Some More News - Some More News: Are Smartphones Bad For Us?

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

Sources:

What's up Mr. Cody, it's Warmbo out in the world doing great. P-Sign emoji, new phone number, meat emoji, heart emoji, meat emoji. Meet emoji. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh uhhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uh I just don't get them. Like, I don't mentally process them. I prefer not to. Sure, fine. I'm just a little concerned, you know, about Warmbo having a smartphone out on his own. Just seems bad for him. I mean, I'm glad he's gone, but. Yeah, it sounds to me like you're just being a worry bus.

Warmbo ran away so he could discover himself sexually. And yeah, that's gross. I don't think it was sexual. I mean, I hope it wasn't sexual. Ugh, let it go, bro. We've both spent most of our lives using phones, and I'd say we're pretty balanced. You worry puss.

Stop being such a worry puss, you worry puss. Ugh, listen, I gotta go. Literally everyone at this funeral is glaring at me. Shh. Why do you care? I didn't even know them. Ugh. Later, Gator.

Our smartphone is bad for us? Oh, one second. Sorry. I just got to... Hey, yeah, I just had to type the letter F a bunch into my notes app. I'm trying to get all the Fs in one place. Anyway, hi. Here's some news. Ron the Baldi-Santis just Anyway, hi, here's some news.

Ron the Baldi-Santis just banned social media for anyone under 14. Real nanny state you got there, Ron. Dude loves big government. Of course, there's been a lot of talk about smartphones and how they're harmful to kids or harmful to us or ruining our brains, which are the kids of our skulls. And to hear the news talk about this,

it's a straight up epidemic. Your chances of having some kind of suicidal behavior, you heard that word right, suicidal behavior is 50%. So I found with teens, for example, that those who spent more time on screens, say social media and texting, were less happy. TikTok is China's digital fentanyl. Well, it's digital fentanyl in the sense that it's highly addictive.

So it's basically digital fentanyl for for your brain. This app is basically digital fentanyl. Digital fentanyl? You mean cops are going to faint at the sight of a smartphone? That's a cool feature. There are currently a million opinion pieces and studies about the harm of smartphones and more broadly, the harm of smartphones, and more broadly, the fact that depression, anxiety, and suicide are on the rise in America,

specifically for teens. There's even a whole book by Jonathan Haidt that came out a few weeks ago titled The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Seems like a big deal, and something we all kind of suspected. After all, that rise in depression coincided

with the rise of these devices. So I think most people assume they are connected in some way. Some studies even seem to indicate that smartphones are literally making kids dumber. Social media is of course the main worry here. Outside of the news, even the surgeon general is concerned about social media.

I'm sorry, that's a 1980s headline about the surgeon general being concerned about video games. Let's get the, no wait, that's a 1970s headline about the surgeon general being concerned about television. Can we get that? There it is. Okay, well, let's call that a bit. That bit was bringing up a good point,

that whenever a new technology arises, there is inevitably a moral panic about the harm it does to kids. This concern is often very overblown, and let's face it, uncool. It's not cool to talk about how kids are always on their phones or whatever. I mean, I'm cool, but it's generally not cool.

This concern is also usually framed as a binary thing. You're probably wondering just from the title, if we're going to give you a hard yes or hard no. And spoilers, we don't have any hard, veiny answers. But since I'm so cool, I figured we'd look at the actual and factual information around smartphones, which is also veiny. There are, as we mentioned,

a lot of studies about their effects, specifically about their harm. Here's a meta-analysis that found that phone usage negatively impacted college students' learning and academic achievement. And a study by the London School of Economics found that test scores increased by as much as 14% after schools in London

implemented a strict no phones policy. Smartphones have been linked repeatedly to lower exam scores, myopia, which is what science nerds call nearsightedness, and even decreased physical activity, which all makes sense. Like obviously if kids have phones on them, they're more likely to use them

instead of playing stick ball or smoking cigarettes or whatever physical activity they would normally do. Jukebox. As for the test scores, that London school study notes that this 14% improvement was only for the lower achieving students, while phones had no positive or negative effect on the higher achieving students.

They conclude that this is likely because the lower achieving students have more issues with concentration, which the phones made worse. For that other Rutgers study, it was an 11-year test of 2,433 students that compared how they got their homework answers to how they performed on tests. They found that, quote, students who benefited from homework reported generating their own answers, and students who reported copying the answers from another source did not benefit from homework. And of course, the most common place they got answers was from the internet via smartphone. But like, no shit, if you just look up the answers to your homework, of course you don't retain that answer. But the way you look that up has nothing to do

with phones specifically, just another source, which could just as easily be a laptop or the odd numbers in the back of the book or even another book. Or I guess not as easily, which is the actual issue, that students should be taught not to rely on their phones and to learn to study correctly. There's no doubt

that smartphones are distracting, especially in class, and make it easier for us to access information. But the studies around these devices seem to hinge on this vibe that smartphones are changing our physiology in some mystical way. Researchers say the mere presence of our phones can cause brain drain, whether they're on or even off. So according to this study, your smartphone can affect your cognitive abilities even when it's shut off, so long as you can see it.

