All of those arguments have been used for every change in society for thousand of years. For example:
>discovering the negative effect algorithmic social media has on the mental health of teens
Same was said for pants over dresses, for radio, for tv, for rock and roll, for video games, for dancing, for co-ed schools, for educating women, for cameras, for electricity, for catalog ordering, and on and on, with literally the same arguments, the same studies, the same downfall of society, and this has been repeated in cultures the world over as they evolve. With all these terrible decreases in teen life compounding for hundreds to thousands of years, it's amazing they do so well today compared to generations past.
It's also nice when people put their beliefs, created from their upbringing, on the next generation, ignoring that each has adapted and evolved with new changes and each does turn out ok, and for the most part with much better lives.
Instead of picking a negative consequence of some change and ignoring the net change, look at the pros and cons - over time society tends to mitigate the cons and adopt the pros, and today will likely be the same pattern.
>Instead of picking a negative consequence of some change and ignoring the net change, look at the pros and cons
I actually did, you didn't which is why you're engaging in whig history. Today roughly one in six youths is obese. 10% of all American teens are prescribed some psychiatric medication. Over the last five years about 20% of high school students have reported thoughts of suicide. Today people from all age groups report fewer social connections than in any prior decade. All of these stats are at all time highs/lows.
This pattern you're talking about doesn't exist. If you look at actual data there are huge losses in quality of life, some having continued for decades. The tech utopianism in the face of clear evidence is pathological and imaginary. Vague arguments about "thousands of years of history" (do you actually have data on happiness and well-being over 'all of history')? don't constitute an argument, that's just fantasy.
And that report points out the correlation between general teen happiness and various internet uses is ~ -0.1, which is pretty weak, with plenty of citations of research backing it up.
>Today people from all age groups report fewer social connections than in any prior decade
So you can cherry pick all the ills you want, blame them on whatever current boogey man there is, but that same argument has been used for all the things I mentioned above. The correlations, and certainly the causes, are no where near as clear in the research data on these topics.
>discovering the negative effect algorithmic social media has on the mental health of teens
Same was said for pants over dresses, for radio, for tv, for rock and roll, for video games, for dancing, for co-ed schools, for educating women, for cameras, for electricity, for catalog ordering, and on and on, with literally the same arguments, the same studies, the same downfall of society, and this has been repeated in cultures the world over as they evolve. With all these terrible decreases in teen life compounding for hundreds to thousands of years, it's amazing they do so well today compared to generations past.
It's also nice when people put their beliefs, created from their upbringing, on the next generation, ignoring that each has adapted and evolved with new changes and each does turn out ok, and for the most part with much better lives.
Instead of picking a negative consequence of some change and ignoring the net change, look at the pros and cons - over time society tends to mitigate the cons and adopt the pros, and today will likely be the same pattern.