It's electronics in general. I was in 7th grade at the inflection point, when the iPhone 3G first widely popularized having a pocket computer. Facebook went mainstream around the same time. Suddenly kids became a lot less social, and that never flipped back.
It's mobile devices, not electronics in general. Social networking was around before widespread mobile computing, e.g. MySpace, but it was a supplement to offline social interaction, not a replacement. Back then, you had to make a conscious decision to use the computer and log in. Having the device in your pocket at all times drastically changes how it's used.
Absolutely. Being "online" changed from being a place you go (your computer) at a certain time (after school/work, a couple hours a day max) to becoming an always-on experience. It's a qualitative change.
It is both qualitative and quantitative change... From limited time to unlimited time with limited place to unlimited place... From couple of hours with other tasks, to ever present thing you turn in slightest moment of boredom...
100% and the people who created Facebook, Instagram all know exactly what they were doing. This is why many people hate Mark Zuckerberg and the Instagram founders and they need to be protected at all times by armed guards.
Every big corp c-suite executive has armed guards. It's not related to the ire they draw, but rather the board weighing the risk of someone taking them hostage vs the cost of the guards.
I mean how much time is spent on electronics and away from people overall. Mobile devices increased that a lot, but they aren't the only part. There are way more PC gamers than before, for example. My classmates also used early Facebook more on PCs, maybe because some features didn't work on iPhones (Flash content?). They'd just sit at home on the PC all night.
I'd even count remote classrooms/work. In 2020, people didn't need phones to be always-online, they were at home anyway.
Thirty years earlier people were also "always at home". Watching TV, or playing console games…
The big difference was: At least the youth was at home together with others doing so. You went over to your neighbor to watch some TV show for example.
What changed quite lately are indeed the always online smartphones. You don't need to go to your neighbor, even if you want to "do something together" (of course online, like everything nowadays).
Also people don't even call each other. The default is chat, or very often voice messages. But no real talking.
So no, media and electronics aren't the main driver here. It's the always online devices everybody uses everywhere the whole time. Human minds likely aren't constructed to be always connected (or one could argue, actually disconnected) in such a way.
It's not primary the quantity, it's the quality of media consumption that significantly changed. Also the media is the first time completely interactive and personalized. Compare to for example TV (which was back than "the devil who destroys the morale of our youth" according to some elder people). You didn't get targeted personalized ads the whole day on your TV…
The psychological manipulation that the pre-smartphone media could possibly exercise on individuals was much more constrained compared to what's possible (and actually gets executed) today. Smartphone apps are a great example as they're now mostly constructed to induced addiction (the companies selling ads call it "engagement").
I agree with you, but it goes beyond just smartphones.
TV shows were linear, so unless you had an interest in every single show being aired, your viewing was naturally limited to specific times.
Video games didn’t use to have online capabilities, nor did they provide endless matchmaking with completely strangers across the world, so if you wanted to play with other people, you had to do it in person. And games didn’t have endless streams of new content being released.
What changed is that everything became built around endless streams of content. Smartphones are a key enabler of that, but even legacy media like TV and video games have evolved to become bottomless content pits. Social media feeds never end, video games always have another match, there are always more shows and movies to binge on demand.
That's why I was saying electronics are the driver. As they've become more advanced, people have spent more time on them and less time socializing.
Also, I'm not going to dismiss the "devil who destroys the morale of our youth" accusation cause I'm way too young to remember a time before TV. For all I know, maybe social life was better before it. I used to miss out on visiting my cousins because they were "busy" silently watching a football game for hours every weekend.
Hard disagree. It’s algorithmic “engagement maximizing” systems, specifically. (Engagement is code for addiction.)
If those pocket PCs had useful and creative apps only and maybe some non-addiction-optimized games they’d be fine. The problem is the apps, not the hardware.
With kids the absolute worst seem to be YouTube, TikTok, and Roblox. All three are banned in our house. The kids have their own devices (with monitoring) and can play games and explore other stuff but we do everything we can to keep addiction systems away. It works fine. Our kids engage with real people when they are available and tend only to go to the screens when bored.
We don’t have a hard time limit but if we notice too much screen time we set up play dates or book activities. They’ll go for those things over screens… or at least they do now that the worst stuff is gone.
Banning YouTube was the single highest impact one. The whole mood of the family and home noticeably changed. We got our kids back. They liked their friends again. To this day my #1 piece of parenting advice is to ban YouTube. A few others too but that one seems the worst for some reason.
Engagement maximizing algorithms and UI dark patterns work incredibly well to the point that they can behave like a drug.
YouTube has a treasure trove of creative, stimulating, enlightening, entertaining, and didactic content. There is more interesting stuff there than you could watch in many lifetimes: science from Veritasium to lectures from Stanford on every topic imaginable, thousands of hours of high-quality content on every topic from WW2 to the most niche retro computer you can thing of, the best orchestras in the world playing at your demand — all at your fingertips.
Unfortunately, it has 1000x more utter filthy trash.
Seriously, I dare you: open the default YouTube homepage on incognito. It's terrifying. The dystopia is already here.
