How is the smartphone age wiping out an entire generation of young people?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Today's American teens are growing up in an era of ubiquitous digitalization, when smartphones have become eternal companions. And, as evidenced by national polls, more and more adolescents are in crisis.

Here is perhaps the most alarming statistic: between 2009 and 2017, the proportion of high school students with suicidal tendencies increased by 25%. The proportion of adolescents with clinical depression increased by 37% between 2005 and 2014. Perhaps, in reality, this figure is even higher, just some are embarrassed to admit it. In addition, the death rate from suicide is on the rise.

Adults noticed these tendencies and got worried: phones are to blame!

"Is it true that smartphones have wiped out an entire generation?" - asked the magazine "Atlantic" in 2017 from the provocative cover. In her highly acclaimed article, San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge summarized the link between mental health and technology - and answered in the affirmative. The same opinion was confirmed in the mass consciousness.

People's fears about smartphones are not limited to depression or anxiety. Real panic is sowed by gambling addiction and telephone addiction - due to the ubiquity of digital technologies, our concentration and memory deteriorate. All of these questions are truly horrifying: technology is driving us crazy.

But take a closer look at the scientific literature and chat with scientists who are trying to get to the bottom of it - and your confidence will be gone.

Research on whether there is a link between digital technology and mental health has yielded inconclusive results, both in studies of adults and children. "There is confusion in the scientific world," said Antony Wagner, chair of the psychology department at Stanford University. “Is there compelling evidence for a causal relationship that social networks affect our perception, neurological function, or neurobiological processes? Answer: we have no idea. We do not have such data”.

Some researchers I spoke with - even those who believe the link between digital proliferation and mental illness is exaggerated - think this is an important issue that requires further study and analysis.

If technology is in any way to blame for the rise of adolescent fears, depression, and suicide, we must establish for sure. And if the ubiquity of digital devices in any way affects the human psyche - how our brains develop, deal with stress, remember, pay attention and make decisions - then again we need to be sure.

The question of how technology affects the mental health of children and adolescents is extremely important. The collected data on the causes of panic mood require further study of the subject. So I asked researchers in this field a simple question: How do we get the most convincing answer?

They explained to me what it is fraught with and how the situation can be corrected. Simply put: scientists need to be asked precise, specific questions, they need to collect quality data, and in all areas of psychology. And, surprisingly, scientists will be powerless if they are not helped by tech giants like Apple and Google.

Where did the link between social media and depression come from?

The speculation that an overuse of technology and social media is detrimental to mental health hasn't come off the bat.

"The advent of smartphones has radically changed every aspect of teenage life," Twenge writes for The Atlantic. Even if the word “radical” confuses you, it will be difficult to deny that the way teenagers communicate with each other (or, if you will, do not communicate) has changed. Are these changes related to an alarming rise in mental illness among adolescents?

This is an interesting version, not devoid of a basis.

First, by saying that there are no data, Wagner did not mean that no research was carried out. What he meant is that there is no conclusive evidence that digital technology is detrimental to minds.

This is how things really stand. A number of surveys among young people have shown that there is indeed a statistically significant relationship between time spent on the phone and at the computer, and some indicators of well-being - including depressive syndromes.

However, these studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention among Young People did not focus on digital technology. They only provide a general assessment of adolescent behavior and psychology - for example, with regard to drug use, sexuality and diet.

In 2017, Twenge and her colleagues found a worrying pattern in two surveys: Teens who spend more time on social media are likely to be more at risk for depression and suicidal tendencies. Moreover, this pattern was most pronounced among adolescent girls.

Three reservations must be made here at once. First, data does not imply causation.

Second, depressive symptoms do not mean clinical depression. The teenage respondents simply agreed with the statements that "life often seems meaningless to me." However, in another survey, Twenge and his colleague found that adolescents who use electronic devices for seven or more hours a day are diagnosed with depression twice as often.

Such reservations are teeming with such studies. In general, they rarely conduct a causal relationship, but they exclude clinical assessments (relying on personal data), arbitrarily interpret the term mental health itself, use a self-assessment scale and resort to generalizations such as "screen time" and "use of electronic devices" - where includes any device, be it a smartphone, tablet or computer. Therefore, their findings, for all their statistical significance, are very modest.

The confusion is exacerbated by the fact that different studies look at different parameters: Twenge and colleagues looked at mood, while others are more interested in attention, memory or sleep.

