I really enjoyed this piece, thank you! I was particularly interested that you trace the current smartphone/social media panic back to 2016. I'd be tempted to trace its beginnings earlier than that, to the early 2010s, when news outlets began to increasingly publish articles about the "dangerous trends" that were circulating amongst teens on social media like planking and the cinnamon challenge.
Overall I felt that Haidt's book presents a really inaccurate timeline of teen engagement with tech. His own data shows that teen mental health was stable (perhaps improving) throughout the 2000s, the exact decade when teens began compulsively texting (c. 2001), hanging out on MSN after school, and posting photos of themselves to Bebo or Myspace (c. 2005). It was also the decade the first smartphone was released (2007). So an uptick in mental health problems from 2012 doesn't even really correlate with the arrival of smartphones and social media.
I really enjoyed this piece, thank you! I was particularly interested that you trace the current smartphone/social media panic back to 2016. I'd be tempted to trace its beginnings earlier than that, to the early 2010s, when news outlets began to increasingly publish articles about the "dangerous trends" that were circulating amongst teens on social media like planking and the cinnamon challenge.
Overall I felt that Haidt's book presents a really inaccurate timeline of teen engagement with tech. His own data shows that teen mental health was stable (perhaps improving) throughout the 2000s, the exact decade when teens began compulsively texting (c. 2001), hanging out on MSN after school, and posting photos of themselves to Bebo or Myspace (c. 2005). It was also the decade the first smartphone was released (2007). So an uptick in mental health problems from 2012 doesn't even really correlate with the arrival of smartphones and social media.