> “Social media research has largely assumed that [so-called] social media addiction is going to follow the same framework as drug addiction,” said Turner. Orben’s team and others argue that this is likely to be oversimplistic and are investigating whether the teenagers cluster into groups whose behaviour can be predicted by other personality traits.
> It could be that, for some, their relationship is akin to a behavioural addiction, but for others their use could be driven by compulsive checking, others may be relying on it to cope with negative life experiences, and others may simply be responding to negative social perceptions about “wasting time” on social media.
Finally! I feel less smart for not having thought of this myself!
I was unable to meaningfully change my own phone habits (despite serious effort and roadblocks) until it clicked that I was coping for something. What that was and what I was doing to cope highlighted parts of my life like nothing else. Instead of simply abstaining from using my phone, I put time into activities that benefited the withered branches of my life. Old habits still die hard, but knowing that I'm coping as I'm coping helped me separate the good social media use from the bad.
This is the solution for a lot of behavioral problems. The instinct is to do the bad behavior less, but the solution may instead be to do something else more.
I made a browser based strategy game that takes place over weeks. Instead of checking Facebook 3 times a day, I log into Neptune's Pride 3 times a day to chat with the other players and try and conquer the galaxy.
Woah! I love Neptune’s Pride, thanks for the game!
While in college, I stayed at a hacker house airbnb over the summer with a bunch of newly befriended tech friends, and I got us all playing. I have fond memories of changing the trajectories of my ships as soon as people went to bed, double-crossing alliances. Good times.
hah, thanks for the game. It was definitely an interesting and fun experience.
Unfortunately I've to stop because my obssesive side took over. I practically check the game every hour. I cant sleep because my mind wont stop worrying about chat/trade offers, sudden attack and which planet/tech I need to focus on.
It always popped out in my mind once in a while though. I might try it again to see if I've better control of myself.
"The Myth of Normal" by Mate Gabor is a great place for people to
start this work.
Later it dawns on you that sure, like everybody else you have
weaknesses and traumas that you've learned to cope with, but that
doesn't excuse some people deliberately designing and pushing a
product to specifically exploit that. That should give you dose of
healthy positive anger of the kind that is transformative when acted
upon.
> Instead of simply abstaining from using my phone, I put time into activities
My relationship with social media, even HackerNews, really clicked when a meme (oh irony) said: ”You’re like a tiger in a cage. You know how they pace in circles when their enclosures lack enrichment? That’s you bouncing around apps on your phone”
Haven’t quite figured out how to reliably stop that, but it’s true that when there’s enough enrichment, I can go days forgetting that my phone and the internet even exist.
I used my phone as a way to withdraw and escape. Even the most mundane situations warranted some degree of escape. Very stressful times would boost my screen time dramatically.
It seemed painfully simple in retrospect. Like any behavioural addiction, though, I had an endless supply of reasons to be on a screen at any given time. Scary stuff. I don't think I'm the kind of person people would think behaves that way, nor did I necessarily. But we're all human, and this is a very human thing. It sneaks into your life in such an insidious way, and does so much damage before you can consciously see it or feel it.
Not the parent but I can suggest what has worked for me.
Talking to a therapist can be helpful in getting to the root of it. Meditation also helps, but it may be a longer road. In other words, whatever helps you live a more examined life.
Regarding habits and the habit loop (what's being mentioned here), "The Power of Habit" [0] is a great read.
In addition to therapist, as others state, I'd also suggest just being more open with your friends (I also get that it can be intimidating to see a therapist and it's easy to justify not going, especially if you're in a good mood). Maybe grab some beers or something to create a scapegoat/plausible deniability if needed. I've long suffered from depression and this has been one of the most impactful moves for me, especially around identifying latent issues that appear more ethereal. It can be hard, especially in our general gender norms (I'm male) where some people will think it is a weakness (men and women), but to me strength is doing the hard things. YMMV, but I think it is important to have friends and/or partner(s) that you can be open with and just have the ability to vent. Fuck, sometimes I don't even know what I'm upset about until I let off a little steam first, and often just an outside opinion helps.
I can also suggest small internet communities as these can be places to form friendships while having some PII type of anonymity and at least for me helped me be more open before I was ready to open up to friends. Places like HN and reddit are probably too large, but hey, I'll put this out in general to anyone, feel free to reach out over email[0]. You can also get something similar by just talking to random people at a bar.
