"As an educator, I feel an obligation to support Haidt on his personal learning journey"
I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt by reading the entirely of her article, but she really is the smarmy jackass I expected from the quote. Hats off to Haidt for keeping his professionalism in response.
This is the type of science we should laud. No, the kids are not alright. And there are forces bent on keeping them that way to exploit for political power and money.
There may be other factors beyond technology that contribute to this. As younger kids, they had, as a whole, been overscheduled with little time for free play. They have also been way over protected. Add to this the pressure to be academic superstars, and you can easily see these factors leading to mental health issues. I certainly don't think social media has helped the situation, but it is probably not the only reason, maybe not even the main reason. More study is needed to attribute causality.
without teen mental health baseline data trends for decades prior to the 2000s, it's hard to know if there was an underlying, slower growing phenomenon that smartphones simply exacerbated...Is the current teen crisis about a) exponential growth in opportunities to compare one's self to others? or b) simply a function of a technology devastating an already predisposed layer of teens who have been alienated cross the generations for decads (but who did not fall over the edge?)
It's not just social media. It's engagement with the internet. It's not an active pastime- it's passive. That passivity does not support mental health in anyone, young or old.
Unless I missed them while perusing the Collaborative Study, no data were provided that would allow correlation of cell phone use, social media use or unsupervised play time with pre-teen and teen mental illness. It remains an intriguing hypothesis that increased cell phone and social media usage are causing increased mental illness. However, increased cell phone and social media usage may be to a certain extent a symptom of developing mental illness rather than the cause.
This is a very intriguing hypothesis, especially when combined with the stats on changes in reported mental health and suicide rates! However, there is still the glaring issue of omitted variable bias, which I don't see you addressing. A whole lot of stuff happened in between 2010 and today and I'm not seeing any real attempt to show that teen mental health trends is due to social networks rather than any number of other possible explanatory factors. I would really like to see a statistical analysis with some sort of identification strategy. Off the top of my head, you may be able to use cell phone strength as an instrument for social network exposure. There have been a ton of studies in economics that have used this identification strategy: radio exposure during the new deal; exposure to radio during the Rwandan genocide; exposure to Nazi propaganda; exposure to independent news in Russia.
"As an educator, I feel an obligation to support Haidt on his personal learning journey"
I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt by reading the entirely of her article, but she really is the smarmy jackass I expected from the quote. Hats off to Haidt for keeping his professionalism in response.
I love to see this kind of direct intellectual engagement with critics.
Of course, I'll have to read them directly too.
Your use of the Google Doc is really interesting, I had never considered this kind of tool for academic collaboration to gather and weigh evidence.
This is the type of science we should laud. No, the kids are not alright. And there are forces bent on keeping them that way to exploit for political power and money.
There may be other factors beyond technology that contribute to this. As younger kids, they had, as a whole, been overscheduled with little time for free play. They have also been way over protected. Add to this the pressure to be academic superstars, and you can easily see these factors leading to mental health issues. I certainly don't think social media has helped the situation, but it is probably not the only reason, maybe not even the main reason. More study is needed to attribute causality.
without teen mental health baseline data trends for decades prior to the 2000s, it's hard to know if there was an underlying, slower growing phenomenon that smartphones simply exacerbated...Is the current teen crisis about a) exponential growth in opportunities to compare one's self to others? or b) simply a function of a technology devastating an already predisposed layer of teens who have been alienated cross the generations for decads (but who did not fall over the edge?)
It's not just social media. It's engagement with the internet. It's not an active pastime- it's passive. That passivity does not support mental health in anyone, young or old.
Unless I missed them while perusing the Collaborative Study, no data were provided that would allow correlation of cell phone use, social media use or unsupervised play time with pre-teen and teen mental illness. It remains an intriguing hypothesis that increased cell phone and social media usage are causing increased mental illness. However, increased cell phone and social media usage may be to a certain extent a symptom of developing mental illness rather than the cause.
This is a very intriguing hypothesis, especially when combined with the stats on changes in reported mental health and suicide rates! However, there is still the glaring issue of omitted variable bias, which I don't see you addressing. A whole lot of stuff happened in between 2010 and today and I'm not seeing any real attempt to show that teen mental health trends is due to social networks rather than any number of other possible explanatory factors. I would really like to see a statistical analysis with some sort of identification strategy. Off the top of my head, you may be able to use cell phone strength as an instrument for social network exposure. There have been a ton of studies in economics that have used this identification strategy: radio exposure during the new deal; exposure to radio during the Rwandan genocide; exposure to Nazi propaganda; exposure to independent news in Russia.