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Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

nytimes.com

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Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#271

Post by oefrha »

StrangeATractor wrote: post #228

A lot of comments in this thread remind of cigarette companies dismissing health concerns with tobacco. In my circle of friends and family I've seen the majority of them go from being people you could talk to and spend time with to people that just stare at their phones constantly, I've heard others say the same about their circles. Parents let Youtube raise their kids because they don't want to get their eyes off th…

While I don’t like staring at my phone constantly while I’m around others, have you considered the possibility that people simply enjoy whatever are on their phones more than talking to and spending time with you? A lot of people just want to be left alone, when you think you’re “having an interesting conversation” or “having a good time” or whatnot with them, it’s entirely possible they’re only doing it out of politeness.

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#272

Post by dr_orpheus »

ericmcer wrote: post #262
zackmorris wrote: post #173

D.A.R.E. to Keep Kids Off Social Media Wages stagnated since 1980. Rents doubling every decade. Dead-end service jobs. Unpayable student loans. Social Security payments going to IOUs instead of retirements. Lying politicians and chief corporate officers making bank on the backs of the working poor. 30% credit card interest. Delaying childbirth to make rent until it's too late. GMO and processed foods poisoning giving…

People aren’t generally affected by issues that are out of sight like those you list. A classmate saying something critical about an teenagers appearance will be 100x more impactful than the rainforests imminent disappearance.

Mark Zuckerburg's quote: "a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa"

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#273

Post by [deleted] »

dr_orpheus wrote: post #272
ericmcer wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People aren’t generally affected by issues that are out of sight like those you list. A classmate saying something critical about an teenagers appearance will be 100x more impactful than the rainforests imminent disappearance.

Mark Zuckerburg's quote: "a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa"

[deleted]

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#275

Post by somethingreen »

zackmorris wrote: post #173

D.A.R.E. to Keep Kids Off Social Media Wages stagnated since 1980. Rents doubling every decade. Dead-end service jobs. Unpayable student loans. Social Security payments going to IOUs instead of retirements. Lying politicians and chief corporate officers making bank on the backs of the working poor. 30% credit card interest. Delaying childbirth to make rent until it's too late. GMO and processed foods poisoning giving…

The idea that any of these would normally worry an average young teen is hilarious to me. I grew up during cold war, USSR collapse, multiple wars in the region. At no point was I (or any of my peers to my knowledge) gravely concerned for our future. Because none of us yet had any idea what our normal future is supposed to look like.

The only way these mild horrors get into children heads is, again, through social media.

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#276

Post by BeetleB »

zackmorris wrote: post #173

D.A.R.E. to Keep Kids Off Social Media Wages stagnated since 1980. Rents doubling every decade. Dead-end service jobs. Unpayable student loans. Social Security payments going to IOUs instead of retirements. Lying politicians and chief corporate officers making bank on the backs of the working poor. 30% credit card interest. Delaying childbirth to make rent until it's too late. GMO and processed foods poisoning giving…

Now can you also list the ways things are better than in 1980?

Perspective, and context are relevant. People in countries that have always been worse off than the US is today are not as depressed.[1]

[1] Well, not until they all got cable TV and social media, that is.

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#277

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

gsk22 wrote: post #257
StrangeATractor wrote: post #228

A lot of comments in this thread remind of cigarette companies dismissing health concerns with tobacco. In my circle of friends and family I've seen the majority of them go from being people you could talk to and spend time with to people that just stare at their phones constantly, I've heard others say the same about their circles. Parents let Youtube raise their kids because they don't want to get their eyes off th…

It's hard not to notice that this is essentially the same argument people made against TV ("the boob tube"). People just stare at the TV constantly. Parents let the TV raise their kids. People watch TV even on vacation. TV has made kids stupid. And it probably goes back further -- can you believe the parents letting radio raise their kids? Don't get me started on the children who spend all day staring at words in a b…

Here's a different take on this perspective. It seems to be demonstrably fine that most people occasionally drink some alcohol. But obviously, if everyone was drunk all the time, society would collapse.

Similarly, we could instead say that yeah, maybe TV had some negative effects, but there's no TV outside, at work, at school, at least not usually. And at least for TV, you turn on a channel and watch it. Also there's some pretty good stuff on TV. How many scientists were inspired watching Star Trek as a kid? But I'm sure there were kids who did watch too much TV, and it really did have a negative impact on them. It's just that eventually norms were established yadda yadda that mitigated the severity of it on a societal scale.

With smart phones and social media, maybe we're scaling up the sorts of negative effects that people were worried about with TV, to where it really can have some disturbing effects even on a societal scale. And maybe we really should be worried that we're effectively conditioning children to have shorter attention spans due to the emergent properties of a smartphone with multiple different social media apps firing off notifications with very short form content. And the rate of adoption has been so huge, that if it is the case, we might already be fucked pretty soon.