Whatever works best for you, but it all is a noisy process. But at the end of the day I think what's most critical is that you find some means of just opening up. You don't have to stick to one group either, and if you need to start at one place to build up to another, there's no problem with that. Take it as a journey, not a destination. But I will say having at least a one or two core friends (and ideally a partner) is going to be one of the most helpful things you can do for your mental health. A therapist will never be enough but you should think of them as a very useful and different tool (because you do want advice not coming from those who want to protect you. Outside opinions are invaluable and a good therapist will do their best, but consider they can only work with the context you give and what they can get from you).
[0] In my profile. And if anyone has a suggestion for a better anonymous email, let me know. I'm kinda annoyed at proton's ads.
No shit, go see a decent therapist. This is literally the core of what they do as a profession. If they aren't helpful, just want to babble about the weather for 45 minutes, whatever, find a different one. PhD > Masters but I've met bad PhDs and good masters clinicians.
Also, if you're struggling with getting things done because you're always dopamine seeking, get checked for ADHD. There are some extremely effective treatments that can make your life way easier if that turns out to be the problem.
I think this is an unfortunately not enough discussed topic. As sciences are young (as psychology relatively is) you work on broader problems and much more aggregated results. You make naive assumptions like everything exists in normal distributions or data is i.i.d. So you get results that are big generalizations and sometimes not even reliable. But then as a field advances, it naturally shifts into requiring more and more nuance and specificity. Where you have to start considering multivariate solutions (even if that's a mixture of gaussians, which, awesome tool btw) because you approach a natural wall at the explainability of your data with naive methods. And let's be clear, if we wanted to really rigorously study psychology -- at the same level as, say, physics -- then there would need to be a lot of crazy math invented and we'd probably still end up needing to do unethical things because holy fuck how do you control all those variables. (definitely warrants being open about error and unknowns)
There's nothing wrong with that. But I do think it's wrong that we're not open about it, in so much that it isn't even always explicitly stated during a science education. We might say something like "all models are wrong" but I don't think that solidifies this thinking enough for novices and can create experts who still don't get it. Wherein it becomes a classic clique, where everyone knows the phrase but doesn't understand or practice the lesson.
There's some noticeable downsides too. If you're constantly not reiterating what your base assumptions are and acknowledging the limitation of those assumptions, you forget they exist. It also becomes hard to communicate the significance of your work to the public and I think in some cases is often why the public ends up calling (sometimes rightfully, sometimes not) bullshit. I think there's also a major advantage to science, in being open about these helps newcomers (such as those entering graduate school) more readily understand the limitations of the field and what work needs to be done. But I think some incentive structures we have in place don't encourage great scientific behavior in this way. Speaking of which, other metrics can even end up making bridging this multivariate gap more difficult. Such as the all too well known p-value weirdness, you may end up rejecting works making progress towards this bridging by having these arbitrary requirements rather than evaluating works with more nuance, which can even then discourage attempting to build such bridges. I guess coming full circle to: it's complicated? Like everything else lol
It would be more productive to stop prodding at the symptoms and instead consider looking into potential root causes like car dependency and commercialization or erosion of third places.
Kids aren't just staring at a glowing rectangle due to some unexplainable pharmacological effect it may possess, they just crave human connection and sense of belonging just like everyone else. Using medical terms to dehumanize them is not productive at all.
The root cause is that social media apps are designed to be addictive whereas other software is not. This was encouraged by all the SV cheerleaders (remember Nir Eyal's "Hooked" being a must-read for all product bros?), before it was clear that Facebook and others conduct significant levels of experimentation to extend screen use time.
Places with far weaker car culture and world class mass transit and which have stronger "third places" culture are still phone and social media addicted. See Singapore, Japan, or South Korea as an example of this.
>‘We’re not saying the people who say they feel addicted are addicted,’ said Georgia Turner, a graduate student leading the analysis
Is it common to question the validity of self-identified addictions to other substances or behaviors? Is it common for people who aren't gambling addicts to say things like "I feel like I'm addicted to gambling"?
I suppose that the lead on the study doesn't want to overstate their findings, and there's obviously a social stigma that exists around admitting to gambling addiction that doesn't seem to exist for social media addiction, but still; it strikes me as unusual to be so openly questioning people about whether or not their perceived addictions are real.