Even the people doing the study were surprised by this. After all, is the phone sending us brain inhibiting microwaves? Are we so distractible that simply seeing a screen makes us forget our... Names. Well, when you read the study, you discover that they are describing an experiment

where students were made to solve math problems. And in doing so, they were given one of three conditions. Either their phones were left in another room or in their bags or on the desk with them. They found that students who had the phones on the desk were more distracted and didn't perform as well. Specifically, their marks were lower by a few points. And yeah, again, no shit.

They were probably bored doing math or thinking about how they really want to use the calculator app for the math problems. And so the claim that phones can affect us, even when shut off, kind of boils down to them being a minor distraction. After all, it's all the world's knowledge right there, which probably makes school feel frustrating

or like a waste of time, especially if schools don't update their curriculum, which it sure seems like they are failing to do. Phones as a distraction are absolutely a real problem. But a lot of headlines and studies seem to imply that they are also making us dumber when there's very little actual evidence of that. Going back to test scores,

people will often match up the rise of smartphones against test scores lowering between 2013 and 2020. But the thing is that those graphs tend to be very zoomed in so that the dip seems bigger. The reality is that we're talking about a very small difference. Quote, on a 500 point scale, 13 year olds scored an average of 280 in math in 2020, down from 285 in 2012. On the reading portion, the scores dropped from 263 to 260. That's coming from the National Center for Education Statistics.

And when you zoom out, you see that on the larger timeline, it's kind of nothing. And the most significant dip really seems to happen from 2020 to 2022, the pandemic. And in fact, scores are far higher than in the 70s, AKA a time when we didn't have smartphones or video games or like fun. I mean, fire was invented by then, I think.

Fire can be fun. Here's a different graph of worldwide test scores from the Program for International Student Assessment, which shows a big drop from 2003 to 2022. The problem there again is that obviously a big part of that drop is from COVID. Luckily, they also have data points from 2018. And so when you look at their other graphs showing the individual countries, and note the data point before the drop from COVID, you see that these scores varied greatly depending on the country. A lot of them go up and down. The UK and America even saw an improvement from the previous data point.

Canada and Germany apparently have some issues to work out, but it's not this consistent drop across the board. And when you go into the individual scores on their webpage, you can more closely see that it varies. In America, our science literacy actually improved from 489 in 2006 to 502 in 2018. For reading, our score was 504 in 2000, and then 505 in 2018. Math went down, however, from 483 in 2003 to 478 in 2018. But see, none of this is particularly dramatic, from 483 in 2003 to 478 in 2018.

But see, none of this is particularly dramatic and in some cases it's an improvement. So when you average it altogether, worldwide scores dipped, but it greatly varied between subjects and countries in a way that doesn't really point to smartphones or technology in general, but rather that Canada is dragging us down and we should dissolve it as a country. The bagged milk was a clear warning sign.

In fact, a more recent meta-analysis of 27 previous studies found that evidence of brain drain, which is what science nerds call reduced cognitive capacity, has been highly overblown. Some researchers have started to push back against the moral panic narrative that phones are objectively bad for young people. Heck, some people are questioning

the internet's effect in general. According to some of the most recent research, the link between social media use and anxiety and depression is small and inconsistent. A lot of the media outrage around phones seems to be totally spurious. Like this 2018 study that blamed smartphones for an enlarged bone spur at the base of millennials skulls. around phones seems to be totally spurious. Like this 2018 study that blames smartphones

for an enlarged bone spur at the base of millennial skulls. Do you get it? Do you get it? Spurious? Bone spur? I think it was awesome. But what wasn't awesome is the study, which was bad. It was conducted by a chiropractor

who sells posture pillows, didn't account for age or gender, used old x-rays taken by the aforementioned pillow salesperson, and most importantly, didn't measure cell phone usage at all. Despite these overwhelming and obvious flaws with the study, this made the freaking national news. It does look sort of like a horn,

but actually this is a bone spur near the base of the skull. Researchers in Australia examined hundreds of X-rays and found that roughly 40% of people 18 to 30 years old who use their phones more than four and a half hours a day developed the growth. Again, that study didn't even measure cell phone usage. It's actually kind of shocking how many smartphone studies

don't actually study the phones themselves. For example, here's an article from the Washington Post about a study that showed, quote, between 2012 and 2018, nearly twice as many teens displayed high elevated levels of school loneliness, an established predictor of depression and mental health issues. The premise here is that even before COVID,

loneliness was a problem. And the conclusion they made is that it must be related to smartphones. But if you crack open the study itself, things get really muddled. For starters, the way they are measuring loneliness is from a mean average between a scale of one to four. Basically, they gave kids a multiple choice test where the

answers were strongly disagree, disagree, strongly agree, and agree, and assigned those to a number. The higher the number meant the higher the loneliness. But they also assigned a pass-fail system where a score of 2.22 or above signified what they called high loneliness. And so when they are saying that twice as many teens displayed high loneliness, they're saying that they passed that 2.22 score. But overall, when you look at their data, the worldwide average score elevated from around 1.85 to two.

