Notice how they had decided beforehand what they were going to find out, and are making an excuse here for not finding part of it.
I’ve always felt that we wouldn’t recover from the negative impacts of phone addiction very quickly, if ever, after several years of addiction to doom scrolling, social media feeds, and the short bursts of 10-second videos.
I wish more real research in this field was being done, so that we could have some solid evidence — and proper warnings against — the negative impacts of phone addiction.
Until then, kids — and their parents — are left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social ostracism.
This line of thinking perpetuates the problem. More people getting addicted does not mean addiction is a prerequisite to live a full life. It's never been more important to aggressively curtail phone use – and make unpopular decisions that your kids will thank you for later – than it is now.
And, certainly not all kids would. It very much depends on the kid / the impact said ostracism would have.
It took public shaming to start to reduce addiction to cigarettes, after we were able to show how bad they were for you.
And when living in an appropriate place to raise children (playgrounds, etc near housing) it's super easy to meet other parents. And, in my experience at least, a rather large percent are also against 'digitizing' their kids.
Making friends the old fashioned way, and not just for your children.
Ah, so this yet another aspect of health that one needs a certain amount of money to enjoy.
I have a child around this age and can absolutely see the issue, but I think it's less about phones per se and more about messaging apps and/or social media. For us, banning the phone itself wouldn't have these effects because we impose suitable restrictions on use as well as having put effort into educating our kids on healthy behaviours.
There are a small number of kids in the year group with "nokias" (non-smart phones) and they aren't looked down on or deliberately excluded by others, but they might feel they are missing out on something. As the kids get older and more independent their needs for communication tools will surely grow, but not so much social media.
It's crazy there's people here defending these companies.
In other words - I'll ensure my chlidren have a small group of kids to regularly play with, ideally in the same neighborhood. Who cares what the other kids are doing?
The social aspect has to be addressed or the addiction is harder to quit.
So I agree with you, but the social isolation is an important factor in keeping people off the phone. Also, I am finding that younger folk do not know how to interact with people IRL. I am faced with fear, uncertainty, shyness, anxiety...and all of these issues were created by the phone use as well.
It is a very complex issue to solve.
Not sure.
I worked with a science team that had found very strong cognitive improvements in the short term (~2 weeks) after improving sleep quality. Though, study participants were mostly middle aged and elderly.
I would agree, though, that improving sleep quality would definitely improve cognitive function.
But removing phones would only help if it’s degrading sleep. If phone addiction has no impact on sleep (e.g. the parents still enforce regular bedtimes), then I would not expect that much, if any, cognitive improvement. Not quickly, anyway.
Either way, these two need to be studied independently to know for sure.
They found that the kids' bed times were far earlier without phones, but was that a short term effect? Was it an effect of being observed and measured? If the parents valued their kids' sleep, why was the average bed time of 12 year old kids after 11pm pre-ban? You could blame that lack of sleep on phones if it made you feel better I suppose, but it's clearly not the whole story.
Is it harder to think clearly because you've just been watching shorts/reels for an hour? Absolutely not. It's an addictive waste of time, sure. But trying to claim some kind of cognitive impairment is just this generation's "X rots your brains" (where X has been TV and then video games).
1) a large enough group of actual close friends to use some social media app, so that by deleting that app you are removing a large part of your social life
2) those apps to continuously add infinite scroll, ad driven, engagement trap shit into every single aspect of the entire app.
Imagine if your work messages came through tiktok and by pressing back you were instantly dropped into an infinite scroll feed curated to your interests. Or say, slack gets bought and becomes an ad driven company who's only metric is increased time in app. But! Then your work refuses to change apps! So as you watch the app slowly become an attention pit, you are completely prevented from escaping it.
I don't think a lot of you old fogies really understand what the apps are like these days, or what teenage social life is like without the apps.
The fact that you're claiming that it's not harder to read an uninteresting paragraph after watching an infinite feed tells me you, luckily, have the privilege of not being tethered to these apps. You have the privilege to exist in a world where your social life isn't governed by ad revenue.
Because i grew up at the very start of all this, and some of my friends still use some of the apps, and everything that's "common knowledge" about phones and attention spans is true. The phone itself is fine, but i do think that the infinite scroll is just about the most dangerous device on the planet, barring the obvious ones.
This just reads like a thread about preventing teenagers from starting smoking, being filled with older people saying "why would you do that? Quitting smoking isn't hard, i smoked a pack once and was fine. And besides, smoking a cigarette or two doesn't hurt anyone, I'm fine".
In fact it's mostly the other way around. I watch them when I'm too exhausted to do something productive (which is often unfortunately).
We need to burn more of them to raise awareness of just how pernicious the written word is.
This mirrors the critique to phones: used primarily to passively watch “paintings” instead of interacting. The viewer’s knowledge and critical thinking is improving only seemingly at best.
