"... what makes TikTok and Instagram and whatever else special is the sociality."
Here is where I think your thinking goes wrong. You're taking the "social" part of social media literally, without interrogating it. "Parasocial" was a term that was popular there for a minute, and I think that's a much better descriptor for what Tiktok and Instagram actually are.
Not too be rude about these guys and their ilk but one thing I am frequently annoyed by (to put it mildly) is that the people who most often comment on “kids these days” and society’s ills in general are almost always freakishly inhuman robots.
Without fail they all appear to have no understanding of how actual living human beings operate. They talk about people the way entomologist talk about the mating rituals of bees.
Exhibit A: “Well, Tyler, you’re talking as an intellectual who has probably the highest reading throughput rate of any human being I’ve ever heard of.”
Who talks like this! If this dude actually spent time around other kids growing up he would’ve either been rightfully beaten or berated into being less of a dork.
TL;DR the people who spend the most time talking about other humans do so because humanity is completely alien to them.
Something I'd really love to know is why it seems like all the pro-screen-time, pro-social-media takes are coming from the people I read that could be categorized as progressive and/or on the left.
I expect conservatives to carry water for giant corporations, to see so many liberals/leftists essentially doing so is more than a bit disappointing.
How is the WORLD can you condemn The Coddling of the American Mind without reading it? It is a very sensible survey of the changes I myself watched from my "free range childhood" in the 50s to the increasing criticism of letting your children explore (physically or mentally) when my kids were young in the 70s and 80s to the current situations where parents can be prosecuted for "child abuse" because they let their children play in a nearby park.
His argument is that increasing restriction on childhood learning from experience, and the confusion of physical safety with intellectual safety has resulted in the rash of over PC attitudes in the college students of the time of his book. His suggestions are completely sensible and boil down to "let your children learn from experience as well as from your teachings and don't scare them to death about people who disagree with them."
I found the book by his co-author ( Greg Lukianoff), the Cancelling of the American Mind, much less convincing because it was rife with overgeneralizations about college students, but I wouldn't have known that had I not read it.
When I first saw what this post was about, I was excited to read it, but it turned out to be pretty disappointing.
While "The Coddling" certainly increased Haidt's visibility, he was well known long before that. "The Righteous Mind" (in my opinion, still his most best and most important work) was earning him recognition as one of the world's "top thinkers" years earlier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt#Reception).
Meanwhile, Haidt indeed does argue that social media and phones are one of the major causes of teen mental illness and depression. Not simply a symptom but an important cause (though not the only one) of those problems. And the evidence he gathers to make this case is impressive. It certainly isn't "anecdotal."
Which doesn't mean, of course, that everyone has to agree. I would be interested in reading a real argument for why Max believes it is "more productive, and more realistic, to imagine screen time as a symptom of those problems, and many others--a compounding symptom, maybe, but a symptom nonetheless."
That's a post that would be worth reading and engaging with. But Max doesn't make a compelling argument. In fact, he doesn't make any argument at all. He simply links to Nature's piece criticizing Haidt but doesn't even bother to explain why he finds it compelling or what is wrong with Haidt's recent post in response to it:
"AI will cut screen time down to 1/3 of today for everyone because it will simply summarize what is on the internet." Summarize what then, Tyler? Summarize what?
Who is creating all this content that is being summarized if everyone is using AI to read us back the internet. This idea of the internet is one step more (or less) sophisticated than the "advances the plot" complainers of movies/TV. The goal isn't to enjoy or spend time, simply get to the conclusion.
Damn weird fuckin comment section on this one! Going to exit this "shared space" just like I did the "third places" of my "halcyon youth" whenever the whippets started.
whenever people wax incredulous about young people's social media use and I start to feel myself agreeing with it, I remind myself that most of these kids were not alive (or do not remember) a world where social media didn't exist. Just the other day my husband reminded me of the derogatory epithet "posting face"--used in the early-aughts to refer to online users who posted actual images of themselves. "posting face" was seen as indicative of wanting attention, having mental illness, or just having a sense of self-importance that wasn't warranted back then, because the Internet wasn't considered "important".
I think that's the part of problem folks run into when using this mental health crisis framing to talk about young people and social media: deep down they still don't think the Internet is important, because they can remember a time when it genuinely wasn't. That's not to say that a mental health crisis among the youth isn't the happening, or that the screen time isn't an exacerbating factor. But we also live in a world where the communities we build and relationships we foster on the internet do have tangible effects on the real world. So the fact that these young people are worried about "missing out" or "being left out" of happenings on the internet is a real and valid thing for them to feel. Would it be better for them to socialize in person? Well yeah, probably. But the real world isn't where everyone is most of the time. We're all "posting face" now.
