[HN Gopher] Not Every Study on Teen Depression and Social Media ...
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Not Every Study on Teen Depression and Social Media Is Bad. Only
Most of Them
Author : oatmeal1
Score : 15 points
Date : 2023-05-30 19:41 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (reason.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (reason.com)
| jjeaff wrote:
| Someone made a good point on a recent episode on the NYT's Hard
| Fork podcast. They were discussing how the social media scare is
| similar to the moral panic in the 90s and early 2000s over video
| games. And millions of kids played all those violent games
| relentlessly and we didn't collapse as a society.
|
| However, one of the hosts pointed out a big difference today that
| wasn't the case back then. Those of us who played things like
| Mortal Kombat or GTA rolled our eyes at the supposed dangers. But
| with social media, lots of young people will openly state that
| they think it is harmful for their mental health. They will
| remove it from their devices and swear it off and many end up
| going back to it. So there is something obviously different now.
| notaustinpowers wrote:
| I think the biggest difference now is that for games like
| Mortal Combat, we knew they were stories, we knew they were a
| fantasy. But social media nowadays is very focused on being
| "real".
|
| It's easy to separate fantasy from reality when we know that
| the characters on screen are fake. But when the "character" on
| the screen is your friend from high school posting a new photo
| with a rented Porsche in front of an AirBnb, talking about how
| successful they are, the line separating fantasy from reality
| starts to blur. I'll compare my fitness journey with my
| friends, but I'm not comparing myself to Kano, because I know
| Kano isn't real.
|
| Consciously, we may know that the photo is edited and it's not
| real, but subconsciously, it's a face we recognize and we
| compare anyway, even if we don't mean to.
| [deleted]
| aio2 wrote:
| I would argue that these services have very different purposes.
|
| Video games are meant to be virtual games, social media is for
| connecting people (looking at it optimistically).
|
| Don't you think social media has more openings for bad actors,
| or at least more apparent openings? I think these fears are
| valid based on that.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| A lot of that depression seems to be root-caused to teens
| comparing themselves to their peers.
|
| In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-
| olds." [1] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese,
| not just overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's
| [2]. I have to wonder if it's related. A lot of teenagers are
| bombarded with images of their peers' perfectly healthy bodies
| that, quite simply, won't match what they see in the mirror. The
| solution? Ban mirrors.
|
| [0] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html
|
| [1]
| https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obe...
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