[HN Gopher] Almost half of British teens feel addicted to social...
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Almost half of British teens feel addicted to social media - study
Author : marban
Score : 94 points
Date : 2024-01-03 14:17 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| brohoolio wrote:
| I'm sure they are. What's the screentime per day for the cohort?
| 2 hours? 4 hours? 8 hours?
| itslennysfault wrote:
| ...and the other half lied or are in denial.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Can we switch social media off for 8 hours per day, 9-5pm maybe.
| I think it would make everyone happier and I bet nobody would
| miss it.
| tempest_ wrote:
| I remember when stores used to be closed on Sundays.
|
| We can close social media on Sundays and reopen monday morning
| aha
| ben_w wrote:
| Sunday shopping ban was part of my culture shock moving to
| Berlin.
|
| The calmness of the city outweighs the mild and easily
| planned-around inconvenience.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Not everybody needs to live in big cities, the calm you
| like so much can be obtained outside instantly, any day,
| every day.
|
| Plus sometimes when actually having a life maybe other days
| are fully taken doing something important, so its nice to
| have it as an option. The societies that have Sunday
| shopping that I ever visited didn't experience any kind of
| shopping frenzy during it, everything is scaled down, some
| shops are opened shortly, some are not at all (or some
| close on Monday instead).
|
| That is all said as an European who knows very well what
| you mean, from various angles
| tempest_ wrote:
| The flip side is retail workers get worked to death.
|
| Around here the only day retail is closed is Dec 25,
| every other day is open.
|
| I have not worked in retail for so long, maybe they
| prefer the opportunity to make more money I don't know.
|
| It would not really change anything for me.
| lawlessone wrote:
| >9-5pm maybe
|
| i feel like that would just be convenient for work and nobody
| else.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I'm not saying the proposal is finalised or even marginally
| thought through. But neither is everyone being horrifyingly
| distracted by social media.
| twiclo wrote:
| That's a great idea. Utah thinks so too. Well, at least between
| 10:30 PM to 6:30 AM
|
| https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title13/Chapter63/13-63-S105.html?...
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| It's only for minors. I think that's an important note.
| vidarh wrote:
| I would miss it. I would also make it a matter of principle to
| refuse if someone tried to force a shutdown on us - I've got my
| Mastodon and Lemmy instances, and if we were to have to go
| underground, we'd go underground.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I am actually not convinced the people chatting on Mastodon
| or Discord are addicted in the same way as YouTube and
| Twitter.
|
| How about this instead, no algorithmic feeds for any 8 hours
| of the day you choose, so if you want a more peaceful evening
| you select 7pm-3am and your feed is just people you follow
| ordered by when they first posted.
| vidarh wrote:
| No thanks. No way. I'm working on adding algorithmic feeds
| to my Mastodon instance because it's _the biggest_ issue I
| have with Mastodon. It 's also making me _spend more time_
| because I have to scroll through a bunch of stuff I have no
| interest in to see the stuff I want to see.
|
| Put another way: To me, your statement boils down to
| telling me I should be less social. These kinds of places
| are the social contact I grew up with - starting with BBS's
| in the early 90's onwards - and where I've met and keep in
| touch with most of the people I know.
|
| I have no problem accepting some people have problems
| controlling their social media use, but at the same time to
| me talking about limiting or shutting it down is about as
| authoritarian and restrictive as enforcing curfew. In fact,
| _more so_ - it 'd affect me more negatively than being
| forcibly locked in my own house 8 hours a day.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| LeechBlock on Firefox has timed blocks. It works on Android and
| desktop.
|
| Delete the apps, use the websites.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Plenty of people use it responsibly. Why should they be
| punished just because some people can't seem to control their
| behavior?
| andy_ppp wrote:
| That's good because a quick poll where I am everyone says
| they would like to reduce social media usage!
| saiya-jin wrote:
| A good character building experience then, for free - try
| all of ya putting down phone for an hour a day. Next time
| even 2. Everybody knows the trivial steps leading to it,
| but will bullshit around it for 2 hours just to avoid it.
