Social media use has only minor effects on wellbeing: study | Hacker News Reader

Social media use has only minor effects on wellbeing: study

theguardian.com

36 pointslxm76 comments

It only hurts kids as much as it hurts everyone else.

My 60 y/o mom is on social media for hours per day. That's harmful.

My 80 y/o grandma plays Pokemon Go four hours per day, which we initially thought was good because it got her to go walking. Now we can't take her anywhere without slowing us down. It's become harmful.

My 6 y/o nephew will totally tune out the world if you let him play Angry Birds, ignoring his parents until someone physically removes the screen from his hands. That's harmful.

I hosted a field trip for pre-teen middle schoolers and in our downtime between activities there was zero social interaction because they all buried their heads in their phones (okay, I did observe one student ask another for a charger). That's harmful.

Screen time is hurting everyone and singling out kids is just old people refusing to accept that screens changed humanity at all ages. I don't think that our current old-timers lacking screens when they were kids made them any better at life. It only made them worse at using modern technology. The current crop of youngsters may miss out on face-to-face interaction, or maybe their eyes will be shaped poorly for long distance sight. But they'll be better at navigating the digital world, which seems to be where we spend a lot of our time regardless of age.

> Screen time is hurting everyone and singling out kids is just old people refusing to accept that screens changed humanity at all ages

Better close your browser window real quick! Don't want any more of that nasty screen time to harm you!

I could have easily included myself in my above list of anecdotes. But more importantly, look at all the "harmful" things I listed. My mom interacts with her friends. An old lady slows down a group of people. A kid gets in trouble with his parents. Middle schoolers are socially inept.

None of those things are really that harmful, they are mostly expected and regular parts of life.

Have you read about Poe's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law?

> Now we can't take her anywhere without slowing us down. It's become harmful.

That sounds like a mild inconvenience, but certainly not harmful. Staying active (even if that means just walking around, especially at the age of 80) is important.

See my reply to dagenix in this thread. You have discovered the point.

Your point is not my point. Your point is that social media isn't as harmful as people make it out to be. My point is that older people need regular physical activity.

>My 6 y/o nephew will totally tune out the world if you let him play Angry Birds, ignoring his parents until someone physically removes the screen from his hands. That's harmful.

> I hosted a field trip for pre-teen middle schoolers and in our downtime between activities there was zero social interaction because they all buried their heads in their phones (okay, I did observe one student ask another for a charger). That's harmful.

I did the exact same thing with books and nobody said it was harmful. To the contrary, I was mostly praised. I'm not saying it wasn't harmful, it clearly was in some respects. But the benefits outweighed the costs and everybody could see that. Why can't we do the same with phones?

Books have many clear benefits, like generally increasing reading and writing ability and in particular, expanding vocabulary.

What are the benefits of extended phone use?

I'm not saying there are none but I'm hard pressed to think of a way staring into a phone benefits me. 90% of the time I and the people around me seem to be consuming drivel on social media (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit) which usually has none of the benefits of books and especially for young people, seems to have very serious downsides, like depression and a feeling of social isolation.

There's also the aesthetic argument against raising a generation that never played outside, never got bored so bad they had to invent new games:

a generation that completely abstract their bodies into vehicles used to get data into their minds.

Pretty dystopic if you ask me.

(Edit: I mean young, <12 year olds, on phones and tablets. Elementary school kids shouldn't be on social media for the above reasons, IMO. As an awkward teen, the internet did give me so much good things, too)

I think part of it is that it's so kid-by-kid. There will always be those self starters, and those mature enough to use the internet properly. Educating them on proper web use is a parents' job and is something they can do together, like reading.

The parents screen time is probably more damaging than the child's screen time, to the child. They are probably directly correlated, time wise.

Screen time to the neglect of your child is, neglecting your child.

There are plenty of ways to balance it.

This.

I'm a CS engineer graduated from a college in Kerala (South-India). The whole course is 4 years long and in these 4 years, the administration didn't allow students to bring Smartphones to the campus. Yes even for the students who are majoring in computer science. And even laptops were only allowed from 3rd year onwards.

Their justification was laptops and smartphones are just a distraction for students. And the rules where quite strict and if you bring any of these to the campus they would fine you heavily. All because of the notion that internet and digital presence is bad for you even if you are studying about these devices.