It is both fairly common to say you're addicted to something as a way of saying you're really into something as well as to indicate actual addiction, and you can't expect people asked a question like that without detailed additional guidance to be able to give a clinical assessment of whether they are in fact suffering from an addiction.
Unless you probe what the respondents mean by addiction, or provide them a clear definition before asking, there's very little reason to assume they will be using a definition of addiction that justifies assuming anything approaching a clinical definition, or even anything negative.
My opinion goes in other direction: I think even with that caveat, what she went on to say suggests she's making assumptions about what people meant - especially given the age of the respondents - that I don't there's basis for unless the survey provided a lot more context than just the question given in the article.
Seems reasonable to separate self-identification from a diagnosis. Flip the logic: if someone says they aren't addicted to something, does that make it true?
Well, yes if the suggestion is some sort of intervention. There are large groups of people that will say they are addicted to coffee, TV, video games, etc. Not a lot of them will meet the medical definition of addiction.
Social media addiction is a meme (in the technical, mind virus sense), gambling addiction isn't.
I don't know if this is what the study authors were thinking, but I see it as a bit like not taking people's word for it that they're gluten intolerant. It is a real thing and people do know that they have it, but also it's a trendy thing and there are a lot of people trying to convince you that you have it when actually you're perfectly normal.
I don't think there'd be a problem taking their word for it if the questions asked were the right ones.
Asking people if they feel like they're addicted to social media without framing exactly what you mean by addicted (and for that matter what you include in social media) might both overcount and undercount.
Have everyone who answered answered on the basis that they see this "addiction" as a problem, or a negative, and something they genuinely find hard to stop (as opposed to not really wanting to do anything about)? On the opposite end, are the ones who disagree counting forums like Reddit, or HN? Discord servers? Are they talking mostly about one one-on-one contact with friends on, say, Snapchat, that they're "addicted to" because it's social contact they enjoy, or depression-boosting, compulsive voyeueristic doom scrolling that they're addicted to in a downright harmful way?
It's a start, and little more, to ask that first question that pretty much only tells us that there is something of sufficient magnitude to probe further. To start with, the respondents appear to not have said whether or not their "addiction" is something that causes negative effects on their life or not.
Repost because of HN’s over-aggressive censorship (m-bation is abbreviated no-no word):
Social media is just psychological m-bation via marketing tactics. Maybe if we called it m-bation people would stop aggressively ignoring the negative effects from habitual use. On the other hand no one openly discusses physical m-bation, just as no one discusses their online identity they’ve cultivated.
Get a hobby, gain a skill.
Would this be the same 8 hours for everyone worldwide, would it be by the user's timezone, or would we get to choose our own 8 hours?
This question was brought to you by memories of not being able to set the timezone of my tamagotchi and it subsequently dying because it was awake when I was asleep.
A good character building experience then, for free - try all of ya putting down phone for an hour a day. Next time even 2. Everybody knows the trivial steps leading to it, but will bullshit around it for 2 hours just to avoid it. Brave ones block the app. But real hardcore mode is simply uninstalling given app.
The day I removed all FB apps (FB, messenger) was the happiest phone-owning day for me since getting it for the first time.
I just don't want legislation telling competent people what to do here. I want the legislation to be more analogous to child protective services.
I feel that a guardian should have a choice up until they are negligent or inhibiting (however a society deems it - specifically left as this definition).
If said guardian is able to raise a kid in a healthy environment, with a healthy relationship to technology, then I do not want to step on their toes.
I think we need to 'reverse Chesterton's fence'(?) our liberty here, let's not lose our freedom and build a restrictive fence or Berlin wall.
I know many people disagree with me, but the fact that there isn't consensus here means we should tread carefully lest break some cotton mills.
I would miss it. I would also make it a matter of principle to refuse if someone tried to force a shutdown on us - I've got my Mastodon and Lemmy instances, and if we were to have to go underground, we'd go underground.
I am actually not convinced the people chatting on Mastodon or Discord are addicted in the same way as YouTube and Twitter.
How about this instead, no algorithmic feeds for any 8 hours of the day you choose, so if you want a more peaceful evening you select 7pm-3am and your feed is just people you follow ordered by when they first posted.