| Brave ones block the app. But real hardcore mode is simply
| uninstalling given app.
|
| The day I removed all FB apps (FB, messenger) was the
| happiest phone-owning day for me since getting it for the
| first time.
| SirMaster wrote:
| I think we should encourage healthier social media
| practices. Forcing people feels more like a band-aid rather
| than a proper fix.
|
| I don't think the problem is social media, I think the
| problem is people honestly.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| Would this be the same 8 hours for everyone worldwide, would it
| be by the user's timezone, or would we get to choose our own 8
| hours?
|
| This question was brought to you by memories of not being able
| to set the timezone of my tamagotchi and it subsequently dying
| because it was awake when I was asleep.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Nah bro. What about, for example, people who happen to be busy
| during all but the hours you select for the shutdown. Since
| it's forced, they effectively just don't get to use it at all.
| In my opinion though, social media can be used in a productive
| way in moderation, like how a lot of people use it to keep up
| with the news or stay in touch with family.
| reedf1 wrote:
| When did we lose the moral authority to make things illegal for
| minors? I believe in 50-100 years it will be a worldwide scandal
| that these skinner boxes were ever given to children let alone
| adults. AI optimised attention slideshow that likely drains you
| neurochemically and disrupts your reward circuitry the same way
| heroin or ecstasy does? On paper this shit should clearly be
| regulated.
| ethanbond wrote:
| One contributing factor is the surprisingly recent meme that
| corporations exist solely for the benefit of their
| shareholders. It's a totally ahistoric and obviously antisocial
| meme that gets repeated like it's gospel, even by otherwise
| intelligent people. This perspective should be literally
| laughed at and made fun of as a moral system suitable only for
| the greediest and most myopic among us.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Isn't it an inevitable part of Capitalism though? If the
| directors of a corporation start acting to not maximise the
| shareholders profits, they'll soon be replaced or the
| corporation bought out by more ruthless/sociopathic people.
| ethanbond wrote:
| The emergence of this idea definitely is guaranteed, but
| the dominance of it isn't. There are many countervailing
| forces that can and should be used, including regulation.
| One of the forces that I'm advocating for, as I believe it
| is undervalued and underutilized, is pushback at the
| cultural level. It is absolutely possible to build truly
| thriving businesses that include more stakeholders than
| just shareholders. Costco is a canonical large cap example,
| but of course there are millions of small businesses who
| serve their communities much more holistically.
| jl6 wrote:
| What is special about Costco?
| nonameiguess wrote:
| There are plenty of examples of companies that have stayed
| in business for a very long time while being focused on
| something other than maximizing profits, whether that be
| prestige, quality, treating employees and customers
| reasonably well, promoting particular values. In N' Out,
| Hobby Lobby, Costco, Ferrari, A24. Not saying they're
| paragons of virtue, but they have missions other than "get
| as rich as possible" and this hasn't driven them to
| extinction. Presumably, over some long enough span of time,
| you need to at least not lose money to stay in business,
| but money doesn't need to be your only objective.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| You only have to maximize shareholders' profits better than
| the next best CEO, they have no other option. No one is
| firing Tim Cook because he made a choice that reduced
| profits 1%.
| cj wrote:
| Interesting article on this topic:
|
| https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/02/11/towards-
| accountab...
| ethanbond wrote:
| Very interesting indeed! Thank you for sharing.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Overdramatic. Social media may be bad but it is not like heroin
| or ecstasy.
|
| Engaging in moral panics, on the other hand, seems to provide a
| high to some individuals just like heroin or ecstasy. Let's
| regulate them instead.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| There's already evidence of the harm caused to teenagers'
| self esteem due to endless comparisons with peers over social
| media. This leads to many types of mental illness such as
| depression, anxiety, eating disorders etc. Considering that
| we're exposing almost the entire teenage population to these
| harmful effects, it's hardly overdramatic.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Heroin physically alters brain chemistry. It's worse.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Mental illnesses also physically alter brain chemistry
| and anorexia is arguably far more damaging than heroin.
