Tuesday, this was the theme at my toastmaster's debate club[1] - I got stuck arguing that social media doesn't make you depressed.
And... my problem with my argument wasn't that it was untrue, but that it was kinda mean. I don't feel jealous of the lives of almost anyone I went to high school with; quite the opposite. A lot of them post "racist memes with spelling mistakes" - which is sad on many levels; If nothing else, it is a certain indicator that they are not living their best lives... but I have a hard time imagining a world where I could be jealous of someone like that.
For that matter, most of the positive social media content I see is baby pictures. I'm one of those people who is glad other people have children; I admire parents, yes, but I certainly wouldn't want to be one myself.
I suppose I just don't get it. Do other people carefully curate their social media lists so that they are only following the super-rich, super-successful and super-articulate? because my experience with social media is that I see people closer to 'average' when I log in to facebook, whereas in real life, I live in a world where most people I spend time interacting with are smarter and wealthier and more successful than I am on several other axes.
I'm not on social media aside from Reddit. But what I notice with my wife and others is a simple reason why I dislike it. If you have 400 friends, and they each only take one vacation a year, that means 8x per week, you're looking at other people taking a vacation. Even if you travel 4x per year, you'll still feel like you never do anything and everyone else is always celebrating their life.
I realize this is a simple example, but it's valid and wears you down over time. Also, even having a handful of very wealthy friends can eventually lead to feelings of envy.
In past times, most people grew up surrounded by people similar to them in terms of wealth and status - but in today's world that's no longer the case.
If you really do look down on your old friends and acquaintances like that (so that you see their posts as all about being poorer and less articulate than you), then you're probably the one making posts that depress them.
Imagine yourself as if you went to highschool in the society where you now work (so that now, the people you used to know are twice as educated and lots of them are far more wealthy), or perhaps imagine what it would be like to have stayed in your old town while someone else went to SV!
As others have pointed out in responding to you, you don't only have to be following the super-rich and super-successful for your feeds to project an image skewed toward their experiences.
Thanks to the heavy-tailed distribution of most aspirational resources (whether that is followers/friends, likes/retweets or various offline resources), we encounter a "generalized friendship paradox" (see https://doi.org/10.15195/v1.a10 among others) where on average our friends in our social networks score more highly on a variety of attributes than we do.
So it's enough for us to follow a few individuals on the long tail of a distribution for the paradox to apply that, even though most of our friends might not be particularly impressive individuals when compared to ourselves, on average our friends are much more popular, successful and beautiful than we are. Thanks to the structure of our networks (and online networks might have greater skew than offline networks), socially-induced anxiety can come about quite quickly. Not a lot of curation is needed.
This is pretty much my exact experience with social media. I grew up in a remote, working class area. Many of the people I grew up around are lower SES than I ended up being. Of course, I'm the lucky one that got out of that so my relative well being is pretty high. Who knows what it would be like if I grew up in a wealthy suburb of a major city.
That said, I do find myself drained after spending too much non creative screen time. News sites, twitter feeds, fb, insta, etc. . . . Anecdotes and all, but the screen time hypothesis jives well with my personal experience.
Note that the article is on teens, an age group where as a general rule everyone is super hormonal and therefore emotionally changable and hyper aware of social status.
You're trying to look at this through the eyes of an adult, presumably one with a reasonably good career judging by other comments you've made.
Many of you are speaking about the social aspects of smartphones and social media, but I think a big issue is also the cognitive impact of short-term gratification due to internet/tech addiction. Happiness often comes from feeling competent. If teens attention spans are dwindling due to this addiction, they are going to grow up without the grit to persist and develop skills.
I agree with this. It's not about "jealousy" towards your friends on fb. It's about feeding the attention-monkey. And the more you feed that monkey the more it wants.
Healthy brains spend time (much time) prior to attention, just being. I like to go on long walks and practice breathing. Dissolving mind and attention leads to great clarity, when the thoughts are needed.
Society as a whole does not seem to recognize the attention-burden, for example, more and more advertising and television images are showing up everywhere. It is not possible to just relax and be, while commuting or getting around town. People seem to assume that this is the way to live. It is not.