No thanks. No way. I'm working on adding algorithmic feeds to my Mastodon instance because it's the biggest issue I have with Mastodon. It's also making me spend more time because I have to scroll through a bunch of stuff I have no interest in to see the stuff I want to see.
Put another way: To me, your statement boils down to telling me I should be less social. These kinds of places are the social contact I grew up with - starting with BBS's in the early 90's onwards - and where I've met and keep in touch with most of the people I know.
I have no problem accepting some people have problems controlling their social media use, but at the same time to me talking about limiting or shutting it down is about as authoritarian and restrictive as enforcing curfew. In fact, more so - it'd affect me more negatively than being forcibly locked in my own house 8 hours a day.
Not everybody needs to live in big cities, the calm you like so much can be obtained outside instantly, any day, every day.
Plus sometimes when actually having a life maybe other days are fully taken doing something important, so its nice to have it as an option. The societies that have Sunday shopping that I ever visited didn't experience any kind of shopping frenzy during it, everything is scaled down, some shops are opened shortly, some are not at all (or some close on Monday instead).
That is all said as an European who knows very well what you mean, from various angles
It would be nice to be rich enough to afford a weekend/sunday house in the countryside at the same time as a house or apartment in the city the other 5/6 days a week.
Nah bro. What about, for example, people who happen to be busy during all but the hours you select for the shutdown. Since it’s forced, they effectively just don’t get to use it at all. In my opinion though, social media can be used in a productive way in moderation, like how a lot of people use it to keep up with the news or stay in touch with family.
The first region to somehow effectively ban any access to Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and social media for people under the age of 21 will raise the first generation of young people to rule over the rest of the world's social media addicted hoi polloi.
Having a permanent public visual record of "growing up" isn't going to help people as much as their parents seem to think it will and the only viable leaders, politicians, Justices, etc. will come from this hypothetical region.
Or they'll find a massive brain drain, unless you find some non-authoritarian way to leave. China probably has a lot of netizens that want to experience the rest of the Internet, or game more than two hours a night, but they won't be able to escape without the CCP threatening their families.
Once again, social media is 21st century cigarettes. Legions of brilliant scientists and engineers have spent cumulative millennia optimizing these products to be as addictive as possible, while simultaneously compiling and burying evidence of the deleterious effects their products have on their customers.
When did we lose the moral authority to make things illegal for minors? I believe in 50-100 years it will be a worldwide scandal that these skinner boxes were ever given to children let alone adults. AI optimised attention slideshow that likely drains you neurochemically and disrupts your reward circuitry the same way heroin or ecstasy does? On paper this shit should clearly be regulated.
One contributing factor is the surprisingly recent meme that corporations exist solely for the benefit of their shareholders. It’s a totally ahistoric and obviously antisocial meme that gets repeated like it’s gospel, even by otherwise intelligent people. This perspective should be literally laughed at and made fun of as a moral system suitable only for the greediest and most myopic among us.
Isn't it an inevitable part of Capitalism though? If the directors of a corporation start acting to not maximise the shareholders profits, they'll soon be replaced or the corporation bought out by more ruthless/sociopathic people.
The emergence of this idea definitely is guaranteed, but the dominance of it isn’t. There are many countervailing forces that can and should be used, including regulation. One of the forces that I’m advocating for, as I believe it is undervalued and underutilized, is pushback at the cultural level. It is absolutely possible to build truly thriving businesses that include more stakeholders than just shareholders. Costco is a canonical large cap example, but of course there are millions of small businesses who serve their communities much more holistically.
There are plenty of examples of companies that have stayed in business for a very long time while being focused on something other than maximizing profits, whether that be prestige, quality, treating employees and customers reasonably well, promoting particular values. In N' Out, Hobby Lobby, Costco, Ferrari, A24. Not saying they're paragons of virtue, but they have missions other than "get as rich as possible" and this hasn't driven them to extinction. Presumably, over some long enough span of time, you need to at least not lose money to stay in business, but money doesn't need to be your only objective.
You only have to maximize shareholders' profits better than the next best CEO, they have no other option. No one is firing Tim Cook because he made a choice that reduced profits 1%.
(When doing "X let alone Y" the more outrageous thing goes in Y.)