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#278

Post by scythe »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #205
scythe wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really matter if they circumvent it. The problem with social media is not exposure, it's overstimulation/"addiction". If you put an inconvenience between the kid and the stimulus, you're already more than halfway there. If they need to use a desktop and a VPN to go on Instagram, they can't spend as much time on it. Likewise, the kid will smoke less weed and drink less beer if they have to hide it and jump…

> Likewise, the kid will smoke less weed and drink less beer if they have to hide it and jump through hoops to get it. In my experience/observation, how strict the parent is at trying to forbid drug and alcohol use doesn't actually have much correlation with whether and how much the kids use drugs and alcohol. Or if it does, it's a negative correlation. The kids with the biggest problems always seemed to have the str…

>Sure, there are a few parents who are totally absentee or abusive (say, giving kids drugs) and it can be related to kids with drugs and alcohol problems.

You seem to be arguing for the same thing as I did. The status quo regarding social media is for parents to be "totally absentee" as you put it, while the usual approach to alcohol is "don't let me catch you". It's very rare for parents to take a permissive approach regarding teen alcohol use, especially considering it's illegal to do that.

>But the vast majority of kids with drugs and alcohol problems indeed "have to hide it and jump through hoops to get it".

The vast majority of kids have to jump through hoops to get alcohol, period.

>I am pretty sure plenty of research backs up that an effective way to reduce teen drug use is _not_ to have parents just try to be really strict and punitive about it.

Are you?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030646030...

"Results indicate that parental permissibility of alcohol use is a consistent predictor of teen drinking behaviors, which was strongly associated with experienced negative consequences."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037687161...

"harsh parental discipline was positively associated with alcohol use in the lower-use group only."

(But if children are in the lower-use group we have already avoided most of the physiological problems!)

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00048674.2010.50...

"Reduced levels of later drinking by adolescents were predicted by: parental modelling, limiting availability of alcohol to the child, disapproval of adolescent drinking, general discipline, parental monitoring, parent–child relationship quality, parental support and general communication."

Of course, the more important factor is not discipline of the child by the parent, but discipline of the parent by the parent. Parental use is the strongest predictor of children's use. So we should also consider that parents who use social media too much may influence their children to do so as well.

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#279

Post by uoaei »

interroboink wrote: post #265
runarberg wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most recent IPCC report stated that we are very likely to hit 1.5° in the next five years. If all our current policies hold, and we don’t continue to increase our annual emissions we will likely be looking at 2.7° - 3.2° at the end of this century. At 3° the oceans die. I think it is safe to say that the world as we know it is very likely coming to an end between 2050 and 2100. We will be living in a far more inhospi…

> At 3° the oceans die. I appreciate that it's hard to communicate fuzzy concepts with lots of unknowns succinctly, but this seems overly-alarmist and simplistic to me. Or maybe I'm wrong; do you have some reputable sources? Here's one of mine[1], indicating (paraphrased) "5° by 2100 would result in a mass extinction in the next 300 years." And I'd note that even mass extinction is not the same as "the oceans die." A…

* sharks and bat rays in the SF bay were dying of a brain fungus that resulted from decreased salinity from the excessive rain we got a couple months ago

* the size and severity of algal blooms are increasing across the world

* this year's crab season was delayed (initially predicted to be nonexistent) because the ocean currents and especially the depth of cold waters changed so drastically from last year

etc., etc. These examples are only from this year. We could also point to starfish dissolving, coral bleaching, etc. which have been going on longer.

Temperature is only an indicator, but there are many other nth-order effects which result from the changes to the climate that also severely disrupt life processes. We can be sure that the ocean won't "die", but if biodiversity continues to tank the way it has been, we will see an accelerating rate of decline in the health of the oceans and consequently the people whose lives and livelihoods depend on the ocean (somewhere around 1 billion people). Knock-on effects are hard to conceptualize but well worth fully exploring.

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#280

Post by yamtaddle »

foobarian wrote: post #176
iamacyborg wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand being this careful with young children's usage of a device but giving teenagers zero privacy (to the extent of going through their personal messages) seems wild to me.

This is how you raise a generation that thinks intrusive monitoring and zero privacy is perfectly normal, or even worse craves it.

Maybe it's how you raise a generation that understands you shouldn't post a single thing online that you don't want the whole world to know about. Prior generations have entirely failed to understand that, certainly (cf. Zuckerberg's infamous "dumb fucks" comment—which, go figure, we know about because he sent it as an instant message)
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