> The Washington Post editorial board would call on schools to ban cellphones entirely - part of a new moral panic about kids and digital devices, many of whose parents were once prohibited from bringing pagers to school.
I think we're too soon to know if this is a moral panic. It's a mental health worry for teenagers on TikTok etc. We don't know if it's justified or not.
Jonathan Haidt has a new book, The Anxious Generation, where he presents evidence that smartphones and social networking really do cause a decline in teenager mental health.
FWIW, I thought he did pretty well and came away more convinced of his theses. For most of Tyler's alternative and let's say colorful explanations of the data, Haidt provided different sets of data and explanations that were more convincing. As a libertarian and techno optimist, Tyler seemed pretty biased, for example when he offered as an explanation for the plummeting mental health of teens at the exact time smartphones get introduced a random " maybe everyone's mood just got worse randomly". The only thing Haidt didn't refute that well was Tyler's (imo overconfident) assertion that teens will just use AI to summarize social media to them and spend more time with friends.
> Two things need to be said after reading The Anxious Generation. First, this book is going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe. Second, the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science. Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people.
...
> Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers.
I think we're too soon to know if this is a moral panic. It's a mental health worry for teenagers on TikTok etc. We don't know if it's justified or not.