I strongly agree with your point, it should be possible to ban this stuff for minors at least. Under 13s are already effectively banned but banning all minors altogether would be much more effective.
As a teenager in the late 90s in the UK, I remember the moral panic about ecstasy, where Leah Betts was the unwitting literal poster child for the war against drugs, in the form of her comatose intubated face in a hospital bed.
They told us that we couldn't rely on it being pure, because hers was pure and it killed her. They told us we couldn't be sure it would be safe for us if we'd already tried it before, because this was her second time and it killed her.
They never told us she'd actually died from drinking approximately 7 litres of water in 90 minutes. But they did fire someone for truthfully saying the drug itself was no more dangerous than riding a horse.
There's already evidence of the harm caused to teenagers' self esteem due to endless comparisons with peers over social media. This leads to many types of mental illness such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders etc. Considering that we're exposing almost the entire teenage population to these harmful effects, it's hardly overdramatic.
Mental illnesses also physically alter brain chemistry and anorexia is arguably far more damaging than heroin. Someone can remain addicted to heroin/opiates for decades whilst still being part of society (it tends to be either impurities or inconsistent quality of heroin that causes deaths). It's unlikely that someone will continue suffering from anorexia for a decade.
A conclusion that could be drawn from your statements is this: it's more okay for teenagers to use heroin instead of social media because it's safer.
I think people and especially teenagers, even "chronically-online" depressed ones on social media, would laugh at this. They're wrong to do so, of course.
With moral panics, the kids would never agree that video games or D&D or whatever was causing them any problems, yet with social media use most kids will agree it’s a problem, so can’t be characterised as a moral panic.
Furthermore, most people panicking about dnd and raves have exactly zero experience with either. Almost everyone has experience with social media and a lot of the criticism of it comes from things people directly observe from their own personal experiences. It’s not like this is a completely uninformed mass hallucination like the satanic panic of the 90s.
Panic is uncontrolled activity done in response to a threat. If any productive action happens in a panic, it is by chance. Chance, therefore, moral panic is a poor way to actually solve a problem or improve ones life. Opportunistic entites may utilize moral panic toward political goals in the same way as boogeymen or scapegoats. One might think this validates moral panic, but I don't see it as translating to obeying the will of the people (or equivalent constituency) because things done out of panic are not a sign of consent.
[EDIT: I'd love to hear what those who've downvoted actually disagree with. The question as stated in the article objectively does not ask whether they see this as a problem or not, nor does it justify why they believe they can assume how respondents have interpreted the question; I very intentionally caveated this to point out that I don't have a problem with the notion that many of them probably did mean it was problematic to them, but if that was not appropriately contextualised to the respondents it is not clear how many did or did not interpret it the same way the researchers do - maybe they did include additional context; if so it's The Guardian leaving out important context. Either way, from this article we can't tell]
Overegging the results.
This is the statement they were asked to agree or disagree with according to the article.
> “I think I am addicted to social media”
Note that it does not ask them to answer whether they think they have a problematic relationship with social media. Using the term "addicted" to refer to something you spend a lot of time with is common whether you're happy or unhappy about it. Unless there is significant context around the question that the article left out but that were presented to respondents, making the assumptions they seem to be making in the article seems problematic at best.
E.g. if asked if I was dedicated to chocolate, or pistachio ice cream, I'd say yes. If I was asked if I had a problem with it, I'd say no - I enjoy those "addictions". I also enjoy my HN "addiction".
I'm sure a portion of those who strongly agreed that they feel addicted also do consider it a negative and maybe a serious problem in some cases, but the question reported on did not ask about that, so all we really know is the upper bound on the subset that may or may not consider their social media use a problem.
Maybe it is a genuinely big problem, or maybe it isn't. This data won't tell us.
What is worrying, though, is that even though the grad student leading the analysis downplays the "addiction part" (“We’re not saying the people who say they feel addicted are addicted,”) she goes on to overinterpret the data ("But it’s not a nice feeling to feel you don’t have agency over your own behaviour. It’s quite striking that so many people feel like that and it can’t it be that good") - nothing about the question asked about whether people feel they have agency, or that it "can't be that good". Maybe they all meant that, but assuming they all meant that when it was not what they were asked is unprofessional.
cigarette consumption is way, wayyyyyyy down, and is effectively gone in the first world outside of small pockets. compare to the 1950s where everyone smoked, all the time.
or think about asbestos, or lead. we figured out those are bad and made drastic changes to start removing those -- and did.
nature is a little harder, esp. given that the largest corps in the world + plenty of soverign wealth funds, are trying their hardest to keep people from thinking about it as it collapses.