I wonder if there is some sort of solipsistic voice within us that recognizes when too much exposure or connectivity to other people becomes overwhelming in a way that we lose ourselves in it. I grew up and remember the times before everyone had easy access to the Internet in their homes, let alone on a high-powered terminal that now fits in our pockets. Those of us of a certain age remember a shift in social interaction that rivaled the previous generations telling mine we consumed too much tv (the 24/7 news cycle was a terrible idea for my generation, in retrospect).
On the one hand, kids don't need their smartphones in schools because mine did just fine without them. On the other hand, the smartphones can be used for a force of good, provided those "paintings" they are looking at are enriching their learning and growth in some way, setting them up to ask better questions when engaged in the Socratic dialogue.
But how do we guide usage toward that aim? That is the real question we should be asking.
We all know that attention span is _required_ to get anything done academically, so directly correlated to intelligence, or at least the ability to get anything done at all. We all know that children are building their brains, and that significant experiences in childhood impact the view and life of the person far into adulthood. Ergo, do you really thing that being unable to read a single paragraph about Socrates for the future of... the world?
I simply cannot understand the pushback to such a simple and effective policy. Sure, the researchers probably have a bias. All schools aren't being made to do this, many schools implementing this are _choosing_ to, because _they_ interact with our children academically and know that the grade school generation is gonna eat rocks on any college level task because they can't stop looking at their phones, something which is easy to observe many children are _physically incapable of doing_.
Sure, maybe it's a really good time for impossibly motivated and unsocial children, i was one of them, and i can tell you that even having not grown up with it, i (almost 30) am having a hell of a time balancing needing to have snapchat to stay in contact with friends i moved away from, and getting trapped in the continuous feed the app seems to insert into more and more places. About using reddit as a scholarly resource for any question google won't help with and getting trapped in their endless feed. I know it's bad, and I'm a fully grown adult member of society, and i didn't grow up with it. And i'll tell you, i'd trade this phone shit for a book addiction in a microsecond.
What you're advocating for is a future where average attention span continuously decreases. Why do you want that? Why are you against the idea that phone might be fucking bad for us, and especially so for children? What experiences have you had with phone addiction in yourself and loved ones that gives you credibility in this topic? Genuinely asking
Big deal they are staying up late. Let them sleep in on the weekend to make up the difference.
Other examples: cars vs horses, household appliances will make people lazy vs household robots will make peopl lazy, or SNL has really gone downhill (people have been saying that for decades, and it is indeed subjective but the generation who says it now thought it was peak in their youth, when the old people of their time were saying it sucked).
There may be some merit of truth and some valid criticisms in all of it. As other commenters have pointed out, books were a one-sided conversation, so Socrates was right in that sense, but sometimes it's necessary to have this one-sided conversation in order to have a fruitful multi-party conversation. And I think it's important for that to be understood -- some things are good for some things in some roles.
It's becoming very difficult to function in modern society without a smartphone. Smartphones have given us luxuries we couldn't even fathom in the 90s. Today I sent a spontaneous birthday gift to a friend in another state using Doordash. Twenty years ago that may not have even been possible.
I think it's important to understand the role of smartphones in our society and lives. It shouldn't replace real-life social interaction. It shouldn't be where we spend half our days looking at. We shouldn't believe the news that comes from our social feeds at face value (that transcends smartphones but you get my drift). But using it as a tool to get stuff done, that's invaluable.
>Until then, kids — and their parents — are left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social ostracism.
Even this just presumes it's all negative. Why?
Sleep deprivation is really, really bad for you. Here [0] is one example that tries to measure reaction times compared to drinking (in the context of driving). Being tired is pretty much being drunk. Here [1] is another on cognitive activity.
It’s not surprising to me in the slightest (anecdotally, I suffer from bouts of insomnia and my behaviour, mood and cognitive performance in work is definitely lower during those times. Even a single nights sleep shows a huge change in my mood INE) that if reducing smartphone usage they get more sleep that they pretty much immediately saw improvements.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32571274/ [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23029352/
The first serious cognitive effect I've encountered is struggling to find a word I'm searching for (or recalling a person's name) in conversation. On the third day, I also start having significant vision impairment, reminiscent of hallucinogenic effects, where objects seem to be swaying slightly when I focus on them.
It also quite apparent to me that it is much harder to retain information learned after being up for a day or two.
you can suggest further experimentation to prove another point, but this is different from assuming a priori that effect WILL happen. The issue is not in the idea itself, but how it is phrased.
Hypothesis -> proposed experiment -> results -> questions evoked by results -> new hypothesis -> new proposed experiment
MOST importantly, they didn’t fake any results and went where the data took them. This is the kind of science that has been falling out of fashion for the last few decades in favor of researchers who work based on other principles.