And honestly, I have no idea if that's large or not. We're looking at data covering a very short timeline. I don't know why they're using this pass fail system and ultimately it's impossible to determine how severe that rise is. But more importantly, the study shows no actual link to smartphones beyond speculation.

They took a handful of other statistics like the GDP, fertility rates and income inequality, along with cell phone and internet usage, and put them back to back with this loneliness data and concluded that cell phones and the internet were the only thing that coincided. But it only kinda matches up. Look at the graph again.

The worldwide and English speaking averages begin to rise in 2003, not 2012. That's because they also found this rise to be inconsistent in various countries. Some had a very high rise of loneliness while others such as South Korea did not. They speculate that South Korea didn't have as big of a rise because they already had more smartphones in 2012,

but then point out that smartphone use was also very high in Denmark and Sweden, which did get a huge increase in loneliness and even admit that quote, other cultural forces may also be at work, which is to say that they don't really know. They're just guessing based on the stuff they arbitrarily included in their study.

But like, what about other factors? You know what else rose also between 2012 and 2018? School shootings. In fact, by 2018, over half of American teens were worried their school would be targeted. But they don't factor that into this study. What about mental health services? School pressure?

What about social media specifically, as opposed to broad smartphone and internet use? Those DCEU movies started around 2012, huh? Maybe it's those. It can be literally anything you choose to put on that graph so long as that thing grew during that time. And for that exact reason, they ultimately conclude, quote, although such analyses cannot prove causation,

they can test whether cultural indicators can be ruled in or out. Cool. So now we know that it's not fertility rates that are making teens lonely. Thanks. And this is the problem across the board. A lot of the data on this issue seems to show

that the link between these problems and phones is correlation, not causation. And yes, that includes the anxious generation book we mentioned earlier. To quote a review by Candice L. Rogers, an associate dean for research and a professor of psychological science and informatics, H. supplies graphs throughout the book

showing that digital technology use and adolescent mental health problems are rising together. The plots presented throughout the book showing that digital technology use and adolescent mental health problems are rising together. The plots presented throughout this book will be useful in teaching my students the fundamentals of causal inference and how to avoid making up stories by simply looking at trend lines. So at the end of the day, we have dozens of news clips,

countless articles, and a whole book based entirely on people looking at a few graphs and making a completely unscientific connection between them. That's wild. It also ignores a bunch of other studies doubting that there even is a correlation. Here's a Stanford study published in 2022

that found no association between when a kid got their first smartphone and their overall wellbeing. In parts of Europe, a place where smartphones also exist, anxiety and suicide rates seem to not have risen alongside smartphone usage the way they have in America. And so at the end of the day, the only thing we know is that smartphones began to get popular kind of around the same time teen depression did. But also, not really. According to the CDC, teen suicide rates started

to spike around 2007, while smartphones didn't really take off until closer to 2010 or 2012, depending on the data. And even then, it wasn't yet something everyone had. One would assume that whatever is causing the problem didn't create this immediate change and probably existed before that rise, right? It's weird to think that the moment smartphones went on sale

caused kids to start hurting themselves more. And when we did all have phones, those suicide rates were starting to go down after 2018. And then actually it dropped a bit more during the start of COVID. That's right, it went down. The same time schools were closing and we were all stuck inside on our phones

and then went back up after school started opening again. Hmm, hey, when did we start No Child Left Behind again? This is like signed in 2002, so like 2003. That's interesting. Am I saying that's the primary reason? No, but that's kind of the point, that there are a lot of variables we can point to and none of them are very conclusive,

which to me implies that it's probably a mixture of things. Plus these rates are now going down again, at least for teens who are very much in school again. And so this goes back to this all just being about vibes. And the data is not nearly as apocalyptic or even definitive as a lot of headlines indicate, to the point that it's just bad science. So after the break, we're gonna dig into

the larger moral panic around technology and ask if we've ever been right about it. Hold on. Yarp. Hey, Snelly. I was just thinking about your warmbo concerns a little bit more and I realized something. Are you calling me from a war zone?