Until September, I was teaching A-level at 2 schools in the UK, and had been since 2002. Over the last 3-4 years, the ability of students to apply themselves and concentrate (independent of their ability) seemed to drop away completely. Obviously purely anecdotal, but my teaching experience became much worse in that time period; I'm glad to not be doing it any more, which is sad because it's something I actually love doing when it goes well.
I see this in the students I mentor. Every single one of them cannot focus on a single task for longer than 60 seconds, which is severely hampering their ability to think deeply about abstract programming and data science problems. It's very frustrating, but they just cannot stop checking their phones for updates
Except from 2010 - 2015 many teens did feel a crushing sense of economic dread as they dealt with the realities of student loans, an out of reach housing market, devalued college degrees, the gig economy, promises of no retirement, etc.
The article just skims over it with a quick this is why economics couldn’t have been the reason.
> the realities of student loans, an out of reach housing market, devalued college degrees, the gig economy, promises of no retirement, etc.
Have you ever met a teenager? Almost literally zero percent of them think (or need to think) about this stuff, with the possible exception of some of the very oldest teenagers (ie, people in their first or second year of college who are starting to think about the details of the start of their careers).
Only the oldest of teens would worry about those things. I agree they're all bad but I'm not convinced they'd have much of an impact on under 17 year olds.
I'm extremely hacked off that the high school I'm sending my kids to requires students to have an ipad. It's expensive for me, of no benefit to the student, and makes it difficult for students and parents to figure out what homework is due becuase it's scattered around various websites depending on the teacher's whim. It also means he has a screen to fight with us over that he would not have had otherwise. Then the younger kids get annoyed he has one and they don't. There is no upside.
I asked my oldest son why he doesn't invite his friends around more often and he said 'I can talk to them online'.
I don't think many teens (13-18) are doing much deep thinking about those things. I was a teenager about a bit more about than a decade before this time period, so maybe things were just so great then I didn't consider these things. But it seems like a stretch to me that a middle school or high school student is depressed because they are worried about retirement. Things like that were far too abstract to be contributing factors to my mental state at that age.
Screen time is a symptom, not a cause. One of the vital drives of adolescents are to gain independence from their parents and figure out their own place in life. To do this, teens need to interact with peers, hang out, make mistakes, and generally be sociable.
Our society, largely, does not allow this. Instead, safety fears, need for cars, etc, keep teens at home. So what else is a teen to do to interact socially with their peers? Online is the least-bad remaining outlet for this desire - if they can't hang out in a parking lot or whatever, at least they can take selfies on instagram or whatever.
I think the "likely culprit" is, as it has always been, just the "human condition."
The coming into an unknown world, ignorant of everything, constantly reconciling conflicting ideas, nagged by a sense of ultimate pointlessness, and the dread of inevitable mortality. However we may try to pooh-pooh these things away, they've been an incurable source of unhappiness since time immemorial.
Humans cannot be truly happy unless we keep ourselves seriously deluded or constantly distracted; with biosocial emotions, religion, duty, hope, ambition, goals, pleasure or whatever.
Throughout our history the distraction has mostly been provided by daily struggle for survival, but the comforts of civilization and technology, and the increasing knowledge of the species as a whole, have been laying us bare to the above.
We probably either have to keep cooking up new distractions, or we'll need to sit down as an species and conduct a no-bullshit review of what it means to be human, and everyone's place, right and requirements in this world, and our combined place in the cosmos.
That may be the underlying cause of some suicides but it doesn't explain why depression and suicides have increased for teenagers in the last 5 years. Also, if we need distraction to survive the ultimate meaninglessness of life as you claim then why would technology make depression worse instead of better?
>Humans cannot be truly happy unless we keep ourselves seriously deluded or constantly distracted; with biosocial emotions, religion, duty, hope, ambition, goals, pleasure or whatever.
Typical internet denizen idea of humanity.
Religious people are not all deluding themselves into happiness. Quite a lot of them find religion to be a framework with comes with its own sources of existential dread.