| Someone can remain addicted to heroin/opiates for decades
| whilst still being part of society (it tends to be either
| impurities or inconsistent quality of heroin that causes
| deaths). It's unlikely that someone will continue
| suffering from anorexia for a decade.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| A conclusion that could be drawn from your statements is
| this: it's more okay for teenagers to use heroin instead
| of social media because it's safer.
|
| I think people and especially teenagers, even
| "chronically-online" depressed ones on social media,
| would laugh at this. They're wrong to do so, of course.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| heroin isn't readily available to 10 year olds the way
| tiktok is.
|
| brains rewired from youth by apps that have been
| unquestionably designed to demand engagement.
| reedf1 wrote:
| Are there no valid moral panics? Are you a moral anti-
| realist?
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Panic is uncontrolled activity done in response to a
| threat. If any productive action happens in a panic, it is
| by chance. Chance, therefore, moral panic is a poor way to
| actually solve a problem or improve ones life.
| Opportunistic entites may utilize moral panic toward
| political goals in the same way as boogeymen or scapegoats.
| One might think this validates moral panic, but I don't see
| it as translating to obeying the will of the people (or
| equivalent constituency) because things done out of panic
| are not a sign of consent.
| reedf1 wrote:
| You are being selectively pedantic; a hallmark of bad
| faith engagement.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| You're being dense. He directly answered your question.
| ben_w wrote:
| As a teenager in the late 90s in the UK, I remember the moral
| panic about ecstasy, where Leah Betts was the unwitting
| literal poster child for the war against drugs, in the form
| of her comatose intubated face in a hospital bed.
|
| They told us that we couldn't rely on it being pure, because
| hers was pure and it killed her. They told us we couldn't be
| sure it would be safe for us if we'd already tried it before,
| because this was her second time and it killed her.
|
| They never told us she'd _actually_ died from drinking
| approximately 7 litres of water in 90 minutes. But they did
| fire someone for truthfully saying the drug itself was no
| more dangerous than riding a horse.
| owisd wrote:
| With moral panics, the kids would never agree that video
| games or D&D or whatever was causing them any problems, yet
| with social media use most kids will agree it's a problem, so
| can't be characterised as a moral panic.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| I'd be a completely different person if I'd grown up under a 21
| drinking age. It was often my only social outlet.
|
| Even the kids used to go out until the RAVE Act.
| lupusreal wrote:
| (When doing "X let alone Y" the more outrageous thing goes in
| Y.)
|
| I strongly agree with your point, it should be possible to ban
| this stuff for minors at least. Under 13s are already
| _effectively banned_ but banning all minors altogether would be
| much more effective.
| ImAnAmateur wrote:
| > "Social media research has largely assumed that [so-called]
| social media addiction is going to follow the same framework as
| drug addiction," said Turner. Orben's team and others argue that
| this is likely to be oversimplistic and are investigating whether
| the teenagers cluster into groups whose behaviour can be
| predicted by other personality traits.
|
| > It could be that, for some, their relationship is akin to a
| behavioural addiction, but for others their use could be driven
| by compulsive checking, others may be relying on it to cope with
| negative life experiences, and others may simply be responding to
| negative social perceptions about "wasting time" on social media.
|
| Finally! I feel less smart for not having thought of this myself!
|
| I was unable to meaningfully change my own phone habits (despite
| serious effort and roadblocks) until it clicked that I was coping
| for something. What that was and what I was doing to cope
| highlighted parts of my life like nothing else. Instead of simply
| abstaining from using my phone, I put time into activities that
| benefited the withered branches of my life. Old habits still die
| hard, but knowing _that_ I 'm coping _as_ I 'm coping helped me
| separate the good social media use from the bad.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| This is the solution for a lot of behavioral problems. The
| instinct is to do the bad behavior less, but the solution may
| instead be to do something else more.
| deemster wrote:
| A nail is driven out by another nail, habit is overcome by
| habit - Erasmus
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I made a browser based strategy game that takes place over
| weeks. Instead of checking Facebook 3 times a day, I log
| into Neptune's Pride 3 times a day to chat with the other
| players and try and conquer the galaxy.