No, they're just doing that gun salute thing when soldiers die. You're still at the funeral? Nah, this is a different funeral. I'm funeral hopping. Listen, do you remember that film, The Butterfly Effect? Yes. Well, they flat out say that if you change

anything in the past, then no one in the future will notice the change. So, how'd that guy notice when Ashton Kutcher purposefully hurts his hands? What? I know, right? It doesn't make any sense, Cody. They broke the rules, Cody!

Shh! Be quiet! Oh, shh! I gotta go. One of these jerk widows keeps giving me crap. Like I said, I didn't even know him! Okay, well, this is why we have a bail budget. Enjoy the ads, and, you know, hopefully I'll be back. Ad begins. Smile.

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She's at Ruby Tuesday and I wanted to pick me up something. I'm also playing two dots. Okay, hey, hi, sorry, hi, we're back. Before the break, we were talking about how data on the harm of smartphones is flimsy at best, which is weird because you'd expect there to be more of a connection. On the other hand, adults have always been overly concerned whenever a new technology gets in the hands of kids, right?

And so it's really hard to tell what is a genuine problem and what is simply a continuing pattern of moral panics. You know, this stuff. Critics, including the national PTA, say such video games contribute to violence in real life. Yeah, you're so right. Mortal Kombat rocks. So okay, is this just part of a larger pattern of moral panics, or are smartphones different? There is a notable historical pattern of moral panics around technology going all the way

back to the gosh dang printing press. And the panic is almost always about how technology will ruin our brains to the point that even Socrates argued that writing would quote, create forgetfulness in the learner's souls. You may notice that this is the exact concern with smartphones affecting homework. Man, if only he got to play Mortal Kombat,

he would have fucking loved that. Most recently, we were very concerned about television in the 80s and 90s. Depending on the study, children watched around four hours of TV a day and another hour or so with video games. It's hard to find any exact numbers, but here's a US Department of Education paper from 1990

that says eighth graders spent about 21 hours a week on television. So that's like three hours a day. More recently, here's a 2009 Kaiser Family Foundation survey that concludes kids ages 11 to 14 spend nine hours a day on a screen. Mind you, that's not all on a phone and they include listening to music as part of that. So it's more like eight hours, which is still a lot. They actually break it down in the survey.

About four and a half hours spent watching TV with some of that also multitasking. That's up from a little under four hours in 1999. As for phones, this 11 to 14 age group spent around one hour and 40 minutes talking and texting. But this is from 2009. They don't even have the words social or media in here. Twas a simpler time.

We hadn't even occupied Wall Street successfully. Twitch didn't even exist yet, nor had the cruel but fair reign of Ed Sheeran even begun. May his reign end soon. Kids don't actually watch cable TV anymore is my point. Despite that, the CDC still references this study when talking about screen time. And perhaps they shouldn't?

I do declare the CDC to be incorrect here. About this one thing specifically. Here is more recent data from the Common Sense Census that splits the age groups up a little differently. As a disclaimer, Common Sense Census is a group that has pushed legislation regulating violent video games and is not an objective source. But again, it's hard to get any data here.

And they concluded that in 2019, middle school aged kids were spending about four hours and 44 minutes a day on a screen. This went over five hours during the pandemic, but that's still less than the Kaiser Family Survey. Of that time, two hours and 40 minutes was spent watching YouTube or some equivalent of television. Sploog viewer, talkies.net, you know the sites.

Then another hour and a half on games. And for tweens, less than 20 minutes on social media. Of course, for teenagers, it was an hour and a half. So when you break down these numbers, a lot of it is the same as 1999 and even 1990. Kids spent about three to four hours a day watching TV, either on an old CRT television or a smartphone. That hasn't really changed.

An hour, hour and a half gaming, which is a bit more than the nineties because games are, you know, better now, especially the violent ones. And so the extra screen time really comes down to social media, texting, and the internet, which you'd expect would rise since the 90s, as those things didn't exist.

And so the question is how much of that is abnormal and how much is what you would expect? Like is texting or DMing a concern when 90s kids used to spend hours on the phone? What about studying or doing homework on a phone or computer? What about the fact that, since we bring our phones everywhere, oftentimes we're looking at screens while doing other things? Is playing Strawberry Hitler or Rage Sox on my phone all that bad if I'm in a waiting

room? A place that I'd normally just be reading a highlights magazine in. This is all to say that it's very hard to quantify screen time with modern smartphones and interpret that data beyond the general agreement that yes, yes, we stare at a screen a lot. I'd say too much.

And that's probably causing some problems, at the very least for our eyesight and attention spans. And so going back to the larger moral panic and the pattern of us claiming that any new technology is bad, well, I don't want to pretend like that's all hogwash. Gee, we ought to do something, Fred. Okay?

