Instagram was founded in 2010.
It also coincided with the post-2009 financial crisis. Could be more financially unstable households. Could be a feeling if being left behind as pressure to excel academically and socially increased due to a desire to get into better schools for some financial security. I don’t know. Just throwing out other hypotheses.
Ironically, I think that generation may have been more or less right about the imagery being a negative, but wrong about the mechanism by which it works on us negatively.
Sexualized imagery does not turn boys into rapists. But it does seem to promote body image insecurity, social status worries, and general anxiety, in those who see it, particularly those of the same sex, and where the person is seen as desirable to emulate. Violence in the media, also, probably doesn't make us violent. But it may well skew how accurately we estimate the likelihood of interpersonal violence. Quite a few studies hint at a link between how terrified someone is of being murdered and how much gory TV they watch, basically.
t;ldr: instead of turning us into sex-crazed impulsives like feared, it turned us into sex-hating neurotics.
Putting female people into certain position doesn't turn them automatically into liberal challengers of the status quo, who rationally question the things they learned their whole life, certain kinds of pressure comes in the worst forms from other women (mother, grandmother, aunts, colleagues, etc).
E.g. if you are a girl in a typical family in Italy cutting your hair short, getting a tattoo, or not wearing a bra is something your relatives definitly will mention negatively to you. The only reason being that they have an idealized image of what a woman must look like to be a "propper woman". If you don't look like that they might think you are a lesbian, have psychological problems or similar silly causal connections.
I'd say the critical part wrt suicides is not that people are competing for attention from the opposite sex, because that has been around for a million years. The critical new aspect is that people are now grossly underestimating their relative standing. And that's because social media makes the one pretty outlier actress from the other side of the globe feel personal and acessible, which tricks us into treating them like a valid comparison point even though most high school girls will never need to compete against a Hollywood actress on looks, because the latter one is unavailable to all of her male classmates anyway.
Is this actually true?
Just because the hollywood access (or porn star) is unavailable doesn’t mean the male classmates are behaving that way.
Regardless of gender, the people that rise to the top tend to be sociopathic…
The insinuation that anyone who rises to the top of an organisation must be sociopathic is dillusional.
Yes, there is a higher incidence at the CEO level, traits that help you in a role also help you get there, go figure, but the idea all leaders are sociopaths is a huge stretch based off nothing but your own bias and distain for anyone high up in a power structure, that seems to be going around right now.
Citation needed, as well as a fully qualified definition of "organisation". It's not fair to equate the leader of the local farming co-op with the editorial head of a major newsgathering (or in present-times: news-aggregation) corporation.
Now take the world of a teenager, which is already small, and blast it at them 24/7 full force. Imagine the insane bullshit you see from adults on social media trying to distort reality... now imagine how extreme a child could be imitating those same adults. The big difference being we (adults) don’t then have to go spend eight hours around some crazy asshole. These kids do. It’s haunting.
Social media seems less social the long we have it. I think “petty media” would have been a better term and communicated its relative importance in our lives much better.
I assume the fear was girls would sexualize themselves because of what they saw was popular on MTV, which they believed would make them popular as well. I guess the big difference is that girls that sexualized themselves at that time never had an access to large audiences without perceived consequences like girls do on social media today.
I don't think depicting violence in video games is similar because I would say the violent aspect of games isn't the defining aspect of the content that people want to emulate. For example all the video game streamers and influencers, like girls who sexualize themselves, generally want the popularity, and the popularity is derived from being good at the games (or being the entertainer), not by being violent or emulating the violence from games, whereas the popularity of sex symbols is inherently their sexuality. It was starting with internet chat rooms, but there was really no way to broadcast your sexuality to thousands of people back then without exposing yourself to risks like doing it in the public. Social media both removed these risks by creating a physical separation between the audience and the person sexualizing themselves, and provided an audience that provides the attention that those sexualizing themselves desire. It sort of created the missing pieces for the incentive structures that reinforce the behaviors.
It isn't just sexualization too, social media has allowed many communities that were either too niche or 'undesirable' to thrive in offline communities to flourish and become normalized over time.
