Gallup's global survey of positive and negative emotions sheds some interesting light on the proposition that smartphones are harming young people. Here are positive emotions:
There's no change after 2012, when smartphones became widely used. Now here are negative emotions:
Negative emotions did start to rise around 2012. However, this was a broad trend that had nothing to do specifically with young people. Everyone is becoming more negative. Also, this peaked in 2020 and has been declining ever since. If smartphones are the cause, why would that be?
This is a very limited look at things since it includes the whole world, not just the US or even just rich countries. Nor does it break things down by gender, which might be important. However, we do have individual country ratings for certain emotions, and they tell us that overall the US is about average on most things—including sadness—with the exception of stress, where we rate high, and loneliness, where we rate low.
Gallup has all the detailed data necessary to produce annual charts by age for just the US. In fact, it's available to anyone who subscribes to their service, which doesn't include me. But whether it's Gallup or a subscriber, it would sure be nice if someone could replicate the two charts above just for the US, broken down by gender.
Young people are so naïve. Good for them! I work with a bunch of 20 something engineers and they are all awesome people. Smart, well adjusted... good people. I'd trust them with the future. It's a shame they don't see the danger.
Well, that's because they really don't understand the full extent of the secondary effects of climate change, including political upheaval and war. All they see are cool new tech toys and anticipation of even cooler shit coming down the pike.
Pretty much par for the human course, isn't it ? Can't ever recall a time when any significant number of homo sapiens sapiens were well informed, interested, rational and active, can you ?
I remember seeing an editorial cartoon once. It had a vaguely realistic map of some part of the Earth, and it was divided into the part that had been developed, and the part that had been left for Nature and wildlife. And then that part had been divided into the part that would be developed, and the part left for Nature. And so on and so on and ..... You can imagine what it looked like. The point of the cartoon was that every generation takes for granted the conditions under which they live, and are willing to sacrifice Nature to the extent that it gets them money, or whatever. They don't understand that they're cutting their own oxygen lines.
People can get used to anything, if they grow up that way. The only way any of this changes is if things worsen so fast that people can no longer get used to it. But if that happens, then (haha) people switch to "me and mine against you and your'n, to the death!" So that doesn't help either.
Ah, well.
Well, I just checked the other day, and the world's human population has increased by 794 million since 2013. Not bad, given all the wars and illegal immigrants dying and so forth. So pretty soon there won't be any bits "left for nature" except for those bits that climate change makes uninhabitable for humans.
Why would you expect there to be an age gap? Everyone has a damn phone and they're all on it all the time. And it had to reach a saturation level at some point.
Everyone knows why they started to decline in 2020.
It fine to look at smartphones as a trigger point for social changes, but you shouldn't be viewing the data as on/off.
Social changes are too vague. I'd expect there to be a lag after introduction, before there was significant impact. AJust like I would expect there to be time, as society adjust and any the impact from the changes becomes more the norm/flat.
Why would you think today would be any different?
Some of the comments in this post are revolving around climate change - except that the parents, scratch that, grandparents of today's children weren't even born when emissions began accelerating. Naive? For persons that are powerless, in comparison to their elders, they are coping with the possibly horrible future we've given them.