How's about taking a nap? I got a better idea. Let's take a Winston break. That's it! Cigarettes rock. Socrates would have loved them. I did for 10 years, then I quit. Don't smoke, it's bad for you.

So maybe television didn't make us all brain dead, but it did constantly invade our homes with advertisements that, at first, had absolutely no limit to what they could sell or how. In the late 70s, the FTC actually took up a massive initiative to investigate the effects that TV ads had on children. After three years of research, they found that children under a certain age

could not tell the difference between a program and a commercial, and therefore are easily deceived by advertisements. There's actually similar data about the internet in that studies have shown that middle school children have had problems figuring out the difference between a news story and sponsored content. I mean, so do adults. The point here being that just because a technology didn't literally eviscerate our brains doesn't mean it didn't do something bad.

It just means that we got used to the bad things, such as the constant presence of advertisements and violence and all the other shitty things television puts in our homes. Was that a huge problem for kids? I mean, I don't know. I was one of those kids and I feel okay. Everything's terrible. That's just like, that's the world.

Also, I write letters to all the Kellogg's mascots, but those are my real friends. So you gotta write to your friends. But of course, I was also born after we figured out how to regulate at least some of the problems on television. But at least right now, we haven't hit that regulatory stage with smartphones and the internet, and most importantly, social media.

Because while the device itself is probably fine-ish for us, the shit we dump on it absolutely is not. There are, of course, a lot of studies that show an association between increased social media and an increase in mental distress, suicidality, and sleep deprivation, among other bad things. Social media can affect teens' self-esteem and social relations, their academic performance,

and their attention spans. The entire system of likes and upvotes and pokes and hearts and gropes are designed to give us this Pavlovian dopamine response to engagement. Children and teens are especially vulnerable to this kind of thing. As children reach adolescence, their reward systems become more activated,

but their self-control doesn't fully form until age 21, making them a lot more susceptible to social media addiction. In fact, researchers from the University of North Carolina found that teenagers that habitually checked their social media had a heightened sensitivity to social rewards from peers over time. So the more you use social media, the more susceptible you are to the effects of social media.

Like a drug. Or specifically, like an addiction. We don't really have any large data around phone addiction, but based on what studies we do have, it's not hard to assume it's a growing problem. Ever since Facebook, these companies have figured out ways to perfect their newsfeed type system. While the earlier model started somewhat basic, it has grown into a complicated algorithm with the singular purpose of keeping you on the app. And while kids aren't going on Facebook anymore, there's always going to be something trying to do this,

any way it can. So the algorithm is pushing people towards more and more extreme content so it can push them toward more and more watch time. TikTok also says it allows you to see less of something by selecting the not interested button. But Chaslow says that's not enough. The algorithm is able to find the piece of content that you're vulnerable to that will make you click that will make you watch. But it doesn't mean you really like it and that the content that you're you

enjoy the most. It's just a content that's most likely to make you stay on the platform. Right, so TikTok is going to show you anything it thinks will keep you watching, even if, and maybe even especially if, it's something that pisses you off. And to be clear, humans still have like, free will with this stuff.

We aren't a bunch of babies unless we're literally a bunch of babies. What I mean is that, for example, recent studies have shown that the hysteria around radicalization and the various pipelines might've been overblown. Researchers from Penn State found that radicalization on YouTube mostly stems from real life factors.

That is, people who were already going to be radicalized because of their IRL circumstances just happened to get there via the internet. However, even if social media doesn't cause actual severe radicalization, algorithms can make users think things are becoming more polarized. Basically, it makes you think the world

is getting more extreme than it is, but not in the fun extreme way where we all slam orbits and float around on rollerblades. Oh, I miss orbits. It was like drinking frog eggs. And now when I drink frog eggs, it tastes like frog eggs. Bring back Orbits is my point. So combine all of that with the fact

that misinformation often gets the most engagement and you see why social media is primarily incentivizing divisive and terrible bullshit. Kind of like, you know, all of media always for all of time. It's worth noting that social media is basically a turbo version of what we had before. Teen bullying, for example, was always a problem, but the internet has made it easier to do

and with less accountability. And while this study is admittedly limited, there's some evidence that cyberbullying is linked with phone addiction too. And honestly, out of all the potential harms we've talked about, I think addiction is the clearest one. Although even when discussing that, we have to recognize that the media was concerned

about TV addiction in the 90s too. After all, TV is also designed to be addictive. Especially Hypnoto. And all glory to him. What we're talking about here is called a non-substance addiction. As in an addiction to something that isn't a chemical substance.

