A few days ago I wrote that we should stop "blaming everything on social media." I based this on the fact that research just doesn't seem to back it up. Social media isn't all strawberries and clear skies, but overall its effect seems to be mostly neutral or even moderately positive.
But research is hard to do in this area and it's usually years behind anyway. So when a longtime reader sent me a different perspective, I figured it was worth posting to give the other side of the story. Here it is.
I'm a longtime reader and appreciate your work. I became—and have remained since—a daily visitor to the site starting when I lived in Chile as a college student two decades ago, when your writing was a connection to home.
Since then I've gone on to teach, coach, and be an administrator in public high schools in Oregon and earned my master's and doctorate in education. I've worked through the years of mass adoption of cell phones and deployment of social media.
I've read in multiple pieces—most recently in your ten worst trends post—where you've stated we need to stop blaming social media for ills because it, holistically, probably is a net positive. In my experience with students specifically—and this is something I hear from every teacher, educational assistant, counselor, parent, coach, and administrator I've spoken with—cell phones and social media have had a massive negative impact on quality of life for teens. A few examples:
- Sleep: huge numbers of kids have terrible sleep because they are a) up all night on their devices and b) when they do fall asleep, are constantly awakened by notifications.
- Social pressure and bullying: where these used to semi-end once a student arrived home, social pressures and bullying now happen 24/7. Twenty years ago a student was a target when at school, now they can be thrashed on Twitter—and watch it happen live—all afternoon and night.
- Distraction: in the classroom, phones and social media are a constant battle for teachers, but also simply for students to have extended time focusing on reading/writing/etc.
- Loss of non-screen time activities: I have spoken to student after student and asked what their screen time data show. It was often 10, 11, 12 hours per day. They are sending hundreds of text messages a day. Hours on YouTube/Snap/Twitter/etc. This has to come at the expense of something—outdoors, music, sports, games, sex, etc.—right? That doesn't mean it's a net negative, yet my sense is it is.
- Comparing: there is always something happening and it is being posted about, so kids are constantly comparing their experience with their peers and feeling left out or missed out.
These are just a few things that come to mind. And while it by no means applies to all students, these were exceptionally common themes. Moreover, schools in which I work and as reported by colleagues are overwhelmed with teen mental health challenges—suicidal ideation, depression, anxiety, etc.—at unbelievably high levels. We simply can't keep up.
Now, with all that said, I'm not citing any data or large/small studies that verify these claims. And, of course, I'm not claiming it is a causal relationship that cell phones and social media caused these things. That said, I have hours and hours and hours of experience putting the target squarely on those things.
I'm writing because I thought it would be interesting to hear you expand on your thoughts about social media being a force for good. It would be interesting to see how you make sense of some of the ideas I share above and whether they land or simply sound like a bunch of anecdotal rubbish.
Kevin here again. Since I always have the last word on my own blog, I feel it would be a little unfair to say a lot about this. But I'll toss out a few comments.
I'm not a teacher, but I've heard all this stuff too. I don't question that it's real. But what I really want to know is how widespread it is. Here are a few more detailed comments that help to address this.
Sleep: At the risk of being Pollyannish, surely parents can simply take cell phones away from their kids at night if it's truly causing havoc with their sleep? Or would I just get laughed at for suggesting something so naive? This Pew survey from 2019 is also worth a look:
This is typical of research vs. anecdote, and it's hard to know which to accept. But if Pew is to be believed, kids are getting more sleep than they used to—though I can't figure out what could possibly have caused this.
24/7 bullying: Point taken. That said, survey evidence suggests—surprisingly—that cyberbullying has been pretty flat over the years. In addition, the total amount of bullying has actually decreased.
Distraction: I've heard about this problem since long before social media was popular. It sure seems like there ought to be some kind of decent answer that doesn't involve all the kids tossing their phones in a sack or something.