Here are just a few reasons why scientists cannot clearly answer such a seemingly simple question, whether technology helps children or, on the contrary, does harm.

In order to more accurately delineate the contours, researchers need to deal with several serious problems in the technical literature. Let's consider them in turn.

Screen time is hard to measure

Consider that research on the mental health of young people is akin to nutritional science - there, too, the devil will break his leg.

Nutritionists rely heavily on patient self-esteem. People are asked to remember what they ate and when. And people have bad memory. And so much so that the approach itself can be safely considered “fundamentally wrong,” as my colleague Julia Belluz explained.

Perhaps it makes sense to ask yourself, is it the same with studies of network behavior? Indeed, in all surveys, teenagers are most often asked to estimate for themselves how many hours a day they spend using different devices - phones, computers or tablets. The answers are summarized in the "screen time" column. Occasionally, the question is clarified: "How many hours a day do you spend on social networks?" or "how many hours a day do you play computer games?"

Answering them is harder than it sounds. How long do you spend on your phone idle - for example, in line at the supermarket or in the toilet? The more we grab onto devices for no purpose, the harder it becomes to track our own habits on our own.

A 2016 study found that only a third of respondents are accurate in their estimates of time spent on the Internet. In general, people tend to exaggerate this parameter, scientists discovered.

« Screen time can be different, but the difference is not considered

Another snag in the very formulation of the question - it is put too broadly.

“Screen time is different, it’s not the same thing. There are hundreds of ways to spend time on the computer, explains Florence peslin of the Brain Research Institute in Tulsa, Oklahoma. - You can sit in social media, play games, do research, read. You can go even further. So, playing online with friends is not at all the same as playing alone."

This point should be more fully reflected in research

“In dietetics, nobody talks about 'eating time,' says Andrew Przybylski, an experimental psychologist at the Oxford Institute for Internet Research. - We are talking about calories, proteins, fats and carbohydrates. The term "screen time" does not reflect the entire palette."

This is not easy to do, because technology does not stand still. Today teenagers are on the TikTok network (or where else?), And tomorrow they will switch to a new social platform. In dietetics, at the very least, you can be sure that carbohydrates will always remain carbohydrates. Unlike smartphone apps, they will not change.

“Today the newspapers tell you that wine is good, but tomorrow it’s bad,” explains Przybylski. - Now imagine what it would be like if the wine changed at the same rate. If only new wines were constantly appearing."

Meanwhile, the screens around us are becoming more and more. There are already even refrigerators with screens and Internet access. Is this also considered "screen time"?

“When you look at digital technology as a whole, important nuances are lost,” explains Amy Orben, a psychologist at the Oxford Institute for Internet Research. “If you flip through the pages with thin models on Instagram, the effect will not be the same if you just chat on Skype with your grandmother or classmates.”

Scientists demand "passive data collection" and expect help from media giants

Breslin is currently working on a large-scale study of brain development in adolescents. This work is funded by the National Institutes of Health and focuses on cognitive brain development.

To date, 11,800 children from the age of 9 have been under observation for more than 10 years. The development and behavior of children is assessed annually on a variety of indicators, including monitoring physical activity using smart bracelets. Children undergo brain scans every two years to track their neurobiological development.

It is a long-term and high-tech study whose goal is to establish causal relationships. If children develop anxious mood swings, depression or addiction, scientists will be able to analyze all the antecedents and concomitants during the formative years of their personality and determine which of them have determined psychological development.

To date, scientists are not yet able to answer this question unequivocally, admits Breslin. It all comes down to a lack of data. In her study, children are asked to indicate what exactly they are doing on the computer. Screen Time is broken down into subcategories such as multiplayer games, singles, and social media. Again, new applications are constantly appearing - you can't keep track of everything. Therefore, scientists are unlikely to be able to draw final conclusions about how devices and social networks affect the developing brain without outside help.

Therefore, all the hope of Breslin and her colleagues is for passive data collection. They want Apple and Google, the main developers of smartphone operating systems, to share with them what kids do on their phones.

The companies have these data. Think of the new statistics app that recently appeared on iPhones. It provides weekly reports on how users spend their time on the phone. However, these data are not available to scientists.

“Now that screen time is measured by the operating system itself, scientists are increasingly asking Apple to access this data for research,” Breslin explains. With the permission of survey participants and their parents, scientists will be able to figure out children's networking habits without a single question. According to her, "Google" has already agreed, the case is for "Apple".

