I'm not sure the pandemic is solely or even largely responsible.
Zoomers are the first generation with nearly unrestricted access to social media essentially from birth (access that probably should've been restricted early on, but that's water under the bridge). Couple that early and frequent exposure with artificial echo chambers created by apps to boost engagement, and impressionable minds end up soaked in endlessly-amplified negative perspectives.
The test case for this was 4chan incubating incel/redpill culture and Reddit later amplifying it among late-millennials. Today, EDs, ideation of self harm, etc are all mercilessly reflected back at people on just about every social media platform rather than just the niche ones. The pandemic only made it worse by preventing people from spending time with each other in person, but kids are glued to their phones anyway.
$1 Bet: millennial parents will probably learn from this with their own kids. Or if not, legislators probably will. Late Gen-α and the generation that follows will hopefully see a rebound from these trends with parenting habits that benefit from these learnings.
Kids have been exposed to multiple consecutive years of social isolation due to the pandemic. They haven't been going to school or seeing their peers in person. That's kind of the obvious hypothesis. To just completely write that off, you really have to have axe to grind against social media.
As you said, "kids are glued to their phones anyway." That was already true before the pandemic. Which, again, suggests to me that the extreme factor here is the isolation, not the phones.
Not that social media is good or healthy. But the way it's scapegoated reminds me of the way television and video games were demonized when I was a child growing up in the 90s. It was over the top.
I’m a high school English teacher. What you’re saying seems mostly right - but, anecdotally of course, the trend has been made more severe. Their ability to engage with in-person socialization is very obviously impaired, and their pre-existing tendency to snack on social media is compulsive for a whole bunch of them.
At a much higher level than I’ve ever seen, kids will choose swiping over talking with their friends who are sitting right next to them.
It’s getting better, but - man - it was bad when we first returned from distance learning.
> They haven't been going to school or seeing their peers in person.
I'm not sure there's a single family in the continental United States that has spent the entirety of the past two years keeping their children locked up in their basement.
Even when school is closed, nobody has been stopping children from seeing their peers in person outside of school.
And if our society can't figure out a way to make that a priority, then that may be the problem with it, not the school closures.
>Even when school is closed, nobody has been stopping children from seeing their peers in person outside of school.
Why do people always treat friction as something that is irrelevant?
Shutdowns and kids being unable to hang out when they choose to creates a situation where they just lose touch with one another. You can't just deliberately flip a switch to turn it all back on. Social connections don't work like that. Social connections involve a whole series of spontaneous events. If those events don't happen, then social connections fall away. Adults have a hard time making friends, because they have a lot fewer opportunities for those spontaneous events that create friendships.
Rolling the dice less often will give you fewer successes. Some amount of those successes is required for upkeep of a friendship.
You may have missed the fact that many countries / localities in fact did do lockdowns on and off for the last two years that did prevent childrend from seeing their peers in person outside of school. Couple that with the non-stop fearmongering by the media, and it's not an unreasonable assumption to make that many kids were probably kept at home and away from their peers, even between lockdowns.
I dunno why this is downvoted. I know several people who intentionally isolated their kids for at least a year. These kids couldn't even go outside...
Instead of telling people to remain calm, these fucking "experts" intentionally scared the living daylights out of people. And for many people in my particularly liberal region, they took it all to heart and went well above and beyond what these "experts" were demanding.
In the US, those on and off lockdowns[1] lasted for about a month per locale, and weren't even enforced during that time.
What about the other 23 months?
[1] 'Lockdown' is a completely inappropriate word to describe a world where the greatest practical impediment to your freedom is that you can't go to the theatre, the bar, or to Hawai'i. Or host a wedding.
Everything is exaggerated nowadays. “Unenforced suggestions to stay at home” = lockdown. “A minor inconvenience” = torture. “Sensible public health policy” = tyranny.
No US state implemented anything close to what a reasonable, sane person could describe as lockdown. Nobody was locked into their homes. Stay at home was routinely broken with zero consequences. Business closures went unenforced outside of a handful of urban areas. Calling it “lockdown” is clown world logic.