> All because of the notion that internet and digital presence is bad for you even if you are studying about these devices.

Uh, ok. A number of colleges also have curfews and gender segregated dorms. Those aren't good ideas either.

There’s still something to be said for the relative uselessness of most social media. I don’t avoid it by any measure, but I’m also very aware that a minute spent on a given social platform is usually a minute wasted. At least with something like a movie you have a shot at remembering what you saw a month ago. Do you remember what you saw on Instagram yesterday?

The problem with this study and similar ones is that "use of social media" is measured as a homogeneous activity when in reality the various social media services have complex and important functional distinctions and usage patterns that have a meaningful impact on emotional investment. Spending many hours conversing in a private group chat on Facebook is completely different from lurking photos of attractive people on Instagram or taking photos of every meal for Snapchat or retweeting every celebrity you follow on Twitter.

There are other factors to consider as well such as the prominence of and usage patterns of social media within the wider social heiarchy of the peer group. If the in-person social network doesn't have much online cohesion then it stands to reason that use of social media should have a smaller psychological impact compared to peer groups where social media participation is a significant part of socialization.

I am not a fan of news sites delving into philosophical discussions on parenting. The topics are too complex to cover in short pieces and the outcome is to arm people on either side with weak material to support whatever position they have.

We all know someone who either was or has a kid that was negatively impacted by over consumption of XYZ. One observable instance of this happening meets the threshold of evidence. The underlying question here isn’t a search for evidence but validation of a prevailing societal “truth” or norm.

As it pertains to kids and screen times, many thousands of parents are agitated by this problem (and have been with it’s equivalent for millennia) which to me indicates a high likelihood that there is some human collective view or conscience, that evolves with the times, on factors that positively contribute to ones character and that in this instance, many (thousands upon thousands) parents believe elevated levels of screen time do not do not positively contribute to character relative to say drawing, creative play, chopping down a tree to build a bow an arrow, etc.

If you asked my brother and sister who have 3 kids if making them do chores around the house positively contributes to their character, they would respond “undoubtedly”. I’ve never in my life met a parent who disagreed. But I haven’t met all parents and my circles are different than others. I have their views and my life experience but does any of this meet the articles standard of evidence? In a way, I think it does.

The question of how best to raise children will live on for ages and I don’t anticipate the guardian has the patience or will to explore it. Which makes it feel like click bait to me (toss out quick piece on topics people are polarized on, get clicks, move on).

Some questions I would ask of myself to understand this better:

0) what are solving for? Emotional balance, income, job stability, health?

1) what compromises “hurt” and how do we know it (is it short term vs long term, how do we measure it)

2) what are the thresholds that determine a person has crossed into the state / process of “hurt” (how do we know it when we see it)

3) what threshold of children need to enter this state of hurt before we qualify it as a problem due to the genuine causal link between elevated levels of screen time and this state of “hurt” (10% 50%?)

4) as a parent, how do I know I’m right about any of this?

5) even if I believed the evidence I have is valid and the causal link overwhelming, do I have the right to impose my values on other parents who disagree?

Who knows...

I've never thought that screen time had any major detrimental effect on kids. I was spending most of my days in front of a Commodore 64 back in the 80s before it was cool. And most of it was "social media" in the form of single and later multi-user BBS systems, and MUDs once I found the Internet around 1987.

I think a much larger problem is that kids aren't given free rein anymore. Part of growing up needs to be time away from adults, getting into challenging social and physical situations, and learning to fend for oneself. That seems to happen far less.

I'm not just talking about overbearing helicopter parents (which is a whole other pathology that has grown, but always existed for some unlucky subset of peers). I'm talking about being out in the world and not having your parents as concierges.

When I was ten years old, if I wanted to see my friends across town, I had to walk there or ride my bike. If I wanted something to eat, I had to pack a sandwich and bring it. If I wanted a new toy and it wasn't my birthday or Christmas, I had to mow the neighbor's lawn.

What I see today are parents who drive their kids to every social event and give them money for whatever they want. Not an allowance for doing chores, just a stream of cash on-demand. They all have cell phones, and call their parents for a ride whenever they want to be somewhere else. When I was a kid, if the parents were at work and we got hungry, we made a sandwich or waited for them to get home and cook dinner. Now they call them at work and whine and some parent orders a pizza.