Emotions are a delusion to keep us happy? Hope is also a delusion to keep us happy? ...what?
They did a study using Facebook. But I'm more curious about Instagram. "Look at all these rich beautiful people with millions of followers sailing around the world on their yachts." Ten minutes on Instagram is enough to fill any sane person with existential dread and bring about severe depression.
For my son (17 y.o.) it is online games and phone use in general. He has - I hope - mild depression, which - I believe - is caused by his online habits.
His mom and I thought taking his PC away from him would fix it. But then he falls into school-sleep cycle, that looks like full-blown depression.
Yes, his grades are affected and in not a good way.
What works for now is to participate in his life with him. As of now we are at a Volleyball tournament. While he "sucks" at it, the social interaction and sense of belonging to the team/cause that puts a wide smile on his face.
Not saying we should take phones away from kids, but certainly they should be treated as potentially harming things when used incorrectly: guns, alcohol (, drugs?), etc.
In any case, Volleyball includes scores of girls dressed in spandex, so there is hope he will get interested in them and starts to think how to get to them rather than look at the phone.
Not as much as LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a fairytale-land for adults, and it's bizzare (to me) that anyone wants to participate. It's not even humblebragging anymore. It's "Look what I made, and what I achieved" packed into casual "Oh this thing? Yeah it's just my perfect life"-packages...
There should be a health warning to the effect of: “Objects seen on instagram are faker than they appear.”
They may be beautiful, they may be on a yacht - but the thing has been chartered for an hour for an instagram shoot, they’re staying in a backpacker’s hostel, that methuselah of champagne was bought empty and filled with water, and they’re not actually called Montague Herostache, but rather Duane Dibbley. It’s all artifice.
Source: I watched gaggles of instagrammers faking the lifestyle at Royal Phuket Marina during a yacht show last year, paying to pose on megayachts. It was rather sad - like caged birds primping their plumage.
Completely agree. I also believe that YouTube can have similar results. Kids watch videos of "professional" YouTubers having nice cars, traveling all the time, living in nice homes, etc... We have had to significantly limit the amount of time our kids are exposed to YouTube (and Instagram) simply because of the "I want it now" and "I want that one" mentality it has caused on some occasions.
This might have been on HN a while ago, but it talks about different social media sites and came to the conclusion that Instagram was the worst of them as far as this stuff goes.
Depends on who and what you're following, I guess. Being a male in my mid- to late-30s I don't use Instagram for social purposes, as I don't have any personal photo of mine in there, I'm just using it to post architecture-related photos (mostly photos of communist brutalist buildings built in my city in the 1960s and 1970s) and to follow people interested in very similar things. For purposes like this one is quite an interesting medium.
Depends on the person. I don't respond to material wealth, I would probably end up annoyed by their lifestyle more than anything else. Facebook and similar on other hand rubbed my lack of social skills wound so much I deleted it really long ago.
This is ridiculous. Depressed and filled with existential dread over seeing pictures of rich people on yachts, really? Do you feel that way every time you pass by a large house or see an expensive car on the road too?
I think the same can be applied to just about any source/site/app where these feelings of inferiority can arise. Even here if I spend enough time browsing posts with topics I’m not strong in, I feel like I still have so much catching up/learning to do in tech, and it kills me. Drawing comparisons is way too easy and it really is the devil.
This is anecdotal, but when I was a teen, I was bullied, and online was an escape. The idea of those bullies hitting up a Facebook, Instagram, or even just texting insults 24/7 would probably be jarring and depressing.
Teenagers get depressed when they are in love, their love is unrequited, and they are constantly reminded of that fact. Facebook facilitates all of these conditions. Why is love never mentioned in these studies as a primary motivator in teen suicide?
This research is highly debated and is by no means a sure thing. The research so far has been correlational, inconsistent, and weak. Twenge
hugely overstates the confidence we should have in the findings.
Im sure smartphones could be a possible factor however one must not forget how depressing the whole high school experience is. I think that the pressure has increased quite a bit. The amount of hw has also increased.