Max I love your writing and insights, but by leaning exclusively on third party reviews of Haidt's book you ended up arguing against a strawman in this one. The social elements of social media aren't missing in his analysis. Haidt argues that the social needs are hijacked and redirected into harmful, addictive, and isolating versions of themselves.
I do agree with some of the criticism of the book. The claimed uniqueness of Gen Z on this front doesn't totally hold up, which isn't too surprising. Older generations might not have been born with social media, but they still actively use it in droves.
That said, we can all agree Cowen's take in the interview is a bog-stupid misunderstanding of the entire mechanism. Even if AI could effectively summarize all the social media people currently consume, the digest would not actually provide any of the psychological stimulation which makes social media addictive.
> Where does that appear in Cowen and Haidt’s model?
Uhm, the social part is all over the place in Haidts book, and when he says that students say that "everyone else is on it" or that they'll miss what others are talking about, that is not an informational dimension, but a social dimension. (One key to human sociality is knowing "what others are talking about".)
From this 70s child perspective, we never came to terms with a reasonable TV screentime and then....so many more screens became available. The tech is never to fault, its our use and abuse of it that are. Not blaming the user but would really love more intentionality. Watching tik tok gain maddening traction from abroad during the epidemic was breathtaking. More. Conscious. Choices. And teaching next generations good screen and social humaning. This is what we need.
"Multi-player online video games are the Ivy League of learning how to deal with difficult people." In terms of "random people get along to do objective"? Usually. In terms of handling conflict and failure? We must have played different games, then. The only healthy multiplayer interaction I saw was between people who had some connection besides the game; a forum, a community, some RL connection. Everything else is passive-aggression, throwing, ragequitting, /gquitting, drama, and more proofs of the G.I.F. theorem. Not certain how anyone could learn healthy human interaction strictly from the Internet.
How about social media is designed to be addictive to maximize scroll time and ad revenue? It’s just capitalism, y’all.
Yes, the idea of “AI digests” misses the point, but even more fundamentally: there’s no profit motive to reduce screen time.
"... what makes TikTok and Instagram and whatever else special is the sociality."
Here is where I think your thinking goes wrong. You're taking the "social" part of social media literally, without interrogating it. "Parasocial" was a term that was popular there for a minute, and I think that's a much better descriptor for what Tiktok and Instagram actually are.
Not too be rude about these guys and their ilk but one thing I am frequently annoyed by (to put it mildly) is that the people who most often comment on “kids these days” and society’s ills in general are almost always freakishly inhuman robots.
Without fail they all appear to have no understanding of how actual living human beings operate. They talk about people the way entomologist talk about the mating rituals of bees.
Exhibit A: “Well, Tyler, you’re talking as an intellectual who has probably the highest reading throughput rate of any human being I’ve ever heard of.”
Who talks like this! If this dude actually spent time around other kids growing up he would’ve either been rightfully beaten or berated into being less of a dork.
TL;DR the people who spend the most time talking about other humans do so because humanity is completely alien to them.
It's almost as if to say "if only they made video games more 'efficient' then kids would stop playing for so many hours"
Playing video games for hours on end is not a bug, it's a feature.
Same with social media.
Something I'd really love to know is why it seems like all the pro-screen-time, pro-social-media takes are coming from the people I read that could be categorized as progressive and/or on the left.
I expect conservatives to carry water for giant corporations, to see so many liberals/leftists essentially doing so is more than a bit disappointing.
How is the WORLD can you condemn The Coddling of the American Mind without reading it? It is a very sensible survey of the changes I myself watched from my "free range childhood" in the 50s to the increasing criticism of letting your children explore (physically or mentally) when my kids were young in the 70s and 80s to the current situations where parents can be prosecuted for "child abuse" because they let their children play in a nearby park.
His argument is that increasing restriction on childhood learning from experience, and the confusion of physical safety with intellectual safety has resulted in the rash of over PC attitudes in the college students of the time of his book. His suggestions are completely sensible and boil down to "let your children learn from experience as well as from your teachings and don't scare them to death about people who disagree with them."
I found the book by his co-author ( Greg Lukianoff), the Cancelling of the American Mind, much less convincing because it was rife with overgeneralizations about college students, but I wouldn't have known that had I not read it.
When I first saw what this post was about, I was excited to read it, but it turned out to be pretty disappointing.
While "The Coddling" certainly increased Haidt's visibility, he was well known long before that. "The Righteous Mind" (in my opinion, still his most best and most important work) was earning him recognition as one of the world's "top thinkers" years earlier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt#Reception).