Non-screen activities: This is an interesting one! So I headed over to the American Time Use Survey conducted every year by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Here's what it tells us:
The ATUS is a high-quality survey of long standing. However, it only breaks down the youngest age group to 15-24, which is obviously a problem. Also, it's oriented toward adults and doesn't include any questions about cell phone or social media use.
That said, sleeping is up a bit and TV watching is down a bit. The chart above shows everything else of interest. In-person socializing is down, but homework and sports are up, and volunteering is pretty steady. If ATUS can be trusted, teens and young adults aren't cutting back on non-screen activities.
FOMO: I don't have anything to say about this aside from the fact that it's been a central fact of teen life pretty much forever.
Put this all together, and it's hard to pick out a serious impact from social media. So I'll toss out some speculation: there are some kids who are heavy social media users, but their numbers are small enough that they don't move the needle on survey averages. However, their problems are big enough that they do overwhelm teachers in person. As we all know, a few unruly kids can disrupt an entire class.
That's just a guess, though. Another possibility is that survey instrument averages are just too crude to pick up much, and anecdotal evidence really is superior.
And finally, I've heard so much about the deterioration of teen mental health that I definitely believe this is a real thing. What I don't know is what's causing it. Social media is an obvious candidate, but there are others too.
I guess I ended up writing a lot about this after all. Sorry. Welcome to the life of a blogger.
I don't give a darn about teenagers. On the other hand, there is real danger in this social media thing to everyone else.
The Chinese use twitter and Facebook against people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/31/business/china-internet-police-twitter.html?
We could go on and on posting stuff like this about the evils of social media, but twitter is like porn. No one likes it but lots of people use it anyway. It's a tolerable social failure because its entertainment value outweighs the negative externalities.... at least according to the users. Nothing will ever convince them otherwise.
Do you not see the parallels between this post and the previous one?
When talking about social media, your reaction was, "All that stuff already existed before this new thing came along, so no big deal."
But when you're talking about the effects of Fox News, your hair is on fire.
So how do these two questions differ?
No, I don't think he does. I could watch Fox News and not turn into some rabid fascist so therefore it is not really dangerous. This is the argument against any kind of regulation. As long as you can find someone who is unaffected, there can be no legitimate reason to regulate it. The problem is not with the medium, it is with the user. Guns don't kill people, people kill people. It's all the same argument.
Regarding sleep: I worked after school and then stayed up and watched David Letterman every night and had to get up for school at 6:00 or 6:30 back in the 80s. So lack of sleep seems to just be a natural condition for modern teenagers.
Mental health: I have a strong feeling (and maybe I'm just a monster) that a lot of this just comes from problematizing normal mental states for teenagers. It's normal to be sad or lonely if you are having trouble making friends or if your girlfriend broke up with you or if no one of the opposite sex (or same sex) seems to like you in the way you want them to. Parents and practitioners treat this sort of thing as a psychological disorder that requires medication these days. I have seen this happen with my own nieces and nephews.
Or would I just get laughed at for suggesting something so naive?
Yes.
Yes INDEED!
When we were growing up it was the endless TV-watching that was frying our brain. Now, it's being online. Is this worth exploring? Of course, but it's so hard to separate the actual effects from the all-consuming moral panic about the children of every generation that overshadows everything. It leads to the cluelessness of this:
"They are sending hundreds of text messages a day. Hours on YouTube/Snap/Twitter/etc."
Wait, you mean our kids are hanging out with each other, communicating, interacting, and socializing? That's great! Stop being so obsessed with the way they're doing it and recognize that they are doing it.
Here's an excerpt from the Nobel Lecture given by 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa:
"What happens on social media doesn’t stay on social media.
"Online violence is real world violence.
"Social media is a deadly game for power and money, what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, extracting our private lives for outsized corporate gain. Our personal experiences are sucked into a database, organized by AI, then sold to the highest bidder. Highly profitable micro-targeting operations are engineered to structurally undermine human will – a behavior modification system in which we are Pavlov’s dogs, experimented on in real time with disastrous consequences in countries like mine, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka and so many more. These destructive corporations have siphoned money away from news groups and now pose a foundational threat to markets and elections.
