Thanks to bestselling authors like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, the public has become increasingly aware of the rapid rise in mental health issues among younger people […] Their warnings about the destructive impact of social media have had an effect, reflected not least in a wave of schools across Europe banning smartphones.
While it’s good to draw attention to the rising rates of depression and anxiety, there’s a risk of becoming fixated on simplistic explanations that reduce the issue to technical variables like “screen time”.
[…]
A hallmark of Twenge and Haidt’s arguments is their use of trend lines for various types of psychological distress, showing increases after 2012, which Haidt calls the start of the “great rewiring” when smartphones became widespread. This method has been criticised for overemphasising correlations that may say little about causality.
[…]
Numerous academics […] have pointed to factors such as an increasing intolerance for uncertainty in modernity, a fixation – both individual and collective – on avoiding risk, intensifying feelings of meaninglessness in work and life more broadly and rising national inequality accompanied by growing status anxiety. However, it’s important to emphasise that social science has so far failed to provide definitive answers.
[…]
It seems unlikely that the political and social challenges we face wouldn’t influence our wellbeing. Reducing the issue to isolated variables [such as the use of smartphones], where the solution might appear to be to introduce a new policy (like banning smartphones) follows a technocratic logic that could turn good health into a matter for experts.
The risk with this approach is that society as a whole is excluded from the analysis. Another risk is that politics is drained of meaning. If political questions such as structural discrimination, economic precarity, exposure to violence and opioid use are not regarded as shaping our wellbeing, what motivation remains for taking action on these matters?
Now I might be an old disillusioned fart but nope, social media hasn’t changed a thing… for me. The anxiety, depression, and anger was already there, full force, in the 80s and 90s. I mean come on listen to Punk and Grunge. Coincides pretty well with the rise of Neoliberalism and New Labour, wait why did I use the same term twice. It’s at the tail wave of boomers having had their revolution and subsequently declaring the end of history.
What differs though is that (yeah I’m going to do it) the young’uns who never experienced life without the internet, worse, without a smartphone or tablet, don’t even go to fucking concerts any more where they could touch some grass and get laid. Also media competency falls off drastically again I think somewhere in the middle of gen Z.
On the one hand I can believe that people are getting more anxious because things are getting more bleak and it’s an op to get the whole thing blamed on social media.
On the other hand, it also feels like an op from social media companies to insist that their algorithms aren’t preying on people.
i actually found a video yesterday that summarizes my thoughts on this very well:
Its capitalism