There is an entire spectrum on the scale of hard lockdowns to curfews to public health orders.
The GP I was replying to made the assertion that they can't believe there would be even a single family that made the choice to keep their children isolated.
Do you agree with their assertion that no portion of the population could have "over-reacted" to the prevailing health advice? Or that no family had vulnerable persons they were looking after that resulted in a higher level of isolation?
I'm always entertained by the idea that 4chan did something to people as opposed to it revealing what was always there. We're social animals, we're more defined by our environment than we'd like to believe; but similarly, we have the capability to generate and manipulate that environment ourselves.
I would suggest that the basic human feedback loop just got more tightly coupled and that mass personal communication was always going to lead to this.
It gave them a positive feedback loop and gave them a safe space to become more extreme and weaponize their own stupidity.
You can easily see this to a lesser extend by going to any sports team subreddit and then going to the subreddit of the league that team plays in. The voices will be much more uniform and arguments more minor in the team subreddit for the most part... and views that are freely expressed and thought to be factual in the team subreddit may not be at all popular in the league subreddit.
> I'm not sure the pandemic is solely or even largely responsible
I agree that the pandemic is probably not a root cause: I think the global reaction to the pandemic could have a related root cause (social media, outrage / attention culture, the breakdown of normal human discourse, polarization) as the mental health problems. Blaming "the pandemic" fails to acknowledge that covid was as much or more about our collective reaction as it was about the actual virus. It's the "powder keg" thing - the conditions were there, and inevitably something would come along to set it off.
I'd add 'collective overreaction', at least from a fear perspective. I know plenty of adults that lost their rational minds during the pandemic: believing all the media-driven fear porn that never once honestly explained the true risk to the < 70 year-old crowd. Older children/teens watched those same news programs and also picked up on their parents' fear, and they had even less wisdom and ability to think clearly than the parents.
> I agree that the pandemic is probably not a root cause: I think the global reaction to the pandemic could have a related root cause
I keep seeing the argument that the pandemic and the response to it are distinctly separate phenomenon. They are not.
The pandemic response is explicitly part and parcel of the pandemic, you don’t have a pandemic without a response, and there’s no response without a pandemic.
In many places this was actively encouraged during the last two years. Virtually every other activity was banished. Playgrounds, schools, extracurricular activities, pools, museums, you name it... closed. In many places you literally couldn't go outside without some kind of government issued hall-pass.
We absolutely, shamefully fucked over kids the last two years. And so many people cheered it on despite kids being the lowest risk group out there.
Kids have less freedom today than they eve did - my parents roamed the city freely, i only walked to school by myself, kids today hardly leave the house alone
>The test case for this was 4chan incubating incel/redpill culture and Reddit later amplifying it among late-millennials.
4chan did not incubate redpill. Reddit was the primary spot for redpill to congregate, until Reddit started cracking down on TRP and related subs. Cherry on top, Reddit has not acted against the highly similar FDS and many other subs.
Incel culture is also skeptical at best. Yes, 4chan did have the famous Elliot case, and several boards were famous among them. However, Reddit also banned several subreddits related to them which made them flock towards 4chan.
This doesn't change the issue (rampant media exposure is bad for the human psyche). It just puts into perspective things have been going downhill since the masses got access to social media and unlike 4chan, the darker corners of Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and whatever else aren't nearly as taboo and may even sneak onto the homepage feed randomly. 4chan was mostly the place where the extremists would congregate, but extreme cases don't explain why the number of moderate or higher cases would increase.
To put things further in perspective: 4chan started in 2005. Twitter founded in 2006. Reddit, 2007. Smartphones took off somewhere late 2000s/early 2010s. The "average" kid did not have access to these platforms 24/7 before 2010. Those that would likely didn't spend the little PC time just browsing the darkest corners of the net on a single monitor.