Food, porn, porn of food, corn, corn cream, porn cream. The causes of that are usually an underlying mental health problem, such as depression or trauma. So while food and porn and shopping and gambling and the internet are often designed to be addictive, that doesn't mean you'll automatically be addicted to them. Which goes back to the question of why we all appear to be addicted, which I will circle back to later. But you can certainly make the case that smartphones are trying to keep us hooked,

even if it's not the thing that causes that. In fact, it's their standard business tactic. In Silicon Valley, startups have largely based their apps on a pretty simple behavioral model, motivation, trigger, ability, also known as Fogg's behavioral model. The idea is simple. Human beings act when those three forces,

motivation, trigger, ability, converge. Social media has a massive influence on consumer spending habits, something both businesses and the social media companies themselves know and prioritize. In 2022, 76% of US adults reported buying things online with their smartphones. So this is all directly tied to their profits.

Companies do better if we're addicted to our phones. They do better if we are not able to discern real news from fake news. And of course, kids are one of the biggest marketing targets. Kids will buy most things. Nearly every WWE action figure is just a guy in his underwear, and kids buy them.

And so it makes sense to corporations to take this addictive little monster and go after kids. It's not a bug, it's not a feature, it's the core purpose of the system in the first place. A system that is right in your pocket. A new study is shining the light on the amount of time teens spend on their cell phones and social media every day. The average teen gets more than 200 notifications

on their phone in 24 hours. Now, this is kind of another one of those overblown headlines. The study itself claims that most of the notifications come from Snapchat and Discord, and that most teens are able to discern which apps are sending them needless or unimportant notifications designed to draw them in.

In other words, a lot of these notifications are probably communications between teens more than they are advertisements. But recognizing that difference, still a fucking pain, isn't it? Not just for teens, but everyone who has a phone. You probably already know that there's an anxiety around texting that most people feel.

The idea that we're always available 24 seven is extremely distressing and feels unnatural. And while that's true for tablets and laptops, it's of course exacerbated by smartphones. They are the primary culprit here. A little window to the outside world that we are tethered to as both a curse and a lifeline.

And this is probably the biggest case against smartphones. Not that they're making us more anti-social, but actually too social, addictively and compulsively social, or at least stressfully plugged into the world. I mean, if you want to call the internet a social experience, which for some it might be, but not others. And as we've said before, this all stems

from the basic idea that the internet is kind of the first technology that goes both ways. It gives us content and we give back into it. We post and like and click and give it feedback in a million ways that it craves. It's like the ultimate Tamagotchi or that ball in Lord of the Rings for wizard perverts. A window into the delightful and tragic

and angering and adorable. Our work and school, our peers and family, horrific news and video footage of that horrific news. We can wake up, pick it up, and if we're not careful, we immediately see pictures of dead people. Then we scroll for a moment and see a meme about a movie, then we scroll again and it's a cute dog, then we scroll again and it's another dead person,

and it's always there, in our pockets, dinging at us. It's probably one, if not the, most significant advancements in the last forever many years, and it's moving too fast for us to handle, and we have absolutely no idea what it's going to do to us in the long term. And so we absolutely want to make sure that teenagers and kids, the people whose brains are still forming,

have a healthy relationship with this object. And yes, I recognize that a lot of this is similar to television, an object that also advanced the access we had to the world, that also shows horrific images and news. And so this probably isn't some kind of tech apocalypse. It's very likely that a portion of the concern today is possibly overblown and embarrassing in hindsight. But still some basic regulations we can enact, right?

Just because gambling isn't statistically the most harmful thing doesn't mean we let kids do it. And so we obviously need to regulate this to some extent. But of course, which regulations do we do? Do we ban phones for kids? Enact an age limit? Do a Hunger Games? Or perhaps even a Battle Royale?

I'll tell you what, you know what? Let's do our last and best ad and then when we come back, we will solve phones once and for all. Hey there, are you naked? Perhaps a bear ate your clothes or you stripped them off because they were covered in gasoline before accidentally rolling down a hill

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Shop.summorenews.com. Goodbye. Sweet daddy sauce, here we are. We are back. My phone is dinging a lot, but I'm choosing to ignore it. No phones, we're solving phones. And we're talking about how we should regulate them so they perhaps are less harmful to all of us

and especially our spawn. And the thing about regulations around technology, moral panics is that they've almost always been directed at banning the thing in question. As I said at the top, this is starting in America, specifically with Florida banning social media for kids under 14. This is inevitably going to happen in other states. And there's even some talk of lawmakers

banning teen smartphone use altogether. And while I get the frustration of kids being on their phones in class, banning them is entirely missing the point. For starters, we should obviously regulate the companies themselves. I starters, we should obviously regulate the companies themselves. I mean, come on, they constantly steal our data

while making their product as addicting as possible. There's currently no federal law dealing with this. Although legislation has been recently proposed, so thumbs up, but for now, we are reliant on the companies to regulate themselves. The FTC actually proposed sweeping changes aiming to shift the burden from parents and teachers and instead to the apps themselves

and the companies that make them. Europe has seen some success with calls for industries to self-regulate and people have been pushing for that in America as well. Although I wouldn't trust them to self-regulate personally, you know, because of who they are. Like, does Elon Musk seem like he can self-regulate for that surf mime guy?