"Facebook is the world’s largest distributor of news, and yet studies have shown that lies laced with anger and hate spread faster and further than facts on social media.
"These American companies controlling our global information ecosystem are biased against facts, biased against journalists. They are – by design – dividing us and radicalizing us.
"Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy, and it becomes impossible to deal with our world’s existential problems: climate, coronavirus, the battle for truth."
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2021/ressa/lecture/
Homework time IS screen time now. By and large. Especially among 15-24 year olds.
So uh, yeah, screen time is way up.
Ok, Mr.Drum. I like your contrariness, and data often clarify generalized observations. But....
Sleep : Was that survey self report? I suspect it was, because I don't believe it. "Alone in your bedroom" or "not actively doing anything else when it's dark" do not count as sleep. And yes, taking phones away, after giving them far too early and not doing the exhausting work of constantly managing their use, is definitely pollyannaish. Noone does this except a tiny fraction of really dedicated or "you're going to Harvard" parents.
Distraction: The sack is the only answer I've ever seen that actually works. You want kids to forget their phones in class? Recreate our entire educational system from the ground up into experiential learning. Otherwise it's the sack.
Non-screen activities: You're whistling through the graveyard, brother. Socializing - you know, being with other people your own age, or your community, or adults, or or or, is in free fall, while homework is way up. So awesome, you're staring at a book, errr, I mean screen, instead of, you know, interacting with other human beings and learning how to deal with that. Etc, etc. And I guarantee you that most of that increased homework is in the highest performers while everyone else not going to YalePrintonHarvard is, you got it, staring at their screen. Ditto for so-heavily-regimented-it's-effectively-useless-as-a-meaningful-experience sports, except for, you got it, YalePrintonHarvard. I'm sorry, but this s**t is not making kids into stable, resilient adults competent to the complex demands of society, never mind civilization.
Phones are a cancer, maybe not for YalePrinctonHaravrd but for everyone else, no doubt. I see it every day - kids walking alone, or even with each other, staring at their phones like zombies, just like their parents. Kids in elementary school, never mind middle or high school, spending hours looking at porn, fight videos (yes, they record fights and watch them endlessly, and now they're even fighting for exactly this reason), any and every form of media garbage imaginable because no, these kids sure as s**t are NOT reading Shakespeare. You're wrong on this one, Kevin. It's bad, really bad, and it's going to get much worse, and flimsy 'data' does not nullify lived and observed experience.
As someone who probably spends to much online, I would guess it does not take a genius to see that many teens (most?) also spend an inordinate amount of time online.
I teach high school, and I've taught high school for a long time. Cell phones are a huge distraction in the classroom, and you can be sure they are a huge distraction when students are elsewhere. As one of my students noted in a discussion about sleep and sleep deprivation, "someone is making a lot of money off me while I'm on my phone late at night."
I think that needs to be part of the discussion of how social media affects teens, too. It's not just the medium, it's how it monetizes habitual behaviors that interfere with healthy development and acquiring academic skills.
FWIW, I have to work with students on their cell phones. Simply forbidding them doesn't work -- you end up fighting over them instead of teaching kids how to manage their own level of distraction in the classroom.
Re sleep ,
I personally have my phone near my bed at night. Because I need to be able to be contacted if something serious happens with my mom in a nursing home .
But that can be a real problem if I do not remember to turn down or off the text signal at night. Then I am woken up in middle of night be that beep and have to check if maybe it is something serious. And my siblings all get up way way earlier than I do and sometimes start texting on the group sibling text - and often re unimportant crap every damn minute. And waking up enough to turn down the text volume and cannot go back to sleep .
Highly annoying.
And, if I do remember to turn down the volume at night and then forget to turn it back up, I miss any texts the next day . Of course young people will say " what , you did not check your texts every half hour and wonder why no beeps? " . I am old enough that no, if no beeps, no texts to me and happy if I get zero damn texts in a day.
