Jonathan Haidt, being right about social media (again):
Despite years of heated debate, a consensus has now emerged about just how large the correlation is between social media use and mood disorders. In the SCA paper Twenge, Lozano, Cummins and I wrote, we compared the association of social media time with mental illness to other variables found in the same datasets. In that same UK dataset, mood disorders were more closely associated with social media use than with marijuana use and binge drinking, though less closely associated with sleep deprivation. I’m not saying that a day of social media use is worse for girls than a day of binge drinking. I’m simply saying that if we’re going to play the game of looking through lists of correlations, the proper comparison is not potatoes and eyeglasses; it is marijuana use and binge drinking.
Having looked at these studies and sounded the alarm for years now, Haidt then asks, “What would it take to show that social media use was causing teen girls to become depressed and anxious?”
But that is absolutely the wrong question.
Among the normal population of people, only the most willfully blind, idiotic, and lazy (which is to say, most of us) don’t “know” this to be true of social media.
There is one giant, obvious, international and gendered cause: social media. Instagram was founded in 2010. The iPhone 4 was released then too – the first smartphone with a front-facing camera. In 2012 Facebook bought Instagram, and that’s the year that its user base exploded. By 2015, it was becoming normal for 12-year-old girls to spend hours each day taking selfies, editing selfies and posting them for friends, enemies and strangers to comment on, while also spending hours each day scrolling through photos of other girls and wealthy female celebrities with (seemingly) superior bodies and lives. The hours girls spent each day on Instagram were taken from sleep, exercise, and time with friends and family. The arrival of smartphones rewired social life for an entire generation. What did we think would happen to them?
The question is not “How do you get the studies to show it?” or “How do you get people to believe the studies?” The question is, so what? So-the-fuck what? How do you get people to JUST STOP USING IT?
I hear often (and rightly, and encouragingly) about how the sociopaths running the giant social media and tech companies simply do not care about any of this. And they definitely, definitively don’t. But do you know you else doesn’t care? The fucking average human being.
That seems like a bigger problem to me.