I don’t think that this suicide increase has been observed in say Finland.
i think the article is correct, but i also think that new perceptions about society are contributing to the problem. kids used to think that they could make ends meet, somehow. as time goes forward, that notion is increasingly replaced by the notion that there is no way to make ends meet or to have a good life besides succeeding in high school and then college and then in a fancy career. anything besides that is not really accepted or respected, from what ive seen. so imagine that you are a kid and you are in fact not up to the gauntlet of challenges associated with making all of that happen -- or imagine that taking on that huge challenge frightens you which causes you to do badly in school which then makes you even more frightened and hopeless. and you need to do all this while attending a public high school in the US, which are some of the most toxic, inhospitable and shortsighted places in the world.
the whole thing a stupid cultural artifact that not only makes no sense (the economy will not function if everyone has white-collar jobs), but also completely overlooks the mental health of the people who are subjected to it.
and its all made worse by social media, because kids know that if their life and career dont wind up being ideal, their entire social circle is going to be looking at it online.
i was in high school when facebook first took off. i suppose im lucky because i got to experience high school before facebook (before modern social media) and i got to experience high school after. such a transition happens once in a lifetime. i immediately had a very bad feeling about facebook and felt really bad whenever i used it. when i was faced with the transition to a facebook world, informed by the memory of how i felt before facebook, i chose not to make an account and effectively opt out of online social interaction. its a decision that i have never regretted and one that seems better and better as the years tick by.
i still cant understand why people use facebook. and im not surprised in any way that a world where everyone is on facebook has these kinds of consequences.
Is it possible this is also in part due to EMFs from their phones (and environment) and circadian rhythm disturbances from screens?
Some studies suggest the radiation can be risky to kids:
Christ A, Gosselin MC, Christopoulou M, K’uhn S, & Kuster N. (2010 Jan.). Age dependent tissue-specific exposure of cell phone users. Physics in Medicine and Biology, 55: 1767-1783. Retrieved from http://iopscience.iop.org/0031-9155/55/7/001/pdf/0031-9155_5....
Hardell L, Carlberg M, Hansson Mild K. (2009) Epidemiological evidence for an association between use of wireless phones an tumor diseases. Pathophysiology 16 (2-3): 113-122.]
Hardell L, Hansson Mild K, Carlberg M, Hallquist A. (2004) Cellular and cordless telephones and the association with brain tumours in different age group. Archives of Environmental Health 59 (3): 132-137.
Divan HA, Kheifets L, Obel C, Olsen J. (2008) Prenatal and Postnatal Exposure to Cell Phone Use and Behavioral Problems in Children. Epidemiology 19(4): 523-529.
Byun, YH, Ha, M, Kwon, HJ et al (2013 Mar 21). Mobile phone use, blood lead levels, and attention deficit hyperactivity symptoms in children: a longitudinal study. PLoS One. 2013;8(3):e59742. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0059742.
Morgan, L, Kesari, S, Davis, D (2014). Why children absorb more microwave radiation than adults: The consequences. Journal of Microscopy and Ultrastructure 2(4): 197-204. doi:10.1016/j.jmau.2014.06.005
The existential challenge for most teens is "Do I belong with peers?" I had a hard enough time with that, with only a few hundred schoolmates. I can't quite imagine how tough that must be on social media today. Bullying and mobbing are just so much more efficient.
I suppose that one could argue that's it's just stronger selective pressure for toughness. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." But now, words can hurt. Can destroy your life. Or so it seems. And what about the ones who survive? What sort of society will they create? I have no clue.
Maybe we should manage social media like psychoactive drugs.
Teen suicide isn't going up in Europe generally or specifically in the UK.
It seems more likely to me that the uptick is due to a 2004 FDA black-box warning on antidepressants indicating that they were associated with an increased risk of suicidal thinking, feeling, and behavior in young people. It seems likely that prescriptions for antidepressants would go down and people avoiding taking their antidepressants would go up a few years after the warning.
