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Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

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Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#101

Post by NalNezumi »

xxpor wrote: post #83
simias wrote: post #65

Earlier 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…

This. Im 29 and share the same experience.

And we can even go further back; have people checked, old black & white cartoon? Some of them are so blatantly propaganda/politica/visual horrific that they wouldn't even be aired for 15 y.o today. If you take a closer look, even Tom & Jerry is quite violent, and most Japanese animation that air on kids TV-channel back then also, very sexual.

And these things were airing on TV, broadcasting at a specific time and all you had to do as a kid was to push a couple of buttons to access it.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#102

Post by csallen »

titzer wrote: post #24

Social 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…

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 upwards of 7 hours a day, feed them substandard food, and subject them to Orwellian surveillance, exorbitant record-keeping, cruel social hierarchies, and a stress-inducing grading system akin to a dystopian social credit system."

I'm not saying the downsides aren't in fact downsides. They are. But you can't accurately assess the whole picture without taking the upsides into account, too.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#103

Post by Bakary »

bnralt wrote: post #18

I'm starting to wonder if mass media in general is bad for our mental health, and if we'd be better off unplugging as much as we can from everything - social media, TV, radio, Hacker News, etc. and spending more time with our community. I suppose the problem is, most communities are completely addicted to this stuff, so we're left in a situation where it's hard for most people to unplug for any long period of time wi…

I have an opposite version of this where I find myself frustrated that I can't discuss certain topics offline with my social circle. I'm happy to have an outlet for this, even if it might have other negative consequences. It depends on your personality profile I suppose. I find intense arguments relaxing.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#104

Post by samrmay »

learnstats2 wrote: post #49
samrmay wrote: post #13

The article mentions a myriad of factors that correlate with mental health issues going into adolescence. It’s interesting that the headline targets social media, as the body of the article doesn’t seem to highlight it as an especially strong correlation. As a side note, the differing trends of boys and girls after adolescence is really interesting. > However, it recognised that girls' self-esteem and wellbeing stabi…

The article also quotes the researcher explicitly denying the BBC’s headline suggesting causation. I downvoted all the popular comments here which were ready to agree with the causation despite the research making no comment on that at all: the complete lack of critical thinking is why this gets to be the chosen headline. Pure clickbait.

"Social media bad" is much more palpable than grappling with the fact that mental illness is a complicated problem with many contributing factors. Very frustrating because the researchers suggest increasing mental health resources and exercise, whereas the headline suggests social media as the much easier scapegoat.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#105

Post by mumblemumble »

simias wrote: post #65
titzer wrote: post #24

Social 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…

There's another side to this, though. Letting kids roam the internet can give ones who might otherwise be doomed to become misfits an opportunity to find community. Being a queer kid pre-Internet, for example, sucked, and the Web rolling out to households changed a lot of kids' lives. And we have a poor cultural memory of what that experience used to be like, because, before the rise of online communities, a big part of being queer - especially being a queer kid - was being subjected to systematic erasure.

I'm not sure how you balance those two things. My sense, though, is that the balance was better 20, 25 years ago, when the Internet had more small, individualized communities. Most of them have since been squashed by the rise of the social media oligopoly.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#106

Post by elric »

An anecdote, at the risk of sounding old:

Back when I was a kid, if we had internet access at all, we mostly used it for the community aspect. A fan of some book? Search for it on Altavista and you likely found some kind of fan site which had a little bulletin board community organized around it. Or maybe a usenet group. A few minutes down the road you were talking to strangers on the other side of the planet about something you were all actively interested in. Hell, even radio stations had their own chat rooms and forums. Many free software tools had dedicated IRC channels. Mailing lists and usenet groups abound.

These communities were all interest based, and there were sooooo many of them. Because they were interest based, they mostly attracted people who at least had something in common with you, which made it easy to relate to them. And because people are not onedimensional, they were often part of many different communities. Which, aside from being fun, was also a great way to learn how to interact with people all over the world.