The biggest problem I see with cell phones is that a solution to any trivial inconvenience is a text message away. If I'd called Mom at work back in the day, I'd better have had a broken leg.

Every generation finds something to panic about because it's going to destroy their children. The article points this out: in the 50s, it was Elvis shaking his hips, the 80s had Dungeons and Dragons, the 90s had video games. And every generation is convinced that while every previous moral panic was nonsense: this time it's different! Chill people. We survived hips and tabletop games and videogames - "screen time" is no different and we'll be just fine with that one too.

Some of them were real however, smoking really was a terrible idea as was sugar, fast food, and many other things.

So were man-eating tigers and poison ivy. You can't just make a list of things you don't like and say that that disproved my argument about a moral panic. I cited 3 specific things that parents panicked about primarily because their children were growing up differently than they had. Smoking has decreased over time - it's not unique to some particular generation of children. Fast Food really is something that parents feed to their children, not really a difference in what it means to grow up. And I don't know what to say about sugar - it still exists? I guess thats bad?

What do you think about the moral panic about kids picking up vaping or doing drugs at music festivals?

To be fair, not everyone "survived" videogames. I know plenty of people who got "trapped" by them as young adults and some lost years to it or never really moved on. By which I mean, had them as an addiction/escape from developing social skills or confronting other responsibilities.

So, these people you know who got "trapped" - if it wasn't for videogames, they would have had no issues?

That's really beside the point. GP isn't arguing that video games are the sole source of their problems, only that video games could make it worse. And even then, I can easily imagine situations in which without video games they would have been fine. Since video gaming can be an addiction, perhaps you could compare it to other addictions like alcohol. While you could say that an alcoholic already had an addictive personality so you can't blame the alcohol, it seems really odd to excuse the role of the addictive substance in the first place. Nobody is arguing that alcohol or video games be banned.

I think this is a really bad argument, mainly because it ignores the things that people "panicked" about that actually did end up having horrible consequences for society.

Three examples: 1. The American diet. You have an epidemic of kids with obesity and things like type II diabetes (previously referred to as "adult onset" diabetes). 2. You point out video games in your examples, and while I don't believe that video games are "rotting our brains", kids have become much more physically sedentary over the past 50 years with lots of measured negative consequences. 3. Smoking.

And the thing I think that is particularly frightening about "screen time" is that apps and programs are designed by some very intelligent people whose sole goal is to hook you into spending more time in the app.

> The America diet

This is super vague.

> while I don't believe that video games are "rotting our brains", kids have become much more physically sedentary over the past 50 years with lots of measured negative consequences

But where is the evidence that video games are a decline in physical health? I could just as easily blame couch cushions that are too comfy. But that doesn't mean that we should make children sit on the floor.

> Smoking

This isn't a moral panic, at least not as it relates to any particular generation of children. Each generation has smoked less, not more.

Do you earnestly expect anybody to believe that video games play no role in sedentary lifestyles?

Do you honestly expect me to believe your claim without any citations other than it sounds reasonable to you? There are millions of things that have changed in the last X years - just picking one of them you don't like and blaming it is lazy.

I don't understand why you are taking this personally. It's pretty established that video games can be addictive and when someone is addicted to something they usually neglect other parts of their life. It's a big enough problem that the WHO have defined "Gaming disorder" in the ICD https://www.who.int/features/qa/gaming-disorder/en/

Something can be harmful at the extremes while being beneficial on average. Actually, almost everything we do falls into this category. I don't find it at all obvious that video games have been a net harm to humanity even if we restrict to physical health.

Nobody is arguing that video games are a net harm to humanity, but I'm interested in knowing just what benefits you think video gaming confers versus things which haven't been identified as addictive, such as reading books. The fact is that we can't give video games a carte blanche simply because most people deal with them well. Alcohol is usually fine for most people, like video games it can confer benefits (e.g. social ones) but that doesn't mean alcoholism is a bogus thing to worry about.

Self reports as a valid measurement??

Didn't the generation currently raising kids get a hell of a lot of screen time themselves growing up? TV and video games were very common in the 90s.

I certainly watched a lot of crap TV growing up.

However entertainment back then was so feeble compared to today's high voltage stuff it didn't really command one's full attention, there was still time for socializing.