| apwell23 wrote:
| Yes this is why I've been trying to ski as much as possible
| this winter.
|
| 1. Helps my eyes by letting them see things at a distance.
| staring far into mountains on the lift ect.
|
| 2. Keeps me away from internet. I have dumb phone and a whistle
| with me in my pocket.
|
| 3. Helps me reconnect with my body and rediscover what it can
| do.
|
| 4. Mountain air seems to clear up my sinuses
|
| 5. And ofcourse benefits of physical excerscise.
|
| 6. I just feel very fulfilled at the end of day a stark
| contrast to depression of day filled with daze of the internet.
|
| 7. This is bit of bro science but seems to improve my
| digestion. Being in internet daze all day seems to put a pause
| on my digestion.
| forrestwilkins wrote:
| Exercise generally helps with digestion.
| Swizec wrote:
| > Instead of simply abstaining from using my phone, I put time
| into activities
|
| My relationship with social media, even HackerNews, really
| clicked when a meme (oh irony) said: _"You're like a tiger in a
| cage. You know how they pace in circles when their enclosures
| lack enrichment? That's you bouncing around apps on your
| phone"_
|
| Haven't quite figured out how to reliably stop that, but it's
| true that when there's enough enrichment, I can go days
| forgetting that my phone and the internet even exist.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| "The Myth of Normal" by Mate Gabor is a great place for people
| to start this work.
|
| Later it dawns on you that sure, like everybody else you have
| weaknesses and traumas that you've learned to cope with, but
| that doesn't excuse some people deliberately designing and
| pushing a product to specifically exploit that. That should
| give you dose of healthy positive anger of the kind that is
| transformative when acted upon.
| johndhi wrote:
| any tips on how to identify what you're coping for?
| ggpsv wrote:
| Not the parent but I can suggest what has worked for me.
|
| Talking to a therapist can be helpful in getting to the root
| of it. Meditation also helps, but it may be a longer road. In
| other words, whatever helps you live a more examined life.
|
| Regarding habits and the habit loop (what's being mentioned
| here), "The Power of Habit" [0] is a great read.
|
| [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Habit
| edrxty wrote:
| No shit, go see a decent therapist. This is literally the
| core of what they do as a profession. If they aren't helpful,
| just want to babble about the weather for 45 minutes,
| whatever, find a different one. PhD > Masters but I've met
| bad PhDs and good masters clinicians.
|
| Also, if you're struggling with getting things done because
| you're always dopamine seeking, get checked for ADHD. There
| are some extremely effective treatments that can make your
| life way easier if that turns out to be the problem.
| godelski wrote:
| In addition to therapist, as others state, I'd also suggest
| just being more open with your friends (I also get that it
| can be intimidating to see a therapist and it's easy to
| justify not going, especially if you're in a good mood).
| Maybe grab some beers or something to create a
| scapegoat/plausible deniability if needed. I've long suffered
| from depression and this has been one of the most impactful
| moves for me, especially around identifying latent issues
| that appear more ethereal. It can be hard, especially in our
| general gender norms (I'm male) where some people will think
| it is a weakness (men and women), but to me strength is doing
| the hard things. YMMV, but I think it is important to have
| friends and/or partner(s) that you can be open with and just
| have the ability to vent. Fuck, sometimes I don't even know
| what I'm upset about until I let off a little steam first,
| and often just an outside opinion helps.
|
| I can also suggest small internet communities as these can be
| places to form friendships while having some PII type of
| anonymity and at least for me helped me be more open before I
| was ready to open up to friends. Places like HN and reddit
| are probably too large, but hey, I'll put this out in general
| to anyone, feel free to reach out over email[0]. You can also
| get something similar by just talking to random people at a
| bar.
|
| Whatever works best for you, but it all is a noisy process.
| But at the end of the day I think what's most critical is
| that you find some means of just opening up. You don't have
| to stick to one group either, and if you need to start at one
| place to build up to another, there's no problem with that.