Meanwhile, Haidt indeed does argue that social media and phones are one of the major causes of teen mental illness and depression. Not simply a symptom but an important cause (though not the only one) of those problems. And the evidence he gathers to make this case is impressive. It certainly isn't "anecdotal."
Which doesn't mean, of course, that everyone has to agree. I would be interested in reading a real argument for why Max believes it is "more productive, and more realistic, to imagine screen time as a symptom of those problems, and many others--a compounding symptom, maybe, but a symptom nonetheless."
That's a post that would be worth reading and engaging with. But Max doesn't make a compelling argument. In fact, he doesn't make any argument at all. He simply links to Nature's piece criticizing Haidt but doesn't even bother to explain why he finds it compelling or what is wrong with Haidt's recent post in response to it:
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epidemic
Disappointingly shallow post about what could have been an interesting subject.
"AI will cut screen time down to 1/3 of today for everyone because it will simply summarize what is on the internet." Summarize what then, Tyler? Summarize what?
Who is creating all this content that is being summarized if everyone is using AI to read us back the internet. This idea of the internet is one step more (or less) sophisticated than the "advances the plot" complainers of movies/TV. The goal isn't to enjoy or spend time, simply get to the conclusion.
“ multi-player online video games are the Ivy League of learning how to deal with difficult people”
Amen! I was a WOW raid leader and a GM for about 10 years and it was definitely more taxing than my day job (consulting). There have even been studies done comparing raid and real life management styles. http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/10343.52340.pdf
Damn weird fuckin comment section on this one! Going to exit this "shared space" just like I did the "third places" of my "halcyon youth" whenever the whippets started.
whenever people wax incredulous about young people's social media use and I start to feel myself agreeing with it, I remind myself that most of these kids were not alive (or do not remember) a world where social media didn't exist. Just the other day my husband reminded me of the derogatory epithet "posting face"--used in the early-aughts to refer to online users who posted actual images of themselves. "posting face" was seen as indicative of wanting attention, having mental illness, or just having a sense of self-importance that wasn't warranted back then, because the Internet wasn't considered "important".
I think that's the part of problem folks run into when using this mental health crisis framing to talk about young people and social media: deep down they still don't think the Internet is important, because they can remember a time when it genuinely wasn't. That's not to say that a mental health crisis among the youth isn't the happening, or that the screen time isn't an exacerbating factor. But we also live in a world where the communities we build and relationships we foster on the internet do have tangible effects on the real world. So the fact that these young people are worried about "missing out" or "being left out" of happenings on the internet is a real and valid thing for them to feel. Would it be better for them to socialize in person? Well yeah, probably. But the real world isn't where everyone is most of the time. We're all "posting face" now.
Max I love your writing and insights, but by leaning exclusively on third party reviews of Haidt's book you ended up arguing against a strawman in this one. The social elements of social media aren't missing in his analysis. Haidt argues that the social needs are hijacked and redirected into harmful, addictive, and isolating versions of themselves.
I do agree with some of the criticism of the book. The claimed uniqueness of Gen Z on this front doesn't totally hold up, which isn't too surprising. Older generations might not have been born with social media, but they still actively use it in droves.
That said, we can all agree Cowen's take in the interview is a bog-stupid misunderstanding of the entire mechanism. Even if AI could effectively summarize all the social media people currently consume, the digest would not actually provide any of the psychological stimulation which makes social media addictive.
> Where does that appear in Cowen and Haidt’s model?
Uhm, the social part is all over the place in Haidts book, and when he says that students say that "everyone else is on it" or that they'll miss what others are talking about, that is not an informational dimension, but a social dimension. (One key to human sociality is knowing "what others are talking about".)
From this 70s child perspective, we never came to terms with a reasonable TV screentime and then....so many more screens became available. The tech is never to fault, its our use and abuse of it that are. Not blaming the user but would really love more intentionality. Watching tik tok gain maddening traction from abroad during the epidemic was breathtaking. More. Conscious. Choices. And teaching next generations good screen and social humaning. This is what we need.
"Multi-player online video games are the Ivy League of learning how to deal with difficult people." In terms of "random people get along to do objective"? Usually. In terms of handling conflict and failure? We must have played different games, then. The only healthy multiplayer interaction I saw was between people who had some connection besides the game; a forum, a community, some RL connection. Everything else is passive-aggression, throwing, ragequitting, /gquitting, drama, and more proofs of the G.I.F. theorem. Not certain how anyone could learn healthy human interaction strictly from the Internet.
I guess AI has one thing going for it: it could not be less out of touch with the lived experience of 'the youths' than these two dudes.