Is "smartphone usage" merely a proxy for "social media usage"?
When I got my first smartphone almost two decades ago as a 16yo, I used it mostly to play with the system, write my own UIs, debug system daemon issues, tinker with bootloaders and ended up contributing to a community distro for it. It was a fun computer in my pocket that taught me a lot and a massive upgrade over earlier phones where I had to use Opera Mini and Bombus via J2ME.
The vast majority of smartphones of today are toys with very little potential to tinker, and even when it's there, the entry barriers are enormous. Compiling Android is a huge undertaking, while as a teenager, I could already launch vim on my phone screen in a tram and hack on a SMS daemon written in Python. It's incomparable, and even if you do start, you quickly encounter hard barriers like device attestation.
These days I'm not immune to social media either, as evidenced by me writing this on my phone right now - but wouldn't these "worse mental health outcomes" be rather connected with social media usage, media consumption in general, intrusive notifications etc. that are commonly associated with but aren't inherently necessary part of smartphone usage? At the same time, my mental health isn't becoming immune to social media damage when I doomscroll on a PC just because I used a bigger screen with a physical keyboard.
This may actually be false! Owning a smartphone is so normal, even required, nowadays that people who don't even own one are often "edge cases". For example people who believe in fringe conspiracy theories, people with severe health problems, elderly people, etc. Even if resigning from phone helps by itself, "average people" rarely do.
Similar statistical effect happens with alcohol usage: from raw data it often looks like people who drink almost nothing - let's say one drink a month - are healthier than people who drink absolutely nothing.
I don't know many children who are 13 today and don't have a smartphone - in fact it was quite a common thing even a decade ago - how do you even control for this
You shouldn't stick your head in the sand just because it makes you feel better. Since media companies are causing damage then they should be held liable. Where is the class action?
In the US, we restrict driving to around age 16, alcohol consumption to 18, voting to 18, and tobacco consumption to 21. Then there are industry-applied age ratings, like the MPA’s PG-13, R, and NC-17 ratings. Barbiturates and amphetamines we’re once available without a prescription.
There’s official/unofficial wiggle room, but there are limits. For example, if you live on a farm, you may be driving on the farm before you have a license to drive on public roads.
I could see mobile-phone ownership becoming similarly-restricted.
Driving is restricted because of responsibility (same way marriage and contracts in general require someone legally responsible)
Porn, alcohol, tobacco and gambling is cultural/religious, the same way The Prohibition happened in the US, or all alcohol and gambling is banned in hard Islamic countries and adult women are mandatory veiled.
It's pretty interesting to see where a smartphone ban would fit as a category.
Banning smartphones in general would be more akin to banning kids from riding in cars (not driving them) or being around alcohol (even in their own home)
To say nothing of the inconsistency of those bans. You can vote, enlist in the army, and take on life-altering student loans... but smoke a cigarette? No way!
Also, isn't it the sale and purchase of alcohol that is banned for underage persons, not the consumption? That is, if parents want to give their kids alcohol, that's not illegal.
Horrifically terrible data and methodology for even suggesting causal claims. Global Mind Data is literally self report online survey data. You may as well have used political surveys from Fox News and MSNBC
It probably makes a difference that the internet of ~15 years ago was healthier to use than the half-dozen websites that encompass the entire internet for most people today. Attention-optimizing algorithms and infinite scrolling are some of the worst inventions that have come to the internet since the pop-up ad.
I wonder how many 5-6 year olds are getting smartphones because parents are divorced and one parent wants to be able to check in on the other, could be something like that is the issue
Reading Jonathan Haidt's 'The Anxious Generation' broke me. I have two kids, still far too young for smartphones, but his book and all of the surrounding research has made me DRASTICALLY alter the way I use my own smartphone and will shape the way I treat phones with them.
It really depends. Not all kids are extremely dumb and get hooked by very obvious attempts from evil social networks. I still have hope for future aaron swartzs and linus torvaldss
I've struggled throughout my life with anxiety, ADHD, and bouts of depression.
I've done years of therapy, and use some medication to help with my ADHD. I will say though, singlehandedly, the best (and hardest) thing I've had to do is fight my own phone/internet/computer usage.
I grew up with computers and still work professionally with them day to day, but have made a serious effort in the last year to cut down my usage in an extreme manner:
- Using a 'brick' device to control which apps work on my phone, requiring I physically tap my phone to the brick to lock/unlock the restricted mode. This is always on.
- Blocking tons of sites via multiple means (iOS screen time, eero network profiles)
- Turning my iPhone into a very very basic phone: in "bricked" mode, which I will find myself using for continuous days at a time, I can only use: gmail, photos, notes, weather, maps, spotify, telephone, imessage. No news, no internet browsing, no social media.