Researchers suggest that these results might mean that changes in cognitive ability could take longer than the study period of 21 days to materialize, or access to devices has a positive effect on attention offsetting the effects of sleep on attention.
It's probably unlikely but it is an obvious possibility.
The idea of open science is that other teams would be free to explore plausible alternative hypotheses. Some team might explore yours. Another might dig into my idea about the behavior’s relationship to genetics. And so on.
This is the method by which we move ourselves forward. And it’s easy to see how that effort is hampered by the practice of data tampering and other shenanigans. Which this team did not engage in, even when part of there hypothesis wasn’t supported by their data.
This team deserves a “Bravo!”
For instance. It maybe that the distracting quality of the phone is not the only thing providing better sleep and mood, but maybe it is the collective power of the EMF radiation that is disturbing the children's catecholamines.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13826...
There is likely a way to test this hypothesis on human children in an ethical fashion.
Also:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1155/2014/198609
"They examined the acute as well as chronic effects of EMF exposure and found a significant increase in adrenaline and noradrenaline levels after EMF exposure, following a drop, but the normal levels were not restored even at the end of the study (about one and a half year). They also observed significant diminution in dopamine levels."
Although I agree in this case, the alternative hypothesis seems a bit lame, rather than adopting the null hypothesis. On the other hand I guess that more sleep could have some effect on cognitive development in the long run.
Previous studies have set a prior of x% confidence, you see evidence to the contrary, you update to some x-y%.
Given the volume of research on sleep, it probably takes more evidence, even if it's your own study to throw that out.
Regardless, that statement is a good thing. It acknowledges a social bias towards the effect of smartphones. It doesn't give room for people to imply a result based upon that bias. On the surface, at least, it doesn't indicate that data was fudged to reach a particular result.
The time is also the part of the conjecture.
you dont believe the results you get, so you keep designing an collecting data from more experiments until you cant deny it anymore
None of this is remotely contemptible.
Pretend you're an immortal alien conducting a study with the hypothesis, "humans are mortal". You observe that your subjects do not die after 21 days. Do you conclude that humans are immortal? (I hope not. It's much better to conclude that humans don't usually die after 21 days in this particular instance of extraterrestrial captivity.)
It's a fair point about the aliens. They are presumably mortal themselves, they have expectations about lifespan. Something about the mind not being a blank slate, it's hypotheses all the way down, can't escape preconceived ideas. Sure. Except you can try. You can be more impartial than you otherwise might be, when you're aware that there's something to be partial about.
In the case of smartphone bans, the viewpoint is almost politicized, like whether you're down with the tech bros or think they're evil. Researchers should know that, and thus should be very coldly objective. Here they expect the degradation of mental function, why? That's not something well-understood like mortality. It's probably something there's a great wobbly mass of very questionable psychological research about - low attention in school and degraded working memory due to what they may well call "screentime" - and they've just gone along with it like it's established. Why is known evil thing not acting sufficiently evil to meet our narrative? Must do more research until true.
Another sketchy part of doing this research is the subtext that smartphones lower the mood entails therefore ban smartphones in schools. That isn't a science-based decision, it's a decision to trample on the kids' rights for their own good: science can't guide moral choices. But the only reason to scientifically establish the first part, the fact, is for the purpose of advocating a ban.
It would be asinine to study the effects of parachutes on survivability of jumping from airplanes, hypothesizing that they would help, but conclude that the "conjecture must be wrong" because the sample size was 2 and it failed to reach statistical significance, or because the airplane was on the ground.
Would you feel differently if the study period was only 1 day instead of 25?
Or maybe 1 hour?
Would it then be reasonable for them to speculate that the methodology might contribute to the failure to reject the null hypothesis?
>it's a determined effort to find specific results
does not make it so.
saying “we thought this would happen, it didn’t, but maybe there’s just something to do with our study that meant we disnt see the result that confirms our hypothesis” is a perfectly valid conclusion.
As a parent it's wonderful to know that the kids have this 5-7 hour break from the screens. Just wonderful.
The researchers are not claiming that cognitive ability changes would definitely take longer than 21 days to appear, they’re suggesting that that is the next thing to test.
You are alleging this without evidence, and have no credibility to base your claims on.
You can't commit to long term memory what you can't keep in working memory long enough. You can't think about complex things if you don't have the working memory capacity.
If you always have 3% more working memory you might accumulate more knowledge after a while.
Like alcohol doesn't delete your brain, but you have serious memory deficits if you drink every day for years on end.
Or you might accumulate way less knowledge because you don't have a phone to get information from and are getting say 300% less information overall despite retaining 3% more of what you get.
Sleep is the real superpower.
You left out the other benefits the study found. those benefits seem to be quite significant. In fact, I will go as far as to say that sleep has been well associated with student performance.
You remark comes off as disingenuous and not ready for serious review.