There's a reason that the execs at most of those social media companies don't let their kids use their own product. Something we've seen from tobacco execs in the past.
The problem with social media is that it is not a game. It's real life.
Ordinary but attractive humans curate, stage, and edit snippets of perfect lives. Bleeding edge algorithms inject these false realities into our subconscious.
My friends 16-year-old daughter posts photos from a completely different reality if you didn't know her personally.
She posts glamour shots of her and her friends doing all the silly Instagram model stuff you see, in locations like beaches, in front of Disneyland (She just took a picture in front of it, it wasn't even OPEN) etc. And somehow she always looks thin.
The reality is, her family was pretty hard hit financially by COVID-- and that she's a kinda dumpy teenager whose flunking out of High school. Literally a D and F student.
But she has 700 followers on instagram.
EDIT: I just remembered I have a friend whose a minor fitness celebrity and its the same thing with him. He posts photos of him doing all this wonderful stuff, driving an expensive car (which I know is a rental). I help him with his website sometimes and he questions me about his hosting costs (less than $200/yr) and asks if its necessary it cost that much. So he can't really have much money or glamour in his life.
The new buzzword in private school now is "resilience", which I feel like is tacit acknowledgement that kids need to deal with things sucking in the future.
Self esteem (1990 - 2000s) = denial: "I don't feel bad!" Resilience (2010 -) = anger: "I feel bad, but I'll fight and come back stronger!"
Maybe the future pattern will be as follows:
"Solution-driven" = bargaining: "I feel bad and here's what you can do so I feel better" "Pragmatic" = depression: "I feel bad and I should feel bad" "Peaceful warrior" = acceptance: "I feel bad and that's normal when the world is a post-apocalyptic nightmare in 2060"
But I would posit that it is possible that constant exposure to people in your network's achievements (or appearances thereof) can elicit emotions that have negative consequences over long periods of time. I think tribal species probably have an innate function of trying to sort and rank members for various purposes, and maybe that program can get overloaded.
In my schooling experience I don't think I remember there being a correlation between household wealth and mental health issues. There were poor kids who didn't engage at all with the stress of preparing for the future and therefore had a great time in middle / high school (their suffering came later...) and many kids with richer parents who put them through grueling schooling regimens, with very high standards and conditional love, which led to lots of problems with anxiety / depression.
I think a lot of problems came from the remote schooling being really bad for time management. Kids got bad grades, felt like their lives were ruined. This is something I think is happening a lot.
I think if I had kids I wouldn’t let them on such sites until 16/17 or never. Granted, I have a strong opinion against social media before this data.
I'm not a parent yet but I dread this situation. I'm good at denying urges personally, so I'd tell them desire is a constant part of life, we can't always get what we crave. Further, I'd state actual facts about girls mental health, they will see and be exposed to unhealthy mindsets on this app.
Some good that'll do. When I have kids, it'll be "dad, why can't we join the VR orgy party? It's not real sex!"
Teens are just people with very little experience dealing with their seemingly huge amounts of emotion so parents should help them process. We can't protect them from everything so trying to just hide the bad stuff is not going to work, folks will grow up without the tools to deal with it when things go wrong.
Keeping up with what's going on and jumping in when they get stuck, either because the situation is overwhelming, they don't have the proper tools, or they're just putting too much weight on their shoulders, is super valuable.
Unfortunately, with all of the pressures of daily life, combined with the struggles of folks in lower socio-economic environments, lots of people do not have enough time or surplus emotional budget to give it the proper attention, they're just trying to survive.
In normal words it means that they have a lot of freedom and I am not particularly bitchy about that. I tell them they have to go to bed but I do not care too much if they do when on vacation. One day I will get mad and force them to do that, and they know what they did wrong and that this is the"punition". They usually come, beg a bit and I let go.
So they know that there is a lot of vagueness about the "rules" within this area, which they make use of. Also the fact that they have two parents and when they get a "no" from one, they may get a "yes" from the other (and the first one would not care)
Then come the walls. The walls are rigid and extremely strong. They know that they must not try to break them, because terrible things will happen. The most terrible thing would be a loss of trust - something they do not want. They know that we trust them and that the whole flat area above is because of that.