Come on. It seems like the core issue is that smartphones and apps are inherently designed to be addictive. And we need to either gut those addictive properties or enact an age limit like we do with casinos, I guess. I mean, obviously we should just have regulations forcing them to not be addictive, but what are those regulations? How do we enforce them? Who enforces them? Joe Biden? Another old dude? This guy? Mr. Chiu, does TikTok access the home Wi-Fi network?

Only if the user turns on the Wi-Fi. I'm sorry, I may not understand the question. So if the user turns on the wifi. I'm sorry, I may not understand the question. So if I have TikTok app on my phone and my phone is on my home wifi network, does TikTok access that network? Extremely embarrassing. See, the thing about tackling this other problem is that we have a much larger and sillier problem

we first have to address, which is that the government is completely ill-equipped to regulate technology, let alone understand it. As we said, it's moving so freaking fast. And what we really need before anything else is a new federal department specifically created to regulate the internet and protect users.

Or maybe technology in general, like this proposal for a federal department of science and technology. Add internet in there. Federal Department of Internet, Science and Technology. Add internet in there. Federal Department of Internet, Science and Technology. Call it FIST! We need FISTERS to fist these companies and fist all the other companies and technology that will pop up.

And we need to be fisted fast. Because right now, the only big regulations we're making aren't the ones that will work. In Florida, TikTok is now banned on school Wi-Fi networks and school district-owned devices. Yesterday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the ban into law. Students will also be required to sit through instruction on the harmful effects of social media on their mental health.

So for the record, DeSantis is just mad at TikTok specifically and doesn't give a shit about social media. But again, there's no doubt that social media is harmful and addicting, just like we know that drugs can be harmful and addicting. But do you remember what anti-drug classes were like as a kid? Did they deter you from doing drugs?

You're on drugs right now, aren't you? Aren't you? Don't lie to me. You can't lie to me. I can smell it on you and I can tell. Everyone around you right now, aren't you? Aren't you? Don't lie to me. You can't lie to me. I can smell it on you and I can tell. Everyone around you right now can tell. They know. But yeah, statistically, those classes did not deter you.

The larger problem with a sweeping ban, aside from it not working, is that it doesn't actually fix the underlying problem. The thing we sort of began with, which is the idea that kids are more depressed and lonely than they were 20 years ago. And by focusing on smartphones and only smartphones as this huge threat, we're grossly missing the point.

Because going back to the causes of a non-substance addiction, it's often caused by something else, right? Like depression or trauma. Yet we suddenly forget this when talking about smartphones. I'm guessing because it's way easier to blame a single physical thing than actually exploring the larger problem. Kinda reminds me of the D&D panic

where a bunch of outcasts played a game to feel better and adults decided that the game was satanic and also why they weren't outcasts. That panic didn't solve anything and gave us nothing, besides Tom Hanks, I guess. Phones are a symptom of something, not the cause. So what is the cause? The devil?

Come on, title monkey, I just finished with the... Okay, so now I'd like to mention, for no particular reason, that one of the current pushbacks for banning smartphones is from parents who want to make sure that they can talk to their kids in case of a school shooting. In fact, one of the major reasons kids use their phone

in class is because their parents want to monitor them at school. Now for the record, data indicates that it's actually more dangerous for kids to have phones during shootings. But this is of course missing the broader observation, which we already alluded to several times, that perhaps kids are feeling depressed

and lonely and anxious because the physical world has gotten worse for them. See, one of the things the media seems to not do when talking about this problem is to actually ask teens, what's bumming them out? It's weird how this conversation around phones seems to exclude them. The polls that do ask this question found that teens

are mainly stressed about social and academic pressures, bullying and drugs and alcohol, fairly standard stuff. But that's on top of concerns about gun violence, social injustice and climate change. And you may notice that those are all things that got very big around the early 2000s, the same time this rise in depression started. While guns are uniquely American,

climate change is not, nor is social unrest or economic issues or political division. And yeah, you could argue that the internet and smartphones are the reasons kids are so tuned into those problems, but banning smartphones doesn't take those problems away. It's more like shooting the messenger, albeit a very efficient and omnipresent messenger

designed to make you addicted to it. And so the thing about enacting bans or telling them to get off their phones as if that's the solution is, well, what other choice do they actually have? What is the alternative to get off their phones as if that's the solution is, well, what other choice do they actually have? What is the alternative to being on their phone? Hundreds of malls have closed over the last several years because people's shopping habits have changed.