Housing market is pretty bad factor. Most generations previous could afford a starter house on two minimum wage or a bit above minimum wage incomes. In many areas today you need two engineering incomes to pay off a 30 yr mortgage.
tl:dr correlation between them all getting mobile phones and facebook. Perhaps because of the need to reduce it to six paragraphs, it is a very unconvincing piece.
Weird that they so often write "screen" when they mean "social media". My eyes were glued to screens growing up. TV, PC, GameBoy, consoles. But his is only happening now.
I find it interesting the article doesn't talk about physical health. Many of the mental health drugs cause extreme weight gain which can lead to depression.
[+] [-] lsc|8 years ago|reply
And... my problem with my argument wasn't that it was untrue, but that it was kinda mean. I don't feel jealous of the lives of almost anyone I went to high school with; quite the opposite. A lot of them post "racist memes with spelling mistakes" - which is sad on many levels; If nothing else, it is a certain indicator that they are not living their best lives... but I have a hard time imagining a world where I could be jealous of someone like that.
For that matter, most of the positive social media content I see is baby pictures. I'm one of those people who is glad other people have children; I admire parents, yes, but I certainly wouldn't want to be one myself.
I suppose I just don't get it. Do other people carefully curate their social media lists so that they are only following the super-rich, super-successful and super-articulate? because my experience with social media is that I see people closer to 'average' when I log in to facebook, whereas in real life, I live in a world where most people I spend time interacting with are smarter and wealthier and more successful than I am on several other axes.
[1]The silicon valley "Agile Articulators" toastmasters debate club - we meet at the Hacker Dojo in Santa Clara. https://www.meetup.com/Agile-Articulators-Toastmasters-Club
[+] [-] jraby3|8 years ago|reply
I realize this is a simple example, but it's valid and wears you down over time. Also, even having a handful of very wealthy friends can eventually lead to feelings of envy.
In past times, most people grew up surrounded by people similar to them in terms of wealth and status - but in today's world that's no longer the case.
[+] [-] whatshisface|8 years ago|reply
Imagine yourself as if you went to highschool in the society where you now work (so that now, the people you used to know are twice as educated and lots of them are far more wealthy), or perhaps imagine what it would be like to have stayed in your old town while someone else went to SV!
[+] [-] jboynyc|8 years ago|reply
Thanks to the heavy-tailed distribution of most aspirational resources (whether that is followers/friends, likes/retweets or various offline resources), we encounter a "generalized friendship paradox" (see https://doi.org/10.15195/v1.a10 among others) where on average our friends in our social networks score more highly on a variety of attributes than we do.
So it's enough for us to follow a few individuals on the long tail of a distribution for the paradox to apply that, even though most of our friends might not be particularly impressive individuals when compared to ourselves, on average our friends are much more popular, successful and beautiful than we are. Thanks to the structure of our networks (and online networks might have greater skew than offline networks), socially-induced anxiety can come about quite quickly. Not a lot of curation is needed.
[+] [-] weeksie|8 years ago|reply
That said, I do find myself drained after spending too much non creative screen time. News sites, twitter feeds, fb, insta, etc. . . . Anecdotes and all, but the screen time hypothesis jives well with my personal experience.
[+] [-] ck425|8 years ago|reply
You're trying to look at this through the eyes of an adult, presumably one with a reasonably good career judging by other comments you've made.
[+] [-] cteague|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathgenius|8 years ago|reply
Healthy brains spend time (much time) prior to attention, just being. I like to go on long walks and practice breathing. Dissolving mind and attention leads to great clarity, when the thoughts are needed.
Society as a whole does not seem to recognize the attention-burden, for example, more and more advertising and television images are showing up everywhere. It is not possible to just relax and be, while commuting or getting around town. People seem to assume that this is the way to live. It is not.
[+] [-] djaychela|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malux85|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] purple-again|8 years ago|reply
The article just skims over it with a quick this is why economics couldn’t have been the reason.
[+] [-] wutbrodo|8 years ago|reply
Have you ever met a teenager? Almost literally zero percent of them think (or need to think) about this stuff, with the possible exception of some of the very oldest teenagers (ie, people in their first or second year of college who are starting to think about the details of the start of their careers).