- I've deleted all social media accounts (except LinkedIn, but this too is blocked on my phone).
From all of this, the initial realization was, "wow, I'm bored..", which is hard at first to sit with as a feeling, when normally my first instinct to that feeling was "let's open some app/youtube/etc." Then you slowly find positive things creeping in to occupy that boredom time: reading, calling friends/family, getting chores done, etc. And for anything "restricted" that I can't do on my phone, I largely can do on my computer (though I still block sites like reddit, youtube). But this is much healthier as I'm much less likely to pick up my laptop for hours on end, vs. opening my phone at every moment I'm bored.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 42.6 ms ] thread"Cat Ownership Linked to Increased Risk of Schizophrenia, Research Suggests" https://www.sciencealert.com/owning-a-cat-could-double-your-...
> "After adjusting for covariates, we found that individuals exposed to cats had approximately twice the odds of developing schizophrenia,"
When I got my first smartphone almost two decades ago as a 16yo, I used it mostly to play with the system, write my own UIs, debug system daemon issues, tinker with bootloaders and ended up contributing to a community distro for it. It was a fun computer in my pocket that taught me a lot and a massive upgrade over earlier phones where I had to use Opera Mini and Bombus via J2ME.
The vast majority of smartphones of today are toys with very little potential to tinker, and even when it's there, the entry barriers are enormous. Compiling Android is a huge undertaking, while as a teenager, I could already launch vim on my phone screen in a tram and hack on a SMS daemon written in Python. It's incomparable, and even if you do start, you quickly encounter hard barriers like device attestation.
These days I'm not immune to social media either, as evidenced by me writing this on my phone right now - but wouldn't these "worse mental health outcomes" be rather connected with social media usage, media consumption in general, intrusive notifications etc. that are commonly associated with but aren't inherently necessary part of smartphone usage? At the same time, my mental health isn't becoming immune to social media damage when I doomscroll on a PC just because I used a bigger screen with a physical keyboard.
Similar statistical effect happens with alcohol usage: from raw data it often looks like people who drink almost nothing - let's say one drink a month - are healthier than people who drink absolutely nothing.
Also, The brain from age 4-12 is highly impressionable and quite different from 13-26.
There’s official/unofficial wiggle room, but there are limits. For example, if you live on a farm, you may be driving on the farm before you have a license to drive on public roads.
I could see mobile-phone ownership becoming similarly-restricted.
Porn, alcohol, tobacco and gambling is cultural/religious, the same way The Prohibition happened in the US, or all alcohol and gambling is banned in hard Islamic countries and adult women are mandatory veiled.
It's pretty interesting to see where a smartphone ban would fit as a category.
To say nothing of the inconsistency of those bans. You can vote, enlist in the army, and take on life-altering student loans... but smoke a cigarette? No way!
Also, isn't it the sale and purchase of alcohol that is banned for underage persons, not the consumption? That is, if parents want to give their kids alcohol, that's not illegal.
You know. Everything's round and cute and colorful. Like candy.
"Oh. This is for retarded people."
Unfortunately I was wrong.
It's actually much worse than that. It's for normal people. But it makes you retarded.
Slowly. You don't even notice it happening.
It eats away... day by day.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4
If you have kids, take the "wait until 8th" pledge: https://www.waituntil8th.org/
No smart phones until after 8th grade.
I've done years of therapy, and use some medication to help with my ADHD. I will say though, singlehandedly, the best (and hardest) thing I've had to do is fight my own phone/internet/computer usage.
I grew up with computers and still work professionally with them day to day, but have made a serious effort in the last year to cut down my usage in an extreme manner:
- Using a 'brick' device to control which apps work on my phone, requiring I physically tap my phone to the brick to lock/unlock the restricted mode. This is always on.
- Blocking tons of sites via multiple means (iOS screen time, eero network profiles)
- Turning my iPhone into a very very basic phone: in "bricked" mode, which I will find myself using for continuous days at a time, I can only use: gmail, photos, notes, weather, maps, spotify, telephone, imessage. No news, no internet browsing, no social media.
- I've deleted all social media accounts (except LinkedIn, but this too is blocked on my phone).
From all of this, the initial realization was, "wow, I'm bored..", which is hard at first to sit with as a feeling, when normally my first instinct to that feeling was "let's open some app/youtube/etc." Then you slowly find positive things creeping in to occupy that boredom time: reading, calling friends/family, getting chores done, etc. And for anything "restricted" that I can't do on my phone, I largely can do on my computer (though I still block sites like reddit, youtube). But this is much healthier as I'm much less likely to pick up my laptop for hours on end, vs. opening my phone at every moment I'm bored.