Sure, flame wars were a thing, and I'm sure people were bullied and whatnot. Community moderation worked pretty well, though (as someone who administered a 10k+ members forum) it could be a lot of work. But no one ever damaged their mental health by frequenting a knitting forum.

Facebook pretty much destroyed all of these (or at least decimated them). Perhaps these groups are still around, but it's now actively hard to find them. FB does not foster a sense of community. It's not a platform where you will learn anything about any topic. It's not an environment that's conducive to improving personal interactions. It attempted to centralize those things, and it failed. Instead of paying attention to things that interest us, we now have FB and its ilk begging us to please pay attention to their garbage. I miss actual communities, warts and all, and I think that young people's mental health would be better off if they made a return.

Final note: yes, there are exceptions, I know it's not all quite as bad as I'm dramatizing here.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#107

Post by Zelphyr »

mumblemumble wrote: post #55
bnralt wrote: post #18

I'm starting to wonder if mass media in general is bad for our mental health, and if we'd be better off unplugging as much as we can from everything - social media, TV, radio, Hacker News, etc. and spending more time with our community. I suppose the problem is, most communities are completely addicted to this stuff, so we're left in a situation where it's hard for most people to unplug for any long period of time wi…

This is my experience. I disconnected from social media, and my social life immediately died. Friends only communicate with each other through Facebook, so I'm really only staying in regular contact with my very closest friends anymore. Most of it I don't miss, because social media has also reduced the quality of communication to the level of gossip, but what I do miss out on is any sort of invitations to social gath…

I deleted my social media almost ten years ago and I feel like I have a stronger social network now than I had before. The key thing I think I may have done differently is that I got involved in things that provided opportunities to be engaged with people.

For example; I joined my local Masonic lodge and started doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Between those two things alone I find I have regular enough interactions with a variety of different people that I naturally find out about, and am invited to events and activities that more than make up for the loss of social media.

I'm not suggesting everyone join a Masonic lodge (obviously) or take up Jiu-Jitsu. There are a great number of things everyone can do that gets them around other people in a way that is natural and fulfilling.

Also--and this, I find, is critical--all my old friends are still friends and they call or email or text me and I them. Anyone who claimed to be my friend but couldn't be bothered to get in touch with me after I dropped social media was never a very good friend to begin with.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#109

Post by throwaway894345 »

jl2718 wrote: post #98

Imagine you are the chairman of Phillip Morris in 1995. You control one of the biggest companies in the world, absolutely full of cash. You also know that your product is just bad all around for everybody whether they use it or not. One of your corporate lawyers tells you that you need to immediately break yourself up, sell off all the components to foreign buyers, cease all operations in the United States, and cash…

Phillip Morris didn't operate a sophisticated propaganda machine capable of steering national opinion in its own favor and indeed directing the course of democracy (if we are to believe that foreign actors can side-channel attack Twitter's algos to influence elections, then it naturally follows that Twitter can influence elections with direct control over its algorithms). I don't mean this in a contrarian sense (I agree with you), moreso just venting my pessimism that things will change.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#110

Post by TaupeRanger »

jameslk wrote: post #47

These studies seem to keep contradicting each other: http://www.nautil.us/blog/studies-shoot-down-techs-harmful-e... > A new study in Nature Human Behaviour, which looked at data from more than 350,000 adolescents, also found that digital tech use mattered little to kids’ well-being. The authors, Amy Orben and Przybylski, argue that prior research, which examined the impact of social media on teens and tweens, was ba…

Yes, it's just like all high level studies trying to make broad statements about human behavior or any other complex human system, like nutrition or economics. The reason there is so much contradiction is that we can't deal with the complex relationships between variables or the unknown unknowns. The only reason medicine is able to do decent studies is because they can tightly control things in RCTs. Correlational/observational studies are almost never good enough to make strong statements about anything.
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