Sep 21, 2024 10:08 PM
(This post was last modified: Sep 21, 2024 10:09 PM by C C.)
https://www.vox.com/technology/372690/in...tal-health
EXCERPTS: . . . This is all happening against a backdrop where seven states have passed [smartphone] bans in schools, and another 14 are considering bans. There’s also a wave of cultural pressure, intensified by NYU professor Jonathan Haidt, whose latest book, The Anxious Generation, rallies parents to work together to “swim against the tide of ever-increasing screen time.”
One of his collaborators, psychologist Jean Twenge, was one of the first to sound the alarm about the link between youth mental health and time online back in 2017 when she asked in an Atlantic essay, “Have smartphones destroyed a generation?”
To be clear, researchers like Haidt and Twenge aren’t suggesting we simply ban kids from ever touching a smartphone or scrolling through a social media feed. We don’t actually know how such bans or even changes in policy would affect youth mental health. Meanwhile, the school phone bans that have been sweeping the nation don’t govern what parents do at home. We are, however, starting to use the phrase “phone ban” a lot more than we used to.
“I hear that talk of a ban as a kind of howl of despair, really, that we’ve lost control,” said Sonia Livingstone, a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics, who has been studying kids and tech for decades. “We’ve lost control of the feed from the companies, and we’ve lost control of our education and our health and our family life by accepting — as part of whatever kind of Faustian contract — the infrastructure of commerce.”
In other words, we’re letting the tech companies win.
Companies like Meta make money by getting their users to engage more with their products, so they can collect data about them and sell targeted ads accordingly. Instagram’s new Teen Accounts might make parents feel like they have a bit more control over how their kids factor into these transactions, but their kids’ attention is still the product.
[...] Livingstone told me, we should study the causes of youth mental health problems, rather than focus on the consequences of screen time. Linda Charmaraman, founder and director of the Youth, Media, and Wellbeing Lab at Wellesley College, pointed to the surgeon general’s call for warnings on social media platforms as a sign of “a little bit of a hysterical panic.” She also said that solving the mental health problem will require more than a crackdown on smartphone use.
“People want something to stop that rise of mental illness as if this was going to be the magic bullet,” Charmaraman said. “I think it could actually cause people to not look at the other root causes of mental illness.” (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: . . . This is all happening against a backdrop where seven states have passed [smartphone] bans in schools, and another 14 are considering bans. There’s also a wave of cultural pressure, intensified by NYU professor Jonathan Haidt, whose latest book, The Anxious Generation, rallies parents to work together to “swim against the tide of ever-increasing screen time.”
One of his collaborators, psychologist Jean Twenge, was one of the first to sound the alarm about the link between youth mental health and time online back in 2017 when she asked in an Atlantic essay, “Have smartphones destroyed a generation?”
To be clear, researchers like Haidt and Twenge aren’t suggesting we simply ban kids from ever touching a smartphone or scrolling through a social media feed. We don’t actually know how such bans or even changes in policy would affect youth mental health. Meanwhile, the school phone bans that have been sweeping the nation don’t govern what parents do at home. We are, however, starting to use the phrase “phone ban” a lot more than we used to.
“I hear that talk of a ban as a kind of howl of despair, really, that we’ve lost control,” said Sonia Livingstone, a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics, who has been studying kids and tech for decades. “We’ve lost control of the feed from the companies, and we’ve lost control of our education and our health and our family life by accepting — as part of whatever kind of Faustian contract — the infrastructure of commerce.”
In other words, we’re letting the tech companies win.
Companies like Meta make money by getting their users to engage more with their products, so they can collect data about them and sell targeted ads accordingly. Instagram’s new Teen Accounts might make parents feel like they have a bit more control over how their kids factor into these transactions, but their kids’ attention is still the product.
[...] Livingstone told me, we should study the causes of youth mental health problems, rather than focus on the consequences of screen time. Linda Charmaraman, founder and director of the Youth, Media, and Wellbeing Lab at Wellesley College, pointed to the surgeon general’s call for warnings on social media platforms as a sign of “a little bit of a hysterical panic.” She also said that solving the mental health problem will require more than a crackdown on smartphone use.
“People want something to stop that rise of mental illness as if this was going to be the magic bullet,” Charmaraman said. “I think it could actually cause people to not look at the other root causes of mental illness.” (MORE - missing details)