| 来源类型 | Article
|
| 规范类型 | 评论
|
| A complement, not a substitute |
| Arthur C. Brooks
|
| 发表日期 | 2019-06-14
|
| 出版年 | 2019
|
| 语种 | 英语
|
| 摘要 | "Addiction is actually the point. That's what social media shareholders are investing in."
The accusation came last month from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) in a speech at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. While some politicians have argued for years that tech giants such as Facebook are dangerous for the economy, Hawley's argument is that they are dangerous for us as people, creating "a society increasingly defined not by the genuine and personal love of family and church, but by the cold and judgmental world of social media," he said in his May 15 maiden speech in the Senate.
Are Hawley's concerns about the downstream social effects of these platforms warranted? Research is in its infancy, and the early results are mixed. However, I see a consensus starting to emerge. The findings from a recent article in the journal Psychiatric Quarterly by psychologists Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell are typical, showing an enormous negative association in adolescents between heavy social media (and other digital media use) and life satisfaction. In their words, "Heavy users ... of digital media were 48% to 171% more likely [than light users] to be unhappy, to be in low in well-being, or to have suicide risk factors such as depression, suicidal ideation, or past suicide attempts."
Of course, correlation isn't causation, and it's theoretically possible that depressed teens are simply more likely than their peers to engage in heavy social-media use. The best way to sort this out is to use experimental methods - as with drug tests - where social media is randomly assigned to people and the effects compared with those of a control group.
A few studies have done this. For instance, last year, University of Pennsylvania researchers reported in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology on their study of undergraduate students randomly assigned to one group with dramatically limited use of social media - 10 minutes per day on each of three platforms, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat - while a control group was given unlimited social-media use. The result: Compared with the control group, "the limited use group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over three weeks."
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The research to date has generally focused on young people, for the same reason that we are most concerned about the marketing of any addictive product to children: We don't consider them responsible for their habits and thus must protect them from exploitation. But many adults confess that they worry about the effects of excessive social-media use on themselves. In my professional world, I have seen heavy Twitter use lay to waste the reputations of respected journalists and utterly consume the productive time of great scholars. |
| 主题 | Society and Culture
; Technology and Innovation
|
| 标签 | Social media
; technology
|
| URL | https://www.aei.org/articles/complement-not-substitute/
|
| 来源智库 | American Enterprise Institute (United States)
|
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物
|
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/265991
|
推荐引用方式
GB/T 7714 |
Arthur C. Brooks. A complement, not a substitute. 2019.
|
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