[+] [-] dajt|8 years ago|reply
I'm extremely hacked off that the high school I'm sending my kids to requires students to have an ipad. It's expensive for me, of no benefit to the student, and makes it difficult for students and parents to figure out what homework is due becuase it's scattered around various websites depending on the teacher's whim. It also means he has a screen to fight with us over that he would not have had otherwise. Then the younger kids get annoyed he has one and they don't. There is no upside.
I asked my oldest son why he doesn't invite his friends around more often and he said 'I can talk to them online'.
[+] [-] cwar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThrustVectoring|8 years ago|reply
Our society, largely, does not allow this. Instead, safety fears, need for cars, etc, keep teens at home. So what else is a teen to do to interact socially with their peers? Online is the least-bad remaining outlet for this desire - if they can't hang out in a parking lot or whatever, at least they can take selfies on instagram or whatever.
[+] [-] bpicolo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Razengan|8 years ago|reply
The coming into an unknown world, ignorant of everything, constantly reconciling conflicting ideas, nagged by a sense of ultimate pointlessness, and the dread of inevitable mortality. However we may try to pooh-pooh these things away, they've been an incurable source of unhappiness since time immemorial.
Humans cannot be truly happy unless we keep ourselves seriously deluded or constantly distracted; with biosocial emotions, religion, duty, hope, ambition, goals, pleasure or whatever.
Throughout our history the distraction has mostly been provided by daily struggle for survival, but the comforts of civilization and technology, and the increasing knowledge of the species as a whole, have been laying us bare to the above.
We probably either have to keep cooking up new distractions, or we'll need to sit down as an species and conduct a no-bullshit review of what it means to be human, and everyone's place, right and requirements in this world, and our combined place in the cosmos.
[+] [-] spuz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abusoufiyan|8 years ago|reply
Typical internet denizen idea of humanity.
Religious people are not all deluding themselves into happiness. Quite a lot of them find religion to be a framework with comes with its own sources of existential dread.
Emotions are a delusion to keep us happy? Hope is also a delusion to keep us happy? ...what?
[+] [-] deckard1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] limaoscarjuliet|8 years ago|reply
His mom and I thought taking his PC away from him would fix it. But then he falls into school-sleep cycle, that looks like full-blown depression.
Yes, his grades are affected and in not a good way.
What works for now is to participate in his life with him. As of now we are at a Volleyball tournament. While he "sucks" at it, the social interaction and sense of belonging to the team/cause that puts a wide smile on his face.
Not saying we should take phones away from kids, but certainly they should be treated as potentially harming things when used incorrectly: guns, alcohol (, drugs?), etc.
In any case, Volleyball includes scores of girls dressed in spandex, so there is hope he will get interested in them and starts to think how to get to them rather than look at the phone.
[+] [-] MIKarlsen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madaxe_again|8 years ago|reply
They may be beautiful, they may be on a yacht - but the thing has been chartered for an hour for an instagram shoot, they’re staying in a backpacker’s hostel, that methuselah of champagne was bought empty and filled with water, and they’re not actually called Montague Herostache, but rather Duane Dibbley. It’s all artifice.
Source: I watched gaggles of instagrammers faking the lifestyle at Royal Phuket Marina during a yacht show last year, paying to pose on megayachts. It was rather sad - like caged birds primping their plumage.
[+] [-] Gargoyle|8 years ago|reply
You have to curate your feed. Curate curate curate.
[+] [-] jeffmould|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c0nducktr|8 years ago|reply
https://www.rsph.org.uk/about-us/news/instagram-ranked-worst...
I'm not able to open the report itself from that page, but I found a copy and uploaded it to archive.org.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180128204404/http://www.infoco...
[+] [-] paganel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimmaswell|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmoriarty|8 years ago|reply
Obsessively materialiastic, maybe. Sane, no.
[+] [-] andrei_says_|8 years ago|reply
So I’m mostly exposed to beauty, mostly invited to learning and delight.
[+] [-] j0hnml|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rorykoehler|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nojvek|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AckSyn|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] yakitori|8 years ago|reply
How is this any different than society at large? How is this any different from TV and newspapers?
