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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Of course. As students (born in the internet+smartphone era) they were primed all their life to feel freer in asocial cocooning

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> As students (born in the internet+smartphone era) they were primed all their life to feel freer in asocial cocooning

Don't know what kind of students you're thinking about - I can't imagine anyone more intensely social than a group of freshers?

That's maybe because you don't have experience with past groups of freshers to compare modern ones to...

Been involved with universities since 2003.

And yet you've managed not to see any change any outgoingness, loneliness, time spent on screen, etc., in students and teenagers, despite those being registered in all kinds of studies and polls? Heck, even the sex has been going down...

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/teens-spend-hours-screens-entertai...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/mar/02/nearly-four-...

[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/05/01/6065885...

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2021/campus-life-why-are-student...

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jul/20/lonelin...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jun/13/young-a...

[5] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

Now, even though 2003 is already after the start cutoff date (a first major development being the web's post-1994 huge adoption), the contrast between it and say 2013 (in between which dates smartphones and social media were widely available) would already releal huge changes in those aspects.

Except if the changes became invisible even to someone in contact with students in a kind of "boiling the frog" incremental familiarity (where it had been slowly but steadily increasing each year, but the infra-year difference didn't seem important).

I don't agree with the implication that using Internet and smartphones make people asocial. If anything, I bet those techs helped people feel less isolated than they'd have felt without them.

>those techs helped people feel less isolated

You said it. Including before covid.

I'm less inclined to draw broad generational generalizations but it's probably fair to say that a lot of things would have played out differently in a pre-mainstream Internet era.

This seems like one of those occasions where there'd be an "of course" for either result. Sort of an "absence makes the heart grow fonder"/"out of sight, out of mind" situation.

Except that one of the data points was that kids who were in full-time school were happier, so it's probably got to do with home life. Full-time school + more parents/siblings at home.

Leave it to an old person to yell about technology ruining people while denying the simple science that some people might feel differently about socialization than others.

And leave it to a young person to welcome any change as progress, and see technology not as a tool, but as a good in itself.

>while denying the simple science that some people might feel differently about socialization than others.

Yeah, It certainly is just "differently", can't be worse. That's why depression is sky high among the youngs, loneliness and isolation is reported as having rocketed, and so on (and that's already pre covid).

Well, since it works out so well for them...

I'm a young fellow and I would generally agree with you. I'm sick of the rejection of people's opinions because they're "old" (aka more experienced). Beginning to take the advice and views of my elders seriously is what I think has helped make me so much more happy in my day to day life. I feel like I've been able to skip over many of the troubles my peers face.

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