We talked about this in our Metaverse episode. Kids are social, naturally so. Hell, people are social. The idea that smartphones are making them antisocial is silly when they primarily use their smartphones to interact with each other. So if more kids are feeling depressed and lonely, it's not because they've suddenly changed

into these antisocial creatures, defying the entire history of human behavior. It's far more likely that they have nowhere to go to socialize. I mean, going back to those suicide rates, one of the most obvious bits of evidence is that those rates are higher everywhere that's more isolated,

while cities and anywhere with activity had the lowest rates. We did a whole episode about the lack of walkable cities in America. You know what state is particularly bad for that? Florida, the place banning TikTok. You couple that with the death of the mall and the threat of mass shootings and where do you go?

Where can you exist outdoors for free? I guessed the park, but then the mass shooting thing again. And also did teens ever go to parks to do anything besides get high? Kids need things to do. They need a space to interact in, an arcade, a public pool, a rec center, that one weird older guy's house.

But we stopped making these things and we did it right around the time that kids got depressed and smartphones got popular. Look at this graph again of teen loneliness starting in 2003 and then spiking in 2012. Now look at this graph of mall clos starting in 2003 and then spiking in 2012. Now look at this graph of mall closures in America reaching its peak exactly in 2012.

And of course, all of this got so much worse during COVID, which acted as the final death blow to the concept of public spaces. The problem isn't the phones, it's that the phones replaced literally everything else. Everything, it's where we shop, talk, debate, date, watch videos of cool guys talking news. And so if you're a kid or just a person,

of course you're addicted to your phone. Of course you don't want it taken from you even in the classroom. It's the only fucking thing you have. So if you want kids or people in general to get off their phones, the main way to fix that is to give them a reason to do so. They will react to that.

In fact, here's a study showing that most teens will have a healthy relationship with technology if the adults around them also do. They are a product of their environment. And right now, phones are the only environment. It's like we're in a worst version of the matrix. So the matrix resurrections? Wow, monkeys, zing, shots fired in bullet time.

And for the record, social media is not all bad. Some research shows that some uses of social media are linked with positive outcomes for youth mental health. For instance, teens can interact with a broader and more diverse peer group online. This can be especially meaningful for kids with marginalized identities, helping them find community even if it isn't available IRL.

While there's obviously a ton of bigotry and racism online, especially in a post-ex world, researchers have found that social media can be a really helpful connection for young black and brown people looking for mutual support. The same goes for queer and trans youth who may find meaningful connection online with a peer group.

And again, the basic function of the smartphone to connect people to the largest repository of information ever conceived of on the planet, isn't an inherently bad one. Information is awesome. And the democratization isn't an inherently bad one. Information is awesome. And the democratization of information is even more awesome. That's why we all donate hundreds of dollars to Wikipedia every time they ask for it, right?

Right, right, right. So no, it's not the smartphones. It's the fact that our country and most of the world has systematically torn down all the ways it was pleasant to be outside and replaced it all with a digital version on the internet, which is on our smartphones. Wait, so, wait, so is it the smartphones?

So it is the smartphones, but not in the way you assume. Hey Katie. Hey little buddy. Listen, I've been thinking about it and I'm okay with the plot hole in the butterfly effect. I am way more bothered with Minority Report where the villain frames Tom Cruise using a paradoxical self-fulfilling prophecy.

Please. I don't know, man. I'm honestly not sure how to react to these phone calls. Anyway, I've been buried alive, aww, so I'm gonna need you to get in your shitty car and buy a shovel and drive up here. I mean, I'm assuming you don't have a shovel on account of your weak arms. Sound good? I mean, no time to answer, I'm losing oxygen.

Bye, see you soon! Warmbo sent me a link to a semen retention blog. I think in terms of me and the people I know, I'm gonna say that phones are bad. Yeah, yeah, that's a no for phones. Good answer, Cody. No for phones. I really wanna see if I got any likes. Oh, come on. Yeah.

I got a couple of likes. Okay. Yes to phones. Hey everybody! Thank you so much for watching. Make sure to like and subscribe. It would really help us out. We've also got Patreon.com to send some more news. Support us there.

It would really help us out as well. We've got a podcast called Even More News, where the podcasts are. You can listen to this show as a, sorry, you can listen to this show as a podcast. It's called Some More News, where the podcasts are. We've, one second. Yeah, so we've got a merch store. We've got one second. Yeah, so we've got a merch store.

We've got merch store. We've got merch. Look at the little guy. I miss him so much. Oh my God. Oh, I haven't looked at a picture of him since he left. Fuck. Oh, emotions suck.

They're so complicated. Oh, I miss you buddy. Okay, well, be sure to like and subscribe, I think. Yeah.