tightly linked as highways and cars.
Instagram, Twitter and all messengers are inherently mobile, not just in their design but at their core. Their pattern derive from mobile usage, as opposed to desktop patterns.
Twitter is clearly a byproduct of phones: same length as SMS, even worked through SMS at the start (when smartphones were mostly a cool concept or weird devices). There are tons of sources linking social media and smartphones, see for example https://marketingland.com/facebook-usage-accounts-1-5-minute...
I did not read the article, because I usually do not click such titles (only comments section), because obviously, no, the smartphone generation is not "destroyed", just different. Some changes for the better, some for the worse.
The good?
The possibilities of smartphones are just awesome. It is amazing to be in touch with people all over the world. And all this huge knowledge .. avaiable in an blink. Who does even remember how it was to not be able to google just something you want to know? You needed to have books, or know expert people, or people to know which book to read. And now? Just go online and if you know how, you will find your information. Or get your amusement, your news, your need to be acnowledged.
But all of this is still brand new. So we still have to learn not to get lost in it. Be still aware that you have a physical body with needs and sensations. And people seem to forget, that doing sports or climbing a mountain is something very different, from watching a video about it.
But television is even older and there it was only consumption. Now it is interaction - only, and that is sadly a bad part, mostly controlled by coorporations who wants to distract your attention as a buisness modell. Something there got really out of hand and with kids growing up with tailered ads accustomed to data from their whole online activity ever ... than this is where I see the real danger. But kids are allways much smarter than the older generation thinks they are, so I believe they will be doing fine.
I've stopped using smartphones 'cause started to feel yourself like "Walking dead" personage: public transport, stores, streets - many people like zombies watching inside their screens. This is really scaring. And of course the one of the biggest factors of loneliness epidemic around the world.
And I keep repeating: with the proliferation of IMs, those "zombies watching inside their screens" are likely engaged in a much richer social life than the generations before them. Smartphones and the Internet removed the impact of space and diminished the impact of time on communication. What do you think these "zombies" are doing with their screens? In a big part, they're talking to other people!
I can't even imagine having the conversations I have on social media with the people around me. Talking animals discussing kink gear at Pride. Julián Castro acknowledging trans people at the debate. Getting help and sharing information on a piece of software made by people on the other side of the continent (or planet). The rights of androids and holograms.
How do I even find a common language with people whose main activities are poker, racing, and sports? These are all fine activities, but I always want to go off and do anything else when I try to socialize locally. We don't click.
It's not like I was more interested in them before I had an always-on internet connection. Social media and the internet in general gave me an outlet and community for the things I was drawn to before the internet entered the picture.
The previous generation was fighting world war. This generation is fighting with itself. What is bad? I am not so sure. To see long term effects of this we will have to wait.
One thing is sure though after world war people changed and hopefully the self destruction mode of this generation might change themselves. Maybe for good or bad. Again we will have to wait.
It's cyclical. None of this matters, because we adapt. It was rock n roll, television, video games, now smart phones. It will be something else. Perhaps we are all mentally screwy, or perhaps it's another exaggeration. Either way, it's too big. It's like the ice age. It just crushes any and all things. It's not inherently evil. It's just new technology. We will get use to it. People are addicted, but there will be a pullback. It will come back to equilibrium. Or it won't. But life will keep ticking along.
Not necessarily, since we now live in a world where your every movement, action, relationship, and communication is intercepted and analyzed. Your thoughts are next. We don't need microchips because our phones are our microchips, but we may get them anyway, for "security" (that's security of government against its people of course). Things change when we have autonomous drone swarms flitting across our cityscapes and nanobots picking away at our insides. Do you believe it is possible to control a person's will? These are different times, and the life that "keeps ticking along" is not necessarily for any of "us".
The article describes declines in amount of sleep. Having just finished Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep I was surprised to discover that measurable cognitive effects and mental health problems like depression and anxiety occur when sleep drops by as little as one hour (7 instead of 8).
It’s certainly believable that smart phones do affect sleep if nothing else and if so that could explain in part the increased incidences of mental health problems and other issues described in the article.
I think it really have destroyed the idea of how the previous generation think that the next generation should look like. I think we’re only in the beginning of a very different world the post WWII folks lived. People grow up much faster nowadays and are being exposed to things never thought of before. The next generations will do things differently, and unless we destroy ourselves, that’s a good thing.
Everyone else on planet earth calls them Generation Z or Zoomers. Dammit this is that author who makes up her own words for things that already have well-established monikers isn't it. I knew she'd make it back on here at some point.
We're also getting better at helping young people grow and diagnosing their issues.
That may be a reason behind the numbers from health, before they were just dumped on society without a higher education.