| Take it as a journey, not a destination. But I will say
| having at least a one or two core friends (and ideally a
| partner) is going to be one of the most helpful things you
| can do for your mental health. A therapist will never be
| enough but you should think of them as a very useful and
| different tool (because you do want advice not coming from
| those who want to protect you. Outside opinions are
| invaluable and a good therapist will do their best, but
| consider they can only work with the context you give and
| what they can get from you).
|
| [0] In my profile. And if anyone has a suggestion for a
| better anonymous email, let me know. I'm kinda annoyed at
| proton's ads.
| godelski wrote:
| I think this is an unfortunately not enough discussed topic. As
| sciences are young (as psychology relatively is) you work on
| broader problems and much more aggregated results. You make
| naive assumptions like everything exists in normal
| distributions or data is i.i.d. So you get results that are big
| generalizations and sometimes not even reliable. But then as a
| field advances, it naturally shifts into requiring more and
| more nuance and specificity. Where you have to start
| considering multivariate solutions (even if that's a mixture of
| gaussians, which, awesome tool btw) because you approach a
| natural wall at the explainability of your data with naive
| methods. And let's be clear, if we wanted to really rigorously
| study psychology -- at the same level as, say, physics -- then
| there would need to be a lot of crazy math invented and we'd
| probably still end up needing to do unethical things because
| holy fuck how do you control all those variables. (definitely
| warrants being open about error and unknowns)
|
| There's nothing wrong with that. But I do think it's wrong that
| we're not open about it, in so much that it isn't even always
| explicitly stated during a science education. We might say
| something like "all models are wrong" but I don't think that
| solidifies this thinking enough for novices and can create
| experts who still don't get it. Wherein it becomes a classic
| clique, where everyone knows the phrase but doesn't understand
| or practice the lesson.
|
| There's some noticeable downsides too. If you're constantly not
| reiterating what your base assumptions are and acknowledging
| the limitation of those assumptions, you forget they exist. It
| also becomes hard to communicate the significance of your work
| to the public and I think in some cases is often why the public
| ends up calling (sometimes rightfully, sometimes not) bullshit.
| I think there's also a major advantage to science, in being
| open about these helps newcomers (such as those entering
| graduate school) more readily understand the limitations of the
| field and what work needs to be done. But I think some
| incentive structures we have in place don't encourage great
| scientific behavior in this way. Speaking of which, other
| metrics can even end up making bridging this multivariate gap
| more difficult. Such as the all too well known p-value
| weirdness, you may end up rejecting works making progress
| towards this bridging by having these arbitrary requirements
| rather than evaluating works with more nuance, which can even
| then discourage attempting to build such bridges. I guess
| coming full circle to: it's complicated? Like everything else
| lol
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| You've really nailed from my perspective.
|
| I used my phone as a way to withdraw and escape. Even the most
| mundane situations warranted some degree of escape. Very
| stressful times would boost my screen time dramatically.
|
| It seemed painfully simple in retrospect. Like any behavioural
| addiction, though, I had an endless supply of reasons to be on
| a screen at any given time. Scary stuff. I don't think I'm the
| kind of person people would think behaves that way, nor did I
| necessarily. But we're all human, and this is a very human
| thing. It sneaks into your life in such an insidious way, and
| does so much damage before you can consciously see it or feel
| it.
| i_am_jl wrote:
| >'We're not saying the people who say they feel addicted are
| addicted,' said Georgia Turner, a graduate student leading the
| analysis
|
| Is it common to question the validity of self-identified
| addictions to other substances or behaviors? Is it common for
| people who aren't gambling addicts to say things like "I feel
| like I'm addicted to gambling"?
|
| I suppose that the lead on the study doesn't want to overstate
| their findings, and there's obviously a social stigma that exists
| around admitting to gambling addiction that doesn't seem to exist
| for social media addiction, but still; it strikes me as unusual
| to be so openly questioning people about whether or not their
| perceived addictions are real.