They also know that they can come to us with questions, to which they will always receive an answer. Some of which they will agree with, some not. There are no taboo topics (though some were complicated, when the older one asked me what a whore is (or later, what cunnillingus is) at the ripe age of 10, and the younger one (8 at that time) ran with a chair from the other room to be part of the audience...).
They also know that they can talk with us about things they will do someday - and how to do them safely. Sex is an obvious one, but also alcohol. The younger one (14) told me today that he would like to try how it feels to be drunk when he is 18. I told him that they are risks and that he must be very careful. To what he said "at home of course! with you around just in case!". I hope it will be this way but I listed the risks anyway.
Now that I think of it, we do not even exactly know what the walls are. Certainly things like theft, but they are so remote from our ethics that we do not list them.
This is a terrifyingly difficult prospect. I guess almost nobody in the world is so well equipped for that. There are really hard problems that nobody can "deal" with alone, like the death of loved ones, or social ostracism from your whole peer group. No matter how "well equipped" you are, some things may be simply overwhelming.
EDIT: I learned this the hard way. I am well off economically and emotionally, always had a cushioned life, I became the father in a happy family, really felt totally invincible. But something happened at the age of 41 (sudden death of my dad, in very bad circumstances) that I was not prepared at all to deal with. I used to mock people who couldn't cope with their own problems, but as an adult I learned that some problems may be really too big to rationalize off. I guess many teenagers find themselves in such difficult situations that cannot really solve (like being a victim of overwhelming social pressure), regardless of how loving and close their parents are.
They could do try do things behind his back, they had full window to do it but trust was so ingrained that I don't recall him ever finding out huge problems.
Which doesn't mean they wouldn't plead and beg and try to cajole to get something.
At some point he would explain the rationale behind a decision but in the the end when push came to shove if a "no" was spoken it was a final "no". He isn't forced to justify his decisions and it's accepted as is and I think somehow trust plays a part here. Because his children knows that it's not the thing to get (smartphone, movie time, etc.) that is at play but trust (edit_begin) ultimately trust and the only way to get that thing would be by breaking trust (edit_end). They have to keep their parent's trust and parents know they can only get that trust by actually trusting. So, it works out. YMMV.
Having been on both sides of this, as a teenager and having saw my siblings go through it, I don't envy you either.
But I can talk about my personal experiences. I was very introverted as a kid, and tools like Facebook gave me a bit of social autonomy and confidence, and it absolutely strengthened my in-person relationships. I know others that feel the same.
Not being contactable via the internet definitely can cause social ostracism, but a reasonable middle ground for me is something like Discord or WhatsApp, which is semi private and avoids the toxicity of The Feed.
>How would you handle it if they bought their own 2nd cellphone, and only used the cellular network to escape your control.
That's what really happens. Lock your kid down? They'll get right around it by going outside of the infrastructure and devices you supply. They'll just carry two phones around, and you just won't be wiser about the second one unless you catch them with it.
It won't work with every child... but I am a big believer in fostering the means for a child to make the right decisions for themselves. Yes, the social pressures are immense. But you know, I do remember following my dad's advice to get up a few times an hour, exercise and stretch, when playing video games. Older children worry about their health, and try to make good decisions within their abilities, just like adults do. Perhaps we can't really protect them from this per se, and can only try to help the next generation save themselves, from this mess we've made for them.
I'd like to think I was pretty mature at that age, and my parents would like to think they had done a good enough job raising me that this would never be a problem, and it never was. But we can clearly see from stories of kids spending large amounts of money in FIFA or mobile games or whatever, that this is not true for every kid.
The fact that online purchases were a slow user experience in the 90s meant that I had the concept of purchases, and paying back my parents in cash reinforced the concept of spending real money. Since I had my own savings, I could also see the impact to myself if I spent more than reasonable on Pokemon cards or whatever.
