I'm not a doctor/scientist… but I feel like it's easily just as bad for mature adults.
The constant stream of news and social media… it doesn't have a calming effect. People, in general, seem more angry too.
Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents
191–200 of 366 posts
Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always been a bit extreme on this but I more than ever believe that it's insane that we consider that leaving teenagers with unsupervised internet access is reasonable. Maybe I'm prude or naive but I remember vividly when I first saw a pornographic movie at like around 17. It really shook me at the time. I wasn't traumatized or anything but it made a strong impact on me. These days I expect that most teens exper…
Just wondering, how old are you? I'm 30, so myspace and Facebook showed up only once I was in high school, but everything you describe was still available on the web before social media. Shock sites were huge (goatse, tubgirl, etc), and I remember watching a beheading with a chainsaw by a Mexican cartel. And of course porn was around too. The difference with social media is the "keeping up with the Joneses" except no…
I swear that beheading video is a form of generational anchor in the same way that the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 soundtrack is something a certain group (early millenial/late genx) is.
Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents
#193Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs. If you came up with a substance that caused young people by the millions to become totally addicted, cost them multiple hours per day, pushed them into depression and suicide, and contributed to inactivity, obesity, loss of attention span, and overall ennui, it would be banned almost immediately. Heck, if you proposed a tracking system th…
I think you're a little over confident in your points if you don't mind me saying.
For paragraph 2, Sugar, TV, organised religion, the Boy/Girl Scouts and comic books all satisfy at least some of your criteria. None has been banned yet.
Similarly, many American parents would rush to sign up to a service that let them do those things. Plenty pay for Life360 and similar just for some of those "features". Far from being illegal, many jurisdictions encourage it.
I don't think social media is a force for good. But let's not pretend we really care about the kids or privacy or mental health.
I actually think that many parents (sadly) prefer a kid that sits at home on the computer and is monitorable and docile (a side effect of depression). The alternative is to actually take them places or to let them go unattended, neither of which parents seem happy to swallow.
Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is really off topic, but I just wanted to highlight how important the simpsons are to communication. Like, "old man yells at cloud" causes me to almost immediately understand your point (at least I feel I understand your point). The rest of your comment is almost unnecessary (although it is appreciated because it helps confirm that I am getting you). Personally, the experience is a bit incredible.
Before the Simpsons this was just "get off my lawn", possibly inspired by some other piece of media long forgotten
Apparently made popular by David Letterman in the eighties so not much older than the Simpsons. It makes sense for it to not be very old, as most people didn’t own lawns until mid twentieth century or so.
The lawn as a concept has a fascinating history on its own. It’s a remnant of aristocratic signaling “look how much land I have that I can afford to put aside some of it over here for no reason”.
Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents
#195Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs. If you came up with a substance that caused young people by the millions to become totally addicted, cost them multiple hours per day, pushed them into depression and suicide, and contributed to inactivity, obesity, loss of attention span, and overall ennui, it would be banned almost immediately. Heck, if you proposed a tracking system th…
I've always been a bit extreme on this but I more than ever believe that it's insane that we consider that leaving teenagers with unsupervised internet access is reasonable. Maybe I'm prude or naive but I remember vividly when I first saw a pornographic movie at like around 17. It really shook me at the time. I wasn't traumatized or anything but it made a strong impact on me. These days I expect that most teens exper…
Quick note: It's not the kids that are fooled about Hydroxychloroquine, it's the adults. If you're taking away juniors Internet, you need to take away your parents' connections too...
Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amusingly, you could analyze anything this way if you ignore the benefits and only look at the costs. "Planes are an outrage! Imagine if you proposed a system that required hours of everyone's time, cost them hundreds of dollars, forced them to sit in cramped positions, and subjected them to invasive scans and searches of their personal materials." "How are schools allowed! They literally imprison our kids for upward…
I mean if you want to factor in the benefits of drugs, be my guest, because spoiler alert: They are fucking awesome.
Or at least they should be if we both detach the stigma and stop lumping in things like Cannabis in with Crack
Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amusingly, you could analyze anything this way if you ignore the benefits and only look at the costs. "Planes are an outrage! Imagine if you proposed a system that required hours of everyone's time, cost them hundreds of dollars, forced them to sit in cramped positions, and subjected them to invasive scans and searches of their personal materials." "How are schools allowed! They literally imprison our kids for upward…
I mean if you want to factor in the benefits of drugs, be my guest, because spoiler alert: They are fucking awesome.
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Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are upsides. From providing self estem from a different source from the local. It has raised awareness like never before. It has provided an income for some. It allows new peer groups not available locally It provides a safer space to interact with strangers. Where we got it wrong was connecting these profiles to real life names. That has ruined people's lives.