You can use third-party applications, but they are often too intrusive and register everything up to the pressing of individual keys. In addition, their applications are often buggy and poorly assembled with other applications. Data straight from Apple, Breslin explains, will give scientists access to the information they already have.

But even with passive data collection, there is still a long way to go. It is very difficult to say unequivocally whether they harm children or not.

Scientists need to agree on the magnitude of the effect

Let's say digital technology does affect mental health. But how can we be sure that this connection is indeed of fundamental importance? This is another key question that scientists have to answer.

After all, a lot of factors affect the child's psyche - parents, economic status, ecology, the habit of reading books, and so on.

What if all of these factors are involved, and digital technology is just a drop in the ocean? Maybe other measures deserve the attention of the international community - for example, to eradicate child poverty?

I suppose they won't damage the visual images.

In 2017, Twenge found that in one study, the correlation between sitting on social media and depressive symptoms was 0.05. Among girls, this figure was slightly higher - 0.06. But if you take some boys, then it was only 0.01 - then is, in principle, has ceased to be relevant.

In sociology, correlation is measured by values in the range from -1 to +1. Minus one means perfect negative correlation and plus one means perfect positive correlation.

So 0.05 is pretty small. Let's try to visualize this. Psychologist Kristoffer Magnusson offers a cool online tool for visualizing statistics. Here is a schematic graph of the data from 1,000 study participants. Imagine the x-axis is depressive symptoms and the y-axis is time spent on social media. If you do not draw auxiliary lines, will you notice this relationship at all?

It can also be shown on the Venn diagram as a partial overlap of two parameters.

Twenge and her colleagues also found that the correlation between electronic device use and suicidal tendencies (as defined in the original study) was 0.12, which is only slightly higher.

Some of these correlations are considered statistically significant and have resurfaced in a number of studies. But how relevant are they?

“We are researchers and should not think about statistical significance, but about the true impact of an effect,” explains Orban. He and Przybylski recently published an article in Nature Human Behavior that tried to put correlation research in a broader context.

After analyzing the data of 355 thousand 258 respondents, they found a small negative correlation between digital technology and mental health.

But then they matched those numbers with those of visually impaired people who wear glasses - another important factor that affects psychological well-being since childhood. So, it turned out that glasses have an even stronger effect! Of course, when you have to wear glasses, and everyone teases you, there is little good - but no one demands to limit the “glasses time”. On the other hand, outright bullying affects four times more than digital technology.

In addition, it turned out that eating potatoes affects the psyche almost as negatively as digital technology. Again, potatoes do not cause public censure, and there is no evidence that eating them is harmful to children. "The available evidence simultaneously suggests that the impact of technology is statistically significant, but at the same time so minimal that it is unlikely to be of practical importance."

Przybylski and Orben also found that how scientists interpret depressive symptoms is also important.

“I analyzed all the options and found that you can conduct hundreds of thousands of studies and come to the conclusion that the relationship is negative, just as much - and say that the relationship is positive, and finally, with the same success, conclude that there is no relationship at all. So you see what a mess there is,”says Orben.

To begin with, scientists must more clearly define which parameters are important to them and how they are measured. And it is better to fix the analysis plan in advance so as not to adjust the results later.

Questions need to be formulated more precisely and more concretely, and this will not suit someone. So, asking how much time you need to spend behind the screen is oversimplifying everything.

“We need numbers,” says Breslin. "But there are hardly any universal methods."

Better data can help ask more specific questions about how digital technology affects mental health.

For example: Can online multiplayer games help shy kids who find it difficult to establish relationships? The answer to this question does not tell you how many hours a day you can spend playing online. But the parents of such children will know for sure what will help and what will not.

Then questions will rain down: what about children from poor families, are social networks hitting them more painfully or not? And if social media is bad, what about multitasking when people are doing several things at the same time? When is online dating beneficial in real life? There will be a lot of questions, and each one requires close attention.

“Of course, a purely experimental study, where some children will grow up with social networks, and others without, we cannot do,” says Orben. Apparently, the role of the Internet is unlikely to diminish in the next decade. And if digital technology is harmful to children, then again, we need to know for sure, she says.

So it's time to give answers to all these questions. “Otherwise, we will have to continue arguing without proof,” concludes Orben.