If it had just been pressing a button in a video game like it is for modern kids, and wasn't trusted to mind my own money (or that money was just numbers in a bank account), would I have realized the same at age 12? Or would my parents ended up as the ones that "should have known better". How much of that is good parenting, versus a different environment? I don't know.
I don't have kids of my own, and my life situation is such that I don't consider it a practical near term possibility, but I'd like to think I could raise my own kids so I could extend that level of trust, but a lot of people would see just the fact that the kids had that kind of information irresponsible in its entirety.
It's not like the old days when you knew they'd find a Playboy magazine eventually.
Actually, would retail stores even sell a data plan to an unaccompanied minor? You could buy a SIM online I suppose, possibly via a gift card, and watch the mail carefully to ensure the package isn't seen, but it all seems like a lot of work for a small amount of web browsing.
I’d think that in the worst case scenario, the child goes through the process once, browses the internet for a couple of days on a super crappy device, uses up their data, and realizes the whole thing wasn't really worth it. Maybe they do it again in a few months when they're particularly bored; whatever, it's a few days out of the year.
CEX (UK secondhand games/electronics) will sell you a HTC Salsa* for £3 ($4.12) and Argos (generic catalogue warehouse) will sell you a SIM for £1 ($1.37) that you can then top up with £10 ($13.75) at ATMs, etc., for 7GB of data.
Total cost: £14 ($19.24) which is probably under a week's worth of lunch money these days.
* Should still work on 3G HSDPA 2100MHz.
A prepaid data plan will set you back about 25 a month here, but Canada has infamously high mobile fees. I know people in the EU who pay about $10 a month for unlimited mobile data.
And yes. They will sell one to an unaccompanied minor. Sure, maybe not a 6 year old, but if a 14 year old comes in with the money, that's a sale. There's no law against it (at least here). And unlike with a 14 year old trying to buy a giant butcher knife or spraypaint or whatever, society doesn't seem to have a "uhh, wait a minute" catch on this particular one. It's just a phone. Every kid has a phone, right? They probably just broke their last one. Again.
It's the plan I was thinking the store wouldn't sell, don't those have to be in someone's name? (But I might be wrong, I've never used a prepaid SIM.)
> I know people in the EU who pay about $10 a month for unlimited mobile data.
Perhaps, but not on a prepaid plan. I'm sure you can't buy a post-paid plan as a minor, that wouldn't make any sense!
Prepaid tends to be cheaper in Ireland. Because postpaid is theoretically subsidising your phone and even sim only plans tend to get price shopped around against phone included plans. The cheapest postpaid plan with unlimited data is €30/month without a phone or €55/month with a phone [3][4]
1: https://www.three.ie/buy/prepay.html#prepay-phone-plans
2: https://www.eir.ie/mobile/prepay/
> the whole thing wasn't really worth it
I have the impression that they would be trilled, and develop cravings for those data packet escapes. And the cravings would be much worse because of the artificial scarcity
Parents are relying too much on screens as a form of parenting/entertainment without teaching these critical skills.
Start with limits and let them earn the right to have more access. When you kid starts riding a bike you don't let them ride everywhere, you let them stay on the block, and if they understand safety and are being safe, you slowly expand the range they can go.
Contra: whether they're online or not, conversations about them will take place. And if they're not online then how can they defend themselves, either as an individual or by herding their friends in their defence as well.
Is that a thing? I have plenty of friends that use Instagram but they don't look at each other's stuff or talk about what someone they know in real life posted. If they care about people they know seeing it they put it on Facebook or in the group chat.
Being prevented from using a social media platform at that age, that one's peers are all on would definitely lead to possible social issues in some groups.
I'm assuming the commenter I was responding to is not a teenager (given mention of Facebook being their peer group's primary social media platform), so their experience of their peers being able to use social media in a more healthy manner is unlikely to map to the teenage experience.
Some assumptions on my part. Not the most constructive "best possible interpretation" response, I'll admit. I'm also not expressing a strong opinion that kids should be "allowed" or "blocked" from usage of social media. It's a very tricky issue but absolutely not one to be dismissive of.
Instagram is not an essential part of any of this. If the worst thing your kid can say about you when they hit adulthood is "daddy didn't let me on Instagram," then you did a phenomenal job.