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My advice for parents: curate a few channels or playlists yourself, manually, but UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES give them unsupervised unfiltered access to YouTube. So-called "YouTube Kids" included. Those turbo-consumerist hellscape videos make my stomach churn.
My child is not there yet, so I'm experimenting ahead of time with Jellyfin + downloading select content instead. The idea is to have sizeable content in there to explore in autonomy but no way out.
Not particularly doing this happily WRT the content creators but I just can't get myself to trust platforms such as Youtube to not have unsuspected ways around.
You should also look into alternate video sites. A couple of creators I like(Practical Engineering, others I can't remember) have promoted Nebula as having curated high quality educational content.
My library system offers streaming services that are high quality, might be something to look into. Same platform with videos offers e-books and whatnot, as well.
Even if kids watch only quality educational stuff on YouTube and plays non-addictive games, if that ends up being a lot of time and it replaces social interaction, it'll come at a cost (though they'll also learn a lot).
I understand that YouTube has zero incentive for this but this is the kids mode I would like to have. A white-list of channels that I could negotiate with my kids. A couple of their favorite streamers that I also know that release material every other day, some weekly, so that the content can run out. "oh you watched YouTube all afternoon and you watched it all? Oh too bad, go out and play". And when I think about why YouTube never will add this feature, I get angry.
Edit:sure I could also add a couple of education channels but my kids would sooner go out and play.
Just tried, and YouTube in incognito mode says "Try searching to get started" and shows 0 recommendations. That seems like a recent change. I remember it used to show junk.
That’s an improvement! I’m going to give it a spin and see what it does when you search a few mundane things. Probably still rabbit holes you into trash.
Ah yes, but then how do you actually enforce these curated playlists are the only things your kids have access to? Especially when your kids have Chromebooks at school, and friends with unrestricted access on their devices, and learn ways to workaround any screen time restrictions?
Feels to me like attacking the problem from the wrong angle.
You can’t 100% prevent them from accessing trash but you can limit it as much as possible.
We’ve had success so far but I am concerned with what happens as they get older and get social pressure to join social media.
I guess we have to parent. Paraphrasing something I saw elsewhere:
“Raise your girls or meangirl anorexia influencers will; raise your boys or Andrew Tate will.”
It’s always been important to keep your kids away from bad influences. It’s just that now they can get life guidance from sociopaths, creeps, unhinged ideologues, and self destructive losers in their pockets.
My kids are 11 and 12. We have a YouTube time limit of 30 mins a day, and there are some videos that are just not allowed. Nothing with too much bad language, Nothing with people doing dangerous things to be funny, nothing with rich people buying stuff to break. I did spend some time in both my kids accounts blocking streamers I thought where just bad influences. It has given us a chance to talk about why some of the stuff on YouTube is stupid.
Nobody in our house has used or is interested in TikTok so I have not had to deal with that.
My kids know I hate Robox but they are allowed to play. (I'm a game developer). The kids are are not allowed to spend pocket money on Robucks, but they do get gift cards from friends and family on special occasions and because the Robucks are so rare they have become very precious. The kids agonize over every purchase. They carefully evaluate the value of things. They look for the scams, they avoid gambling and loot boxes, and instead look for things with more value.
We have also had the opportunity to discuss that when the servers go down, all this virtual stuff they seem to own will disappear. That they don't really own it.
As much as I like to hate Roblox, it has been good for my kids. There is a wide variety of free content and you can try before you buy. Its multiplayer by default so it's social in the good way, you are actually talking, thinking and playing with your friends. And both my kids use the editor creating new content and leaning programming.
Any specific reason for hating roblox? I'm especially interested in game developer perspective (parent perspective is familiar to me being father of two and aware that most of roblox content is of rather poor quality)
It seemed unusually addictive with a lot of stupid games that were nonetheless oddly captivating. Reminded me a lot of addictive (to kids) shit YouTube content. Roblox also had poor parental controls.
Anything that serves up dumb or toxic content that is extremely “engaging” gets banned. YouTube was the worst by far but TikTok and Roblox also meet this criteria.
I forgot to mention Instagram. Kids haven’t seen it but it’s been preemptively banned because it’s full of toxic influencers and other trash. Could say the same about Facebook but kids have zero interest in that so no need to bother. Facebook is where older people go to get their brains sucked out by conspiritainment and political echo chamber groups.
I've seen parents with babies in a stroller with their phone strapped to the handle, so the babies can watch YouTube while they go for a walk. They are all going to be completely fucked.
That's a very common description of hitting puberty, so witnessing this in 7th grade specifically doesn't demonstrate your claim.
I lack the domain knowledge to evaluate the evidence against the null hypothesis, so you may well be correct — you just haven't actually demonstrated it with your anecdote.
Hide in room, grunt when asked questions, moody, "disrespectful to their elders", that kind of thing is all "less social".
Although I can think of one specific context where I would say "shy" for a bit: suddenly developing a new axis of emotional drives (lust) that they have to learn to navigate socially.
I see what you’re saying, but this was an anecdote by the 7th grader in relation to their peers. Sure puberty makes teenagers not want to interact with their parents, but I’ve never heard it make them not want to interact with their classmates—usually the opposite.