It is sad to see what is happening to people. Just take public transport and you will see so many people scrolling social networks and consuming useless content.
This is such an "old man yells at cloud" attitude.
The alternative is, what? Striking up conversation with fellow passengers who definitely don't want to talk to me? Staring mindlessly out the window? Consuming useless content via newspaper instead?
The alternative is staring into space, being aware of your surroundings, focusing your thoughts on the things going around in your immediate life, rather than using every available 20 second period of time to stare at a screen. Sure, people read crap on print while on the train before, but people weren't whipping out the paper for those 30 seconds in the elevator or while walking across the street.
I think that's the biggest issue: these devices intend to remove every moment of contemplation and critical thought we might otherwise employ to pull ourselves out of the desperately worsening situation we face. At least the television stayed in your living room and you were compelled to leave that room and interact with people in order to remain a living person. Now we just carry the TV around with us and it's more addictive than ever.
Looking at most of that data, a lot of this seems to be a combination of a tanking economy/jobs market/gig economy, and a technology that allows one to feel more connected without having to spend money to go out. The iPhone has worn the continuing echoes of late stage capitalism like a glove, and in the same way the homeless use drugs to make their shitty lives more bearable, it seems to me people are doing the same with phones. You can sleep anywhere if you're drunk, and you don't have to spend money by going out (goods and transport) if you have your phone/and/or services that popped up to support the interwebs 2.0.
The article focuses on teens. What's a teenage summer job actually worth these days? It's not going to make any kind of dent in college tuition. And there really no need to get one if you aren't driving... (Which ties into other stats in the article.)
I opted out of driving in the late 90s because getting a shite car to go to a shite job to pay for the shite car looked like a terrible deal. The pay at the dairy queen hasn't gotten much better in the last twenty years, and it sounds like the kids aren't seeing the value in the car as much as my peers did.
"The economy" is doing fine, but that's not a very interesting bunch of numbers for most people. The private economy of the majority US households has been getting steadily worse for decades.
Seriously, even as an adult I have circles of friends who exclusively organize events through Facebook and interact with each other through Snapchat and Instagram. When I was a wee nerd I would've resented my parents intensely if they had cut me off from my AIM and ICQ accounts, hah.
Social media is like booze - social lubricant when used responsibly, but can cause problems in those with addictive personalities. Teach your children to use it responsibly, instead of forcing them to be teetotalers.
So you want your kids to grow up friendless? That is pretty much the de facto outcome of removing the platform where all the other kids are getting their shared experiences, forming groups, planning parties, creating inside jokes, etc.
Each of these have been flogged ad-nauseum by the media in their time of peak popularity so that the older people can sit back with a smug quip "Kids these days..."
Did you actually read the article? Because all of the author's claims have data to match, it's not just the perennial kids these days rant. As a member of the so called iGen, I can attest anecdotally that the prevalence of anxiety and mental health issues is very real.
I help run meetups for, well, furries. Helped out with conventions too.
At least for that societal segment the prevalence of mental health is obvious, though I wonder if the rise is more that people are slowly becoming less keen to ostracise people with mental health issues and more keen to try and help them.
I sorely hope that my idle musing proves true. Because bottling it up forever didn't seem to help much.
It's hard to believe that one could hide a mental health disorder for long. I have had relationships with two girls with anxiety and its effects are easy to see. One had a nervous breakdown driving on the highway, eventually beginning SSRIs after the relationship ended, and the other needed to take medication daily to function normally. The second had started taking meds only briefly before we began dating and so it was a constant battle(? not really the right word) for her to discover that she could do things while on the medication that she was previously too afraid to do before, such as socializing in large groups and other things like that.
I'm not convinced by either claim.
In my experience of working with teenagers over the last couple of decades, there is a general trend that they are now better at communicating their emotional needs and emotional state. If teens are more able to clearly and openly express the fact that they are sad, does that mean they are more sad? I think not.
Teenagers face far greater economic insecurity than before, and are more acutely aware of it. What will the workforce look like when they graduate highschool? Jobs that teenagers would have been invited to do are being replaced with automated checkouts and computer vision algorithms. Teenagers are required to go into more debt than ever, to escape this lack of opportunities via education.
The article identifies that today's teenagers: get in less car accidents, have less risky sex, have a lower rate of teenage pregnancy, ingest less risky substances, are generally less violent - and presents this all as bad because it is different than what came before. Is it bad? Would people 20 years ago have thought this was bad?
The author expresses great surprise that people sleep with their phones beside their bed - whereas, it is a great surprise to me that she doesn't. It has an extremely useful function as an alarm clock.
I suspect that she would find that a vast majority of her generation of 47-year olds also sleeps with their phone within an arm's reach.