I'll wait here with bated breath for proof of your intellectual and emotional superiority.
If you want children to have valid and engaging social experiences then encourage them to do so without a screen.
Kyle: [enters] Mom, Dad, can I have money to buy Chinpokomon?
Sheila: What's a Chinpokomon?
Kyle: I'm not sure.
Sheila: Well, why do you need one?
Kyle: I don't know.
Sheila: ...Well then, the answer is no, Kyle. You just got money to buy your Cyborg Bill doll.
Kyle: Yeah, but Cyborg Bill is totally gay now. Please Mom? Everybody else has Chinpokomon.
Gerald: Well, Kyle, that's not a reason to buy something.
Ike: Neah Kyle doh.
Gerald: You see, son, fads come and go. And this "Chin-po-ko-mon" is obviously nothing more than a fad. You don't have to be a part of it. In fact, you can make an even stronger statement by saying to your peers, "I'm not going to be a part of this fad, because I'm an individual." Do you understand?
Kyle: Yes. Yes, I do, Dad. Now let me tell you how it works in the real world. In the real world, I can either get a Chinpokomon, or I can be the only kid without one, which singles me out, and causes the other kids to make fun of me and kick my ass.
Gerald: Hm... Good point; here's $10. [hands it to him]
Kyle: Thanks.
Gerald: Wait, here's 20. Get one for your brother, too. [Kyle receives the other $10 and walks out]
Ike: Hey, Chih-paw-ko.
(Because I never really played with a real tamagotchi I had to figure out for myself what a tamagotchi should do. So mine was a pig. And I had this "game design" problem that every time you feed it it got just a bit heavier. And of course unbounded weight gain is not good, so I added a menu point to slaughter the pig. I even went to the library to research how many kgs of sausage and bacon it should generate per 100kg of raw pig. Turns out real tamagotchis don't work this way.)
And more the next year https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbTgDfB0cao
authoritarian governing erodes the trust you need to effect durable change in your citizens' behavior.
Very unlikely that Instagram has a net psychological benefit, but being in school seems to have had a more direct effect.
If cellular, I’d roll with family iPhones and app restrictions on the kids’ phones, plus a lot of careful messaging.
Social media is damaging, but not having social media is also damaging since you may as well be the kid coming to school in a potato sack
You must realize that every generation of youth from here on will face some unique challenges of their own, and the only way to overcome them is to help them tackle it head on and not let them become defeated by it. Attempting to time travel back to some simpler time is not an option. The simpler time is gone, and will never return. This is their life now.
Meth is extremely unpopular in the 13-18 demographic, and in particular it’s far less popular than social media.
How does that work?
I can't imagine how impossible it would be to shield them from all these toxic technologies like smartphones and social media while still being in the continental USA. Even if you managed it, they'd be in constant exposure on the periphery, and incessantly reminded of their otherness vs. the masses. It just doesn't seem healthy to me.
If I had kids today, I'd buy an undeveloped island somewhere like coastal Panama and raise an army of them off-grid while homesteading on it.
But I've opted to just go childless instead. Humans are like a wildfire raging across the planet, it doesn't need me to throw more fuel on it...
You may not be far from the truth: last year I watched a talk given by Jonathan Haidt (sp?) and he specifically showed the suicide numbers increasing when the "Like" button appeared... the increase was not an anomaly, it was obvious.
I can't find the video unfortunately :(
He talked about it here on the Joe Rogan Podcast
We can also treat this like smoking and opioids and lawsuit/tax excessively instagram and use it to pay for public mental health services.
It seems like there will be a clear evidence trail that Instagram knowingly marketed and permitted use of their app by children under 13. So that’s some future administration/state AG payday, I think.
When IG first arrived it was basically Flickr for mobiles. It didn't have a horrible algorithm or any real novelty other than being a slick mobile interface for sharing the same stuff that was being shared on the web.
Also, as a working adult, I didn't get my first iPhone until my boss handed it to me in 2010. I doubt a critical mass of 10-14 year old girls were bullying each other on IG from 2010.