I'd even count remote classrooms/work. In 2020, people didn't need phones to be always-online, they were at home anyway.
The big difference was: At least the youth was at home together with others doing so. You went over to your neighbor to watch some TV show for example.
What changed quite lately are indeed the always online smartphones. You don't need to go to your neighbor, even if you want to "do something together" (of course online, like everything nowadays).
Also people don't even call each other. The default is chat, or very often voice messages. But no real talking.
So no, media and electronics aren't the main driver here. It's the always online devices everybody uses everywhere the whole time. Human minds likely aren't constructed to be always connected (or one could argue, actually disconnected) in such a way.
It's not primary the quantity, it's the quality of media consumption that significantly changed. Also the media is the first time completely interactive and personalized. Compare to for example TV (which was back than "the devil who destroys the morale of our youth" according to some elder people). You didn't get targeted personalized ads the whole day on your TV…
The psychological manipulation that the pre-smartphone media could possibly exercise on individuals was much more constrained compared to what's possible (and actually gets executed) today. Smartphone apps are a great example as they're now mostly constructed to induced addiction (the companies selling ads call it "engagement").
TV shows were linear, so unless you had an interest in every single show being aired, your viewing was naturally limited to specific times.
Video games didn’t use to have online capabilities, nor did they provide endless matchmaking with completely strangers across the world, so if you wanted to play with other people, you had to do it in person. And games didn’t have endless streams of new content being released.
What changed is that everything became built around endless streams of content. Smartphones are a key enabler of that, but even legacy media like TV and video games have evolved to become bottomless content pits. Social media feeds never end, video games always have another match, there are always more shows and movies to binge on demand.
Also, I'm not going to dismiss the "devil who destroys the morale of our youth" accusation cause I'm way too young to remember a time before TV. For all I know, maybe social life was better before it. I used to miss out on visiting my cousins because they were "busy" silently watching a football game for hours every weekend.
who and what is Mark so afraid of that he needs a platoon of special forces soldiers guarding him?
If those pocket PCs had useful and creative apps only and maybe some non-addiction-optimized games they’d be fine. The problem is the apps, not the hardware.
With kids the absolute worst seem to be YouTube, TikTok, and Roblox. All three are banned in our house. The kids have their own devices (with monitoring) and can play games and explore other stuff but we do everything we can to keep addiction systems away. It works fine. Our kids engage with real people when they are available and tend only to go to the screens when bored.
We don’t have a hard time limit but if we notice too much screen time we set up play dates or book activities. They’ll go for those things over screens… or at least they do now that the worst stuff is gone.
Banning YouTube was the single highest impact one. The whole mood of the family and home noticeably changed. We got our kids back. They liked their friends again. To this day my #1 piece of parenting advice is to ban YouTube. A few others too but that one seems the worst for some reason.
Engagement maximizing algorithms and UI dark patterns work incredibly well to the point that they can behave like a drug.
Unfortunately, it has 1000x more utter filthy trash.
Seriously, I dare you: open the default YouTube homepage on incognito. It's terrifying. The dystopia is already here.
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My advice for parents: curate a few channels or playlists yourself, manually, but UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES give them unsupervised unfiltered access to YouTube. So-called "YouTube Kids" included. Those turbo-consumerist hellscape videos make my stomach churn.
Not particularly doing this happily WRT the content creators but I just can't get myself to trust platforms such as Youtube to not have unsuspected ways around.
Edit:sure I could also add a couple of education channels but my kids would sooner go out and play.
Feels to me like attacking the problem from the wrong angle.
We’ve had success so far but I am concerned with what happens as they get older and get social pressure to join social media.
I guess we have to parent. Paraphrasing something I saw elsewhere:
“Raise your girls or meangirl anorexia influencers will; raise your boys or Andrew Tate will.”
It’s always been important to keep your kids away from bad influences. It’s just that now they can get life guidance from sociopaths, creeps, unhinged ideologues, and self destructive losers in their pockets.
Nobody in our house has used or is interested in TikTok so I have not had to deal with that.
My kids know I hate Robox but they are allowed to play. (I'm a game developer). The kids are are not allowed to spend pocket money on Robucks, but they do get gift cards from friends and family on special occasions and because the Robucks are so rare they have become very precious. The kids agonize over every purchase. They carefully evaluate the value of things. They look for the scams, they avoid gambling and loot boxes, and instead look for things with more value.
We have also had the opportunity to discuss that when the servers go down, all this virtual stuff they seem to own will disappear. That they don't really own it.
As much as I like to hate Roblox, it has been good for my kids. There is a wide variety of free content and you can try before you buy. Its multiplayer by default so it's social in the good way, you are actually talking, thinking and playing with your friends. And both my kids use the editor creating new content and leaning programming.
Anything that serves up dumb or toxic content that is extremely “engaging” gets banned. YouTube was the worst by far but TikTok and Roblox also meet this criteria.
I forgot to mention Instagram. Kids haven’t seen it but it’s been preemptively banned because it’s full of toxic influencers and other trash. Could say the same about Facebook but kids have zero interest in that so no need to bother. Facebook is where older people go to get their brains sucked out by conspiritainment and political echo chamber groups.
I lack the domain knowledge to evaluate the evidence against the null hypothesis, so you may well be correct — you just haven't actually demonstrated it with your anecdote.
As someone who happened to hit that inflection point at the summer after high school I consider my cohort extremely lucky.
Hide in room, grunt when asked questions, moody, "disrespectful to their elders", that kind of thing is all "less social".
Although I can think of one specific context where I would say "shy" for a bit: suddenly developing a new axis of emotional drives (lust) that they have to learn to navigate socially.