I’ve been wondering about “mid phase” internet a bit recently. The time where it opened up to “nerdy” people, after tech professionals, and before general masses. There was a pushback against the internet being serious business. All someone has to do was turn off the computer and it all went away. Could it be that even back then it was somehow known what would happen with the influencer marketing engagement stuff that is a known problem now? Unwarranted self importance? Superman vs Goku and Star Trek vs Star Wars as training in not only how to leverage conflict for engagement (or your personal internet points) but also in how to see through it as being bait? That if you let the general masses make the internet real life then you open pandora bawks? Not sure that’s why it’s all questions.
My awareness of TRP MRA ETC was only after internet feminists started complaining about it loudly, for whatever that’s worth.
As a tangent: how often do we rediscover what the ancients already knew? Can anything survive touching the general masses?
> I'm not sure the pandemic is solely or even largely responsible.
The article is literally reporting a major change in mental health metrics in teens as of a year into the pandemic. You honestly think social media/4-chan/reddit is the culprit? I think I'm starting to see why a million Americans are in a box today. There is a disconnect here.
>Concerns about adolescent mental health were rising before the pandemic: Teens had been reporting poor mental health at higher rates. Between 2009 and 2019, the percentage of teens who reported having “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26 percent to 37 percent. In 2021, the figure rose to 44 percent.
I assume this is the line you're talking about. So in the span of a pandemic, it increased by 7% as opposed to the 11% between 2009 and 2019. While the premise "the pandemic didn't matter" might not be valid, it is a good question to ask which things that are now returning to normal had an effect, and whether the trend is still continuing up otherwise. It has been between 2009 and 2019. It's not difficult to find sources showing correlations between some mental health issues (in this case depression[0]) and internet usage. Several other aspects have not gotten any better either, and do not seem to be getting better anytime soon. Things these teens will inevitably have to deal with in the next 5 years unless things change drastically.
So the pandemic did matter, but I'd also be skeptical of what long term effects the pandemic caused which would not have happened otherwise, and which effects are caused by other trends which quietly continued or were amplified by the pandemic and will plateau or continue growing after.
Again, we are talking about an effect that has been showing a 1.1% increase year over year up to 2019. If we assume that 2019 was much like previous years, then the 7% rise reported from 2019 through the first six months of 2020 would result in approximately a 6% rise in those first 6 months alone. That is an astounding increase in the overall metric in a very short period of time coinciding with the beginning of pandemic lockdowns. I posit to you that this is due to the pandemic; that is, to social isolation, economic disruptions to households, fear of death to self and loved ones, actual deaths of loved ones, etc. I think that is a much better explanation for what has been observed than screen time or social media.
I am seeing that kids are less and less interested in online-only bubbles. They use social media, whatever the current popular platform, as ways to enhance connections if they use it at all.
There are many who are addicted to their devices. But there are many that are not. Why?
Most kids I know, think social media are lame. They use it complement for their hobbies and activities. It was pandemic that glued them to their phones, not the other way around.
Here, have an anecdote: I always spent a lot of my time online (I got Discord at 12 or 13 I think, I never got Twitter or any FB/Meta apps, but now I'm on the fediverse which is nice) and the pandemic didn't really change much other than me not having to leave the house to go to school.
The undergrads I work with don't seem to ever mention Facebook, but Discord seems pretty popular. Social media is like everything else: There's the "bad" product which has been ruined by old people and the "good" product that the hip young crowd likes. This treadmill will continue as people join networks, settle in to their preferences, and then age.
Zoomers are the first generation with nearly unrestricted access to social media essentially from birth (access that probably should've been restricted early on, but that's water under the bridge). Couple that early and frequent exposure with artificial echo chambers created by apps to boost engagement, and impressionable minds end up soaked in endlessly-amplified negative perspectives.
The test case for this was 4chan incubating incel/redpill culture and Reddit later amplifying it among late-millennials. Today, EDs, ideation of self harm, etc are all mercilessly reflected back at people on just about every social media platform rather than just the niche ones. The pandemic only made it worse by preventing people from spending time with each other in person, but kids are glued to their phones anyway.
$1 Bet: millennial parents will probably learn from this with their own kids. Or if not, legislators probably will. Late Gen-α and the generation that follows will hopefully see a rebound from these trends with parenting habits that benefit from these learnings.