| megaman821 wrote:
| Well, yes if the suggestion is some sort of intervention. There
| are large groups of people that will say they are addicted to
| coffee, TV, video games, etc. Not a lot of them will meet the
| medical definition of addiction.
| paxys wrote:
| Probably the most obvious example of this is everyone who
| says "I have OCD!". No, you don't really have OCD.
| vidarh wrote:
| It is both fairly common to say you're addicted to something as
| a way of saying you're really into something _as well as_ to
| indicate actual addiction, _and_ you can 't expect people asked
| a question like that without detailed additional guidance to be
| able to give a clinical assessment of whether they are in fact
| suffering from an addiction.
|
| Unless you probe what the respondents _mean_ by addiction, _or_
| provide them a clear definition before asking, there 's very
| little reason to assume they will be using a definition of
| addiction that justifies assuming anything approaching a
| clinical definition, or even anything negative.
|
| My opinion goes in other direction: I think even with that
| caveat, what she went on to say suggests she's making
| assumptions about what people meant - especially given the age
| of the respondents - that I don't there's basis for unless the
| survey provided a lot more context than just the question given
| in the article.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Seems reasonable to separate self-identification from a
| diagnosis. Flip the logic: if someone says they _aren 't_
| addicted to something, does that make it true?
| amenhotep wrote:
| Social media addiction is a meme (in the technical, mind virus
| sense), gambling addiction isn't.
|
| I don't know if this is what the study authors were thinking,
| but I see it as a bit like not taking people's word for it that
| they're gluten intolerant. It _is_ a real thing and people _do_
| know that they have it, but also it 's a trendy thing and there
| are a lot of people trying to convince you that you have it
| when actually you're perfectly normal.
| vidarh wrote:
| I don't think there'd be a problem taking their word for it
| _if the questions asked were the right ones_.
|
| Asking people if they feel like they're addicted to social
| media without framing exactly what you mean by addicted (and
| for that matter what you include in social media) might both
| overcount and undercount.
|
| Have everyone who answered answered on the basis that they
| see this "addiction" as a problem, or a negative, and
| something they genuinely find hard to stop (as opposed to not
| really wanting to do anything about)? On the opposite end,
| are the ones who disagree counting forums like Reddit, or HN?
| Discord servers? Are they talking mostly about one one-on-one
| contact with friends on, say, Snapchat, that they're
| "addicted to" because it's social contact they enjoy, or
| depression-boosting, compulsive voyeueristic doom scrolling
| that they're addicted to in a downright harmful way?
|
| It's a start, and little more, to ask that first question
| that pretty much only tells us that there is something of
| sufficient magnitude to probe further. To start with, the
| respondents appear to not have said whether or not their
| "addiction" is something that causes negative effects on
| their life or not.
| vidarh wrote:
| [EDIT: I'd love to hear what those who've downvoted actually
| disagree with. The question as stated in the article _objectively
| does not_ ask whether they see this as a problem or not, nor does
| it justify why they believe they can assume how respondents have
| interpreted the question; I very intentionally caveated this to
| point out that I don 't have a problem with the notion that many
| of them probably _did_ mean it was problematic to them, but if
| that was not appropriately contextualised to the respondents _it
| is not clear_ how many did or did not interpret it the same way
| the researchers do - maybe they did include additional context;
| if so it 's The Guardian leaving out important context. Either
| way, from this article we can't tell]
|
| Overegging the results.
|
| This is the statement they were asked to agree or disagree with
| according to the article.
|
| > "I think I am addicted to social media"
|
| Note that it does not ask them to answer whether they think they
| have a _problematic_ relationship with social media. Using the
| term "addicted" to refer to something you spend a lot of time
| with is common _whether you 're happy or unhappy about it_.
| Unless there is significant context around the question that the
| article left out but that were presented to respondents, making
| the assumptions they seem to be making in the article seems
| problematic at best.
|
| E.g. if asked if I was dedicated to chocolate, or pistachio ice
| cream, I'd say yes. If I was asked if I had a problem with it,
| I'd say no - I _enjoy_ those "addictions". I also enjoy my HN
| "addiction".