Why don't you just put your phone in sleep mode? You can tell it to put through specific phone numbers 24/7.
I will check on that . Thanks.
The reason I have not done so before is that I did not know you could do that and I am definitely not the most knowledgeable on newer technology.
And , might just be me , but I find the reference resources on how to do things on your phone very inadequate and not very well organized. Makes it frustrating when you get a new phone and have to relearn how to do everything. Which is why I am only on my 3rd cell phone in my life and am always behind in technology.
Or maybe I should just call one of my nephews!
I have an iphone, and it's simple to turn on Do Not Disturb. Go to settings, click on "Focus", turn on Do Not Disturb. You can add name and phone number of people you want to allow calls from. You're set.
Kevin - I'm also a long-time reader -- I believe I started when you were writing about the run-up to the Iraq invasion in 2002.
Did you notice that both of your rebuttal data points are from the same source, which is survey data, i. e., self-reporting? Probably by a parent:
Pew: This analysis is based primarily on time diary data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS),
ATUS: How are the data collected?
ATUS data are collected via telephone interviews. Census Bureau interviewers use Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing, a system that automatically advances interviewers to the next question based on a respondent's answers to previous questions. Respondents receive an advance letter and pamphlet explaining the purpose of the ATUS and notifying them of the day they will be called. The main part of the ATUS interview is the 24-hour time diary. This part of the interview is used to collect a detailed account of the respondent's activities, starting at 4 a.m. the previous day and ending at 4 a.m. on the interview day. For each activity reported, the interviewer asks how long the activity lasted. For most activities, the interviewer also asks who was in the room or accompanied the respondent during the activity and where the activity took place.
Anecdotal and slightly OT, but computer/digital device distractions have grown to the point that the average kid looks at his device 7.5 hours a day. Says the news somewhere recently.
My daughter went to HS with a very bright boy who got 800 on one or both halves of his SAT and then spent the first semester of Freshman year playing video games until he flunked out.
I didn't even have a TV when I was in college (LBJ was president), much less a powerful cell phone. I had fun, but I graduated and went to grad school and left with two advanced degrees. Not sure I could have done that with all the distractions there are now. I mean, I read a newsPAPER most days, but I wasn't checking the latest new sites every half hour.
I am pessimistic about the idea that young people can multi-task successfully. I would say they can't. If you're doing one thing, you aren't doing another, except perhaps for walking and chewing gum. Attention paid to txts and email and tweets and websites and games means attention is not paid during those times to something that might actually qualify you for a job.
Also, get off my lawn.
I've seen lots of teens deal with social media just fine. I've also seen a few of them get totally wrecked by it. Then again, I've seen one or two kids messed up by drug use. For a variety of reasons, parents can fail to realize how that their child has a social media or drug problem. There are often other problems that appear to predominate. I've also seen kids recover in their 20s, but the trauma will always be with them.
I read somewhere, and it sounds logical, that us humans have gotten so used to surfing the web, texting, etc. in very short periods that we now have real problems sitting still to read a long article, chapter in a textbook, or simply reading for pleasure. If we can't finish it in a couple of minutes, we lose concentration and flit back to texts, the web, music, and other mindless simple activites. No wonder there are so many dunces out there.
What has blown my mind is walking into a room where my nephew and his girlfriend were sitting 20 feet apart and texting and asking who they are each texting instead of talking to each other. They were texting each other. Instead of just talking when they are in the same room..young people actually do that. Totally strange to me.
And I am forced to now first text my nephew before calling him to let him know I will call so he can answer. Many young people never actually answer their phone if it rings unless someone texts first..
Do you feel like a dinosaur yet?
I count myself lucky I obtained a PhD before all the distractions arrived.
Hi!
Just read this article about the impact of social media on mental health https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2021/11/04/when-facebook-came-calling/