Tag: Social Media

When I was teaching psychology in Bangkok, Thailand over 10 years ago, I attended a classical concert there.  Before the show I purchased some food at a café inside the concert hall.  To my surprise I observed several couples more engrossed with their cell phones paying little attention to whomever may have been their partner.  The smart phone. along with its extensive overuse, had spread to Asia.

The smart phone and social media are the consequences of the progress in technology.  Most products of technology have benefited us all.  Everyday life would not be the same if we were without electricity or automobiles at our disposal, once the case over a few centuries ago.  But unbridled use of technological innovations, such as the smart phone and social media, can lead to deleterious outcomes.  Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, has conducted several studies that have shown the ill effects of social media on Generation Z (Gen Z), the age cohort born between 1997 and 2012.  Social media, such as TikTok and Instagram, emerged around 2010 when those born during that time frame became adolescents.

Haidt’s investigations have shown an increase in anxiety, depression and social withdrawn, first in 2010, with this trend continuing in subsequent years.  Some critics of his research have complained that he is merely showing a correlation between the increase in mental health issues and the onset of social media.  However, his studies have revealed that other age cohorts have not manifested this sudden increase in psychiatric symptoms.  Moreover, the data Haidt displays in his book illustrate a sudden precipitous rise of these symptoms in the year 2010 and afterwards.  He has done multiple studies of different groups and different locations with similar results that suggest the widespread nature of the negative impact of social media on teenagers.

Haidt’s work has demonstrated how female adolescents, especially, can suffer from social media when they compare their looks to other females their age that have posted photos on these platforms.  There is a self-imposed competition these adolescent females engage in based on physical appearance.  Often these teenagers do not realize that their peers “doctor” their photos to falsely improve their appearance.  Young females are more conscious of the way they appear vis-á-vis their peers than male teenagers are. This leaves them more susceptible to this type of disinformation often found on algorithmic social media.

Attempts to mitigate the ill effects of social media are now being considered in the United States and other countries.  Australia already has enacted a law disallowing youth under the age of 16 from creating or keeping an account with social media.  This is probably not a coincidence in that this is the same age suggested by Haidt to prohibit the use of social media by youth.  America, unlike Australia, has not enacted national laws forbidding the use of social media by adolescents until they reach a certain age in part due to the 1^st Amendment.  This Amendment prohibits government from censorship; also limiting the federal government’s reach on this matter is the   propensity to allow individual states to make these decisions on their own.  Accordingly, with the help of parental backing, different states have begun to adopt measures limiting social media use to adolescents in educational settings.  Thirty-five states have implemented smart phone bans in schools with some of these schools not allowing students to have access to their smart phones the entire school day. 

The rate of change caused by technology has never been as fast as it is currently.  The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will only accelerate the rate of change societies will face throughout the world.  This is why it is imperative that the leaders of these countries begin to address the consequences of AI before it becomes a technology gone amok.  We waited too long to rein in social media.   Hopefully, we will not make the same mistake with AI, a technology that can offer a vast amount of improvement in our daily lives but also has the potential to be ruinous. 

Upon attending a concert given by Olivia Rodrigo, I recalled an episode on the Twilight Zone, They All Look Like #12, that I had seen back in 1964. In his introduction, Rod Serling says let’s imagine the year is 2000.  We are now 22 years past that year projected by Mr. Serling but, I regret to say, ever closer to what was portrayed in the Twilight Zone in that episode.

The episode tells of how a young girl, Marilyn, aged 18, is being told by her mother that it is time for her to go through the transformation process in which she can look exactly like a model exemplified by the number 12 figure.  She is urged by her mother, Laura, and her friend, Valerie, to go through this transformation as they tell her: “What girl would not want to be beautiful.”  But Marilyn remembering the strong feeling she had for her father, who we later discover has committed suicide to avoid the decree of transformation, replies: “Being like everybody is the same as being nobody.” Toward the end of the episode, Marilyn says her father cared about her as a person and not what she looked like.  We see her futile attempt to escape with her being apprehended, placed on a bed, and the doctor telling her mother the procedure is done.  She gets up and sees that she looks beautiful but a clone of her friend Valerie, #12, at which point the viewer hears Rod Serling’s voice in the background: “Portrait of a young lady in love with herself….In an age of plastic surgery and body building and an infinity of cosmetics those and other strange blessings may be waiting in the future which after all is the twilight zone.”

There is little doubt in my mind that Olivia Rodrigo’s album, Sour, shows a unique brilliance with great potential for such a young woman.  However, as I pointed out in my earlier blog, her songs are all laced with a sadness (as reflected in the album title, Sour) where social relationships with young males have gone awry.  I believe much of the troubled feelings expressed by Rodrigo is reinforced by social media.  Thus, from the period between 2019-2021 suicidal attempts by female adolescents increased by 50% resulting in a much higher rate of hospitalizations for them than adolescent boys.  The pandemic may have contributed to this alarming statistic by causing the need to isolate that allowed a greater amount of time to be spent alone on social media.  Use of such platforms such as Instagram where teens, not only take photographs of themselves, but can dress up their features through a filtering process has only escalated this issue.  The intense rivalry for who has the most beautiful picture, through real or fake means, can be deleterious to young females who are often severely impacted by such comparisons at the tender age of teens.

Beauty, as an ideal that Serling spoke about in the Twilight Zone, necessitated a surgical procedure but in 2022 adolescent females have found a way to create their own beauty through social media.  Unfortunately, the arm of social media is almost infinite in length allowing friends and strangers to see posts and make either favorable or unfavorable comments, in real time, on these posts.  Jonathan Haidt, professor in psychology at New York University, has argued that 13-year-old adolescents are too young to have access to such social media and has suggested raising the minimum age to 16.  But even if the minimum age to allow teens access is 16, there still needs to be a way of enforcing this rule.  Such a procedure does not currently exist.

The need to fit in with its concomitant peer pressure always has been of supreme importance during adolescence.   This need has been intensified with the constant monitoring and comparing fostered by social media.  When the standard becomes how beautiful one appears to countless others, those that don’t meet it can suffer immeasurable harm.  This, I would maintain, is what has caused a precipitous increase in the incidence of suicidal attempts of female teens.