> Ten minutes on Instagram is enough to fill any sane person with existential dread and bring about severe depression.
Ten minutes on HN is enough considering all the fear mongering being pushed here.
And most people who use instagram are not severely depressed. Go figure. Wonder why that is"?
[+] [-] greggarious|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ouid|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psb31|8 years ago|reply
See https://medium.com/@OrbenAmy/social-media-and-suicide-a-crit... and https://twitter.com/shuhbillskee/status/955070356091555840 for some critiques of the work.
[+] [-] adamnemecek|8 years ago|reply
I don’t think that this suicide increase has been observed in say Finland.
[+] [-] wheresmyusern|8 years ago|reply
the whole thing a stupid cultural artifact that not only makes no sense (the economy will not function if everyone has white-collar jobs), but also completely overlooks the mental health of the people who are subjected to it.
and its all made worse by social media, because kids know that if their life and career dont wind up being ideal, their entire social circle is going to be looking at it online.
i was in high school when facebook first took off. i suppose im lucky because i got to experience high school before facebook (before modern social media) and i got to experience high school after. such a transition happens once in a lifetime. i immediately had a very bad feeling about facebook and felt really bad whenever i used it. when i was faced with the transition to a facebook world, informed by the memory of how i felt before facebook, i chose not to make an account and effectively opt out of online social interaction. its a decision that i have never regretted and one that seems better and better as the years tick by.
i still cant understand why people use facebook. and im not surprised in any way that a world where everyone is on facebook has these kinds of consequences.
[+] [-] simplify|8 years ago|reply
https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5a6a144de4b0ddb658c46a21
[+] [-] randomname2|8 years ago|reply
Some studies suggest the radiation can be risky to kids:
Christ A, Gosselin MC, Christopoulou M, K’uhn S, & Kuster N. (2010 Jan.). Age dependent tissue-specific exposure of cell phone users. Physics in Medicine and Biology, 55: 1767-1783. Retrieved from http://iopscience.iop.org/0031-9155/55/7/001/pdf/0031-9155_5....
Block, R. (12 July 2012). American Academy of Pediatrics letter to the FCC. Retrieved from http://www.scribd.com/doc/104230961/American-Academy-of-Pedi...
Hardell L, Carlberg M, Hansson Mild K. (2009) Epidemiological evidence for an association between use of wireless phones an tumor diseases. Pathophysiology 16 (2-3): 113-122.]
Hardell L, Hansson Mild K, Carlberg M, Hallquist A. (2004) Cellular and cordless telephones and the association with brain tumours in different age group. Archives of Environmental Health 59 (3): 132-137.
Divan HA, Kheifets L, Obel C, Olsen J. (2008) Prenatal and Postnatal Exposure to Cell Phone Use and Behavioral Problems in Children. Epidemiology 19(4): 523-529.
Byun, YH, Ha, M, Kwon, HJ et al (2013 Mar 21). Mobile phone use, blood lead levels, and attention deficit hyperactivity symptoms in children: a longitudinal study. PLoS One. 2013;8(3):e59742. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0059742.
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[+] [-] mirimir|8 years ago|reply
I suppose that one could argue that's it's just stronger selective pressure for toughness. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." But now, words can hurt. Can destroy your life. Or so it seems. And what about the ones who survive? What sort of society will they create? I have no clue.
Maybe we should manage social media like psychoactive drugs.
[+] [-] verbify|8 years ago|reply
It seems more likely to me that the uptick is due to a 2004 FDA black-box warning on antidepressants indicating that they were associated with an increased risk of suicidal thinking, feeling, and behavior in young people. It seems likely that prescriptions for antidepressants would go down and people avoiding taking their antidepressants would go up a few years after the warning.
[+] [-] CryoLogic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazyasciiart|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mordymoop|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alkonaut|8 years ago|reply
Can the genie be put back in the bottle?
I’m hoping that giving 12yo kids smartphones in ten years will be seen as giving them cigarettes.
[+] [-] limeblack|8 years ago|reply