None of the things you list are unique to social media. They all existed before the rise of the socials. Many of them existed before the internet.
Nonsense. Social media and the sensational, vain culture it has inculcated it is entirely damaging and without value. It is _only_ revolutionary and disparages any prior merit and censure without reason. It is a denial of service on reason and experience claiming precedence and priority without any historical context.
Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amusingly, you could analyze anything this way if you ignore the benefits and only look at the costs. "Planes are an outrage! Imagine if you proposed a system that required hours of everyone's time, cost them hundreds of dollars, forced them to sit in cramped positions, and subjected them to invasive scans and searches of their personal materials." "How are schools allowed! They literally imprison our kids for upward…
Rather than alluding to vague upsides, can you list what upsides you want to assert that social media provides, so that we can do as you say and perform a cost/benefit analysis? As both an early adopter and former user of both Facebook and Twitter, my eventual conclusion was that whatever benefits they offered were vastly outweighed by the mental toll they took on me.
I just finished writing a paper on this. Here are some upsides:
Studies have shown that disclosing information about oneself is an intrinsically rewarding experience [0]. Social media offerings provide a platform for sharing information easily with a large audience, which activates reward mechanisms in the brain. People use social media because it makes them feel good, which is probably the reason for their explosive growth over the last decades.
Social media offers a way to stay connected with people, or at least feel connected, without having to put in much effort. When you open the Facebook or Instagram application, it is immediately filled with recent pictures and status updates of friends and relatives. Not only does this provide you with information, it might also motivate you to contact those people again, which will then reinforce the feeling of friendship. It has been shown that having an active social circle is predictive of lower stress, increased happiness, positive attitude, and self-assessed health [1].
Patients suffering from serious mental illnesses can self-organize into peer-to-peer support groups on social media platforms. Reported benefits include greater social connectedness, feelings of belonging, and being able to share personal stories and coping mechanisms. Through this empowerment, patients can challenge the stigma associated with their condition; and potentially even improve their situation by learning from peers, and gaining insight into important health decisions and possible remedies. If peer support proves insufficient, patients can motivate each other to seek professional help. [2]
Social media platforms are one of the most accessible forms of long-distance communication. Among the reasons for this, is that they are free of charge, an account is set up in a matter of minutes, and communication is not limited geographically. Furthermore, social media enables certain groups of disabled people to communicate with individuals they are normally unable to reach. For example, deaf people usually communicate through sign language or written text. Since the number of sign language ``speakers" is low, written text is the most accessible way to communicate with others. For them, social media offers an accessible and efficient way to stay in touch with friends and relatives that are geographically far away. Christine Forsberg showed that social media use among the deaf and hard hearing increased their feeling of empowerment, when empowerment is measured in self-efficacy, self-esteem, and self-determination [3].
Happiness, positive attitude, satisfaction, connectedness, and increased (mental) health can be assumed to provide positive utility, and thus promoting them is ethical from a utilitarian viewpoint. It is worth noting however, that there is a flipside to most of the effects covered above (see section \ref{sec:negative_effects}), and it is unclear whether the cumulative utility of all positive and negative consquences is positive or not.
[0]: Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell. “Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding”. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America109 (May 2012), pp. 8038–43. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1202129109.
[1]: Suwen Lin et al. “Social network structure is predictive of health and wellness”. In: PLOS ONE 14.6 (June 2019), pp. 1–17. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0217264. url: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217264.
[2]: J. A. Naslund et al. “The future of mental health care: peer-to-peer support and social media”. In Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences 25.2 (2016), pp. 113–122. doi: 10.1017/S2045796015001067.
[3]: Christine Forsberg. “The Empowerment of Deaf Cochlear Implant Users Through Social Media in the UK, the Netherlands, and Croatia”. MA thesis. July 2020. url: http://arno.uvt.nl/show.cgi?fid=152367.
Also, social media has been used to organize riots in the Arab spring, Hong Kong, etc.
Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that kids shouldn’t use the internet unsupervised, but what is the alternative? We were all 15 once. It is 100% impossible to stop kids from using the internet if they want to. So what’s the alternative?
Active and available parenting, ideally starting long before the teen years where they no longer want to take advice from their parents. Saying that it's 100% impossible to stop kids from using the internet is as true as saying that it's 100% impossible to stop kids from trying alcohol. But there's a difference between a kid getting drunk once at a party and a kid being a habitual, daily alcoholic. As a parent you wa…
> Active and available parenting, ideally starting long before the teen years where they no longer want to take advice from their parents.
This, 1000 times this. Also, leaving kids completely without supervision or using screen time/smartphones to babysit them it's easy but it's just like tech-debt and really any other form of debt. You will pay the consequences 10x during their teen years.