By contrast, we had two teenage relatives staying last couple of days and they are deeeply engaged with their devices to the point of near hypnotism.

> entertainment back then was so feeble compared to today's high voltage stuff

Read that sentence back to yourself in your head and then tell me that doesn't sound ridiculous.

Back before the internet I remember flicking through tv channels being bored because there was nothing on, I have never really felt there was nothing left to do on the internet.

Half an hour a day, on an egg timer. I wish I would have spent less time in front of a screen.

So what do you do for a living now, exactly?

Neither watch TV nor play video games...

Yes, and that is why I tell my daughter no screen unless necessary (FaceTime to her grand parents) or time to time "TV" (max one hour of watching something on iPad or TV a week).

The difference with other kids we know is huge from a behavior, physical and intellect point of view. She'll go to school only this fall.

> Where’s the evidence?

There's definitely evidence that we're getting less and less physically fit as a population:

https://www.menshealth.com/health/a19525386/why-your-vision-...

https://www.stateofobesity.org/childhood-obesity-trends/

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/13/4815909...

Physical activity is in decline:

http://www.phitamerica.org/News_Archive/Says_Says_19-Year-Ol...

Less physical activity is also correlated with worse cognitive functioning:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27182986

Of course that's not a direct link to "screen time", but then what else could be drawing people to less and less physical activity? I doubt it is books or board games. It's a known fact that many modern apps/games are engineered to be addictive, exploiting loss aversion and reward mechanisms of the human brain.

Did you know that there is a direct correlation between the decrease in pirates and the increase in global temperatures?

A lot of these things are assuming a traditional model of well-being (that being fit and smart and long lived makes you happier). This is stuff that doctors say I need, but I don't actually need them like air and water. What if our model of well-being is wrong?

An obese person can be happy as long as they don't peg their happiness on being able to do a bunch of physical activities. Plus, all the time spent not working out can be spent on pursuing other interests.

A dumb person can be happy. There are billions of us.

A short lived person can be happy- it's more about the quality of life than the quantity.

So if I can live in a world in which I don't have to do a bunch of physical activity, can play with the screens that I want, and can enjoy my life? I don't actually need a lot of the things that a doctor says I need. To be fair, an obese person has a higher chance of being hospitalized, which sucks, so being dumb and obese will probably lead to me being less happy.

> This is stuff that doctors say I need, but I don't actually need them like air and water.

I'm sorry, but you do need to be physically healthy for a long life, and it does help with your mental state. You need good blood pressure, you need coronary arteries that aren't blocked, you need a liver that functions and you need kidneys that work.

You missed the point. You don't need to live a long life to be happy. That's you trying to impose your worldview on other people.

A lot of people confuse things that are correlated with being happy with things that make you happy. Being fit does not make everyone happy, it makes some people happy. Eating cheesecake makes some people happy, but not everyone.

What if the things that are correlated with happiness change over time? What if instead of idolizing pro athletes the next generation idolizes pro esports players? Will physical fitness start to see less of a correlation with happiness, playing second fiddle to something else?

I agree that you do need unblocked arteries to stay alive. So increasing obesity may lead to more hospitalizations (and unhappy people that way). But could it be offset by increased well-being in other areas of life?

Are you sure you're not just looking for a rationalization saying that you can live any way you want and still be "happy"?

Of course I'm not ruling out that this is possible. An obese smoker might live to 101 and laugh about it. An athlete might die of Leukemia at age 21. Life is uncertain, you can make of the odds whatever you want.

On the other hand:

Obesity is associated with lower self-reported happiness

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24336235

Physical activity helps depression:

https://www.bmj.com/content/361/bmj.k1808

You also need to count in all the ailments that can result from obesity and lack of exercise, none of which are going to contribute positively to one's level of well-being. Of course it's not all about the length of a life, but the things that cut lives short tend to be quite unpleasant.

> Are you sure you're not just looking for a rationalization saying that you can live any way you want and still be "happy"?

This is how I see this argument.

4K screens with instant, unlimited access to almost all video content humanity has ever created are a relatively new thing. Instead of accepting "lack of evidence of harm", I'd prefer to wait for proof that it's not harmful before letting my kids indulge.