|
| I'm sure a portion of those who strongly agreed that they feel
| addicted _also_ do consider it a negative and maybe a serious
| problem in some cases, but _the question reported on did not ask
| about that_ , so all we really know is the upper bound on the
| subset that may or may not consider their social media use a
| problem.
|
| Maybe it is a genuinely big problem, or maybe it isn't. This data
| won't tell us.
|
| What is worrying, though, is that even though the grad student
| leading the analysis downplays the "addiction part" ("We're not
| saying the people who say they feel addicted are addicted,") she
| goes on to overinterpret the data ("But it's not a nice feeling
| to feel you don't have agency over your own behaviour. It's quite
| striking that so many people feel like that and it can't it be
| that good") - nothing about the question asked about whether
| people feel they have agency, or that it "can't be that good".
| Maybe they all meant that, but assuming they all meant that when
| it was not what they were asked is unprofessional.
| justrealist wrote:
| 50% _feel_ addicted, and the other 50% are addicted but don 't
| even recognize the feeling (because they've had a smartphone
| since preschool).
| maven29 wrote:
| It would be more productive to stop prodding at the symptoms and
| instead consider looking into potential root causes like car
| dependency and commercialization or erosion of third places.
|
| Kids aren't just staring at a glowing rectangle due to some
| unexplainable pharmacological effect it may possess, they just
| crave human connection and sense of belonging just like everyone
| else. Using medical terms to dehumanize them is not productive at
| all.
| rchaud wrote:
| The root cause is that social media apps are designed to be
| addictive whereas other software is not. This was encouraged by
| all the SV cheerleaders (remember Nir Eyal's "Hooked" being a
| must-read for all product bros?), before it was clear that
| Facebook and others conduct significant levels of
| experimentation to extend screen use time.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Places with far weaker car culture and world class mass transit
| and which have stronger "third places" culture are still phone
| and social media addicted. See Singapore, Japan, or South Korea
| as an example of this.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| Quit social media, you'll feel better.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| hacker news is social media
| 342534ateraegst wrote:
| then we should quit that too. Bye bye!
| hinkley wrote:
| Anyone heard any compelling conjectures on what the backlash for
| all of these studies will look like? My own are fairly
| milquetoast.
|
| I just hope they do better than we did with cigarettes, and the
| boomers did with nature.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| a poor take.
|
| cigarette consumption is way, wayyyyyyy down, and is
| effectively gone in the first world outside of small pockets.
| compare to the 1950s where everyone smoked, all the time.
|
| or think about asbestos, or lead. we figured out those are bad
| and made drastic changes to start removing those -- and did.
|
| nature is a little harder, esp. given that the largest corps in
| the world + plenty of soverign wealth funds, are trying their
| hardest to keep people from thinking about it as it collapses.
| jgliajwelirt4j wrote:
| Once again, social media is 21st century cigarettes. Legions of
| brilliant scientists and engineers have spent cumulative
| millennia optimizing these products to be as addictive as
| possible, while simultaneously compiling and burying evidence of
| the deleterious effects their products have on their customers.
| palemoonale wrote:
| Colour me surprised. And quite some of you friggen' softies and
| app devs are resposible for this, this output of yours which is
| way worse than the perceived impact of carbon dioxide, travel,
| cars, etc. Fuck you social media devs.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| They hide behind the "someone else would have done it and the
| paycheck was nice" defense.
| righthand wrote:
| Repost because of HN's over-aggressive censorship (m-bation is
| abbreviated no-no word):
|
| Social media is just psychological m-bation via marketing
| tactics. Maybe if we called it m-bation people would stop
| aggressively ignoring the negative effects from habitual use. On
| the other hand no one openly discusses physical m-bation, just as
| no one discusses their online identity they've cultivated. Get a
| hobby, gain a skill.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| How many of us reading this title are addicted to this website
| (which you can argue is a form of social media, is it not?)
|
| How many of us read + communicate on this as well as Reddit as
| well as...
| Telegram/WhatsApp/Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/TikTok/etc.
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