It is troubling just how many intelligent, educated parents I see are perfectly happy to give children and babies a tablet or phone to placate them.
On the other hand, have you thought about the difficulties of handling this as a principled parent?
You can either turn your child into a social pariah during key developmental years, or spend hours of your and their lives trying to regulate a device that is designed to capture and waste your attention (something I personally rejected as an equal waste of my time and effort, when I took my journey to no smartphone), or do what almost every other parent does, and just give your kids a smartphone.
I think the problem likely goes deeper - most of the parents are likely smartphone addicted already, so they see no issue with it. Or they may see the issue with their child's usage of a phone, but they justify their own constant need for using a phone with it being "for work" or what have you and the child is just following in their example as they constantly see them pulling out their phone.
I'm not a parent yet, and I don't have any answers..but as a 90's kid I can't imagine what it is like now growing up with access to all the world's information in your pocket.
> I can't imagine what it is like now growing up with access to all the world's information in your pocket.
"All the world's information" isn't really the problem; it's having all the world's bullshit, vitriol, manipulation, and general madness in your pocket.
I recently saw my niece with her six month old child. Obviously the baby doesn't have a phone yet, but they seemed fascinated by their mum's obvious interest in her phone.
Should we have blame the parents for kids smoking cigarettes and juuls when are corporations targeting them as a means to get rich? Obviously parents need to get involved to correct things, but blaming them for the outcomes of another party's schemes is cruel
Partially. There are things we can clearly blame corporations for, and things we can clearly blame parents for.
Social media addiction is something parents need to fix, but corporations are not helping. However, it's not inherently the fault of corporations, just like kids smoking cigs.
I don't blame parents for being overworked, exhausted, and not having the time to devote to their kids due to the factors I mentioned. When costs of living skyrocket and costs of raising kids becomes completely unaffordable, I don't blame parents for working more and more just to put food on the table. They also need their own time to recharge and be able to breadwinners without completely burning out. They aren't completely aware of everything their kids do, or what the cool kids in school are doing (and why their kids want to copy said cool kids). It is the parent's job to educate their kids, yes, but sometimes parents are too late to the party to actually effect change.
I don't blame corporations for acting in their best interests, and the best interests of their shareholders. Businesses have to make money. Not everything in the business world has to be ethical, good for society, or morally just, no matter how much we'd like it to be.
There is no magic bullet, but imposing restrictions on corporations seems to be a good start.
That seems unreasonable if the parents have made their views on smoking well known to the kids, which then leads to the kids making efforts to hide their habit from their parents. It's fair enough to blame parents for behaviour that they encourage, but not so for behaviour that they are unaware of.
They've also not talked to any kids and tried to ascertain which proportion of the kids involved 1) see it as a problem, and/or 2) exhibit behavior that suggests it might be a problem. It's pure speculation until they've actually asked follow-up questions. An article about the results of Dr Rich, quoted towards the end, sounds like it'd have had far more meat on it, but given it's The Guardian they'd lose the hook of it being about "almost half of British teens".
I agree with your sentiment but at a certain point it's just impossible for a few parents to push back on the behemoth that social media has become with children.
Colour me surprised. And quite some of you friggen' softies and app devs are resposible for this, this output of yours which is way worse than the perceived impact of carbon dioxide, travel, cars, etc.
Fuck you social media devs.
> It could be that, for some, their relationship is akin to a behavioural addiction, but for others their use could be driven by compulsive checking, others may be relying on it to cope with negative life experiences, and others may simply be responding to negative social perceptions about “wasting time” on social media.
Finally! I feel less smart for not having thought of this myself!
I was unable to meaningfully change my own phone habits (despite serious effort and roadblocks) until it clicked that I was coping for something. What that was and what I was doing to cope highlighted parts of my life like nothing else. Instead of simply abstaining from using my phone, I put time into activities that benefited the withered branches of my life. Old habits still die hard, but knowing that I'm coping as I'm coping helped me separate the good social media use from the bad.