1080p is ok, though? Or is it the fact that you can access too much video? Like, if you could only access every 3rd episode of Cheers, then 4k is ok? I guess we'll have to wait for the scientists to weigh in on this one!

Has search became so hard these days?

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_vis=1&q=screen+time+im...

150,000 hits

The article authors are Oxford professors and they do mention that they’ve reviewed the literature.

What’s your point here?

Screen time (which I know I had too much of, to my lasting detriment) displaces other, better activities. Seriously.

Mostly the problem is that the better activities have become less readily available and/or more expensive.

Most cities have public parks and libraries that are free.

Which are all out of walking distance from the average persons home.

I feel sorry for you, if you live somewhere without a park within walking distance :(

I feel that the average persons home would generally be within walking distance to some sort of public open area.

I'm leaving as soon as possible. This place is very car focused and I hate it. Its an hour walk to the bus stop and a similar time to the supermarket. And this isn't a rural area.

I live 3 blocks from 2 parks, in San Francisco. Even when I go visit relatives who live in the boonies, there's still a park within a 10-15 minute drive.

And do what? These destinations sometimes need to compete for entertainment value hour-for-hour with video games. Additionally, there is an accessibility factor involved in traveling to and from destinations. It requires some serious self-discipline.

As a parent it takes more energy, inventiveness, and patience to entertain our children (or on that note, even another adult) than it does for ourselves.

These alternatives to screen time don't come easy.

I'm a parent too, I make time so that my child has stimulating activities even if its not my fave. Frankly I have a great time watching my child learn and explore.

My kid isn't that old, but I got them a robot that they can "program" from their iPad, its solid learning and exploration time.

I think we need to differentiate between "zero value screen time" and "learning screen time" before we make any real judgements about it.

Judgement abound. There's no lack of it here on HN. I hope some people realize that parenting is much more than "just go to a park". Shallow responses don't understand just how complex parenting can be.

"Screen Time" is too vague IMHO.

I spent most of my time from 10-16 reading books and computer screens, both solitary indoor activities. However via a computer and a modem I communicated with hundreds of people regularly. I don't see that as lost time.

I think what the comment above is getting at is that a Sedentary lifestyle can prevent you from activities that may prove beneficial to your health.

Cycling is a solo activity that I enjoyed. Its kept me quite fit. Especially because I live on the tallest mountain in San Francisco lol.

As eyes grow, their shape is determined by what they see. Viewing lots of black-on-white text (books, most web pages, etc.) moves the focal length one direction. Viewing lots of white-on-black text would do the opposite, but that has gone out of style.

That counts. I can't find the research right now, but I think it hit Hacker News a year or two ago.

Where's the evidence?

If the people who actually work on and build this stuff are skeptical of letting their kids, especially young ones, use it without limit then that certainly passes the smell test for me that there might be a problem.

The revealed preferences of people who work in tech is all the evidence I need.

The thing is, it's not everyone in tech. It's once in a while, some single person in tech denounces some service and there are a million articles written about it. It's anecdata, not data. You shouldn't base your decisions on that fact that some single person you never met and have no reason to trust, decided to say some particular thing that was fun to report on.

This is a fair point, but just as everyone is not in tech not everyone has time to read academic studies about the affects of screen use on children. A click-bait article from Gizmodo is a terrible heuristic, sure, but is observing the behavior of people who do work in tech, who have kids, and then calibrating your view of the problem really that bad of one?

I someone that works in the meat packing industry comes out as a cannibal because he thinks human flesh makes his children grow strong, would you listen to him? Of course not - he's a one off and probably out for attention, but he'll get lots of media coverage. But he isn't worth listening to. Random one off's in tech aren't really any more knowledgable.

No, because a random guy who encourages eating human flesh is an absurdity - never mind that, even if presented with evidence that it did make children grow strong, there are plenty of other reasons to oppose it. Moderating screen time for children is not like this. What I'm talking about is noticing patterns, and positing a hypothesis based on the behavior of those who would be closer to full knowledge of the instrument in question. That seems ... perfectly reasonable.

I don't know who would be better to judge the benefits of eating human flesh than a canibal. It's not reasonable at all to say that you'll accept anecdata from tech Bros seeking attention.

Who said anything about tech Bros? I’m talking about moms and dads that work in tech.

Unprotected sex doesn't make you an expert in anything.

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