Recently, I read:
… an excellent article by Jonathan Haidt. It is an impassioned but clear defence of Haidt’s argument about the harms of social media. The point is that social media is different: it’s different to the television, it’s different to violent video games or music with swear words in it. Social media is a real harm, and specifically a developmental harm on young people with measurable effects on their mental health. The claim is stronger than that: social media is responsible for the post 2012 epidemic of mental ill health.
I suggest readers have a good look through the article, which I’m not really going to argue for or against that much (though obviously I agree with it). What I do want to reflect upon, however, is personal experience and the deeply weird cultural effects of social media. As this is all about the developmental, I’ll start in my childhood.
I was born in the late ‘90s and grew up in Cornwall. When I first started to engage with the internet, it was the late ‘00s. For me, this meant that the internet ran at a snail’s pace. We would try to watch YouTube after coming home from school. The way you’d do this would be to click on a video, leave the room and make some toast and pour some apple juice, return, and press play. Then, you would watch all of two minutes of the video before it would stop, and you’d have to wait for it to load more.
I don’t know if this is because of Cornwall, or because my parents were still on an internet plan from the early 00s, but the internet was slow enough to be a fundamentally different beast to what it is today. Scrolling through videos was not possible; the wall of ceaseless entertainment was not possible; TikTok would have been unimaginable. Has this simple fact of slow internet affected my attention span and my ability to amuse myself? I can never know for sure, but it does seem probable.
The internet that I remember from the early 2010s was still a bit ‘counter cultural’, in an intensely cringeworthy way. There were images of cats with captions in Impact. There were flash games like Motherload, a two-dimensional mining game where, in its thrilling denouement, you kill Satan in the incredibly mysterious guise of the suited Mr Natas. It was a slightly weird thing. Things were ‘real’ or impressive if they happened on the TV, not if they happened on the internet. The internet was not a digital town square or free marketplace of ideas, it was an extension of the parents’ basement.
People started getting Facebook in early secondary school. This would be around the 2011-2012 mark. Interestingly this does intersect with the years Haidt thinks were crucial for the explosion in social media.
I can’t remember whether I was banned from Facebook by parents [update: my mother informs us in the comments that I was not banned!] or just not interested in it, probably both. I think I believed what we were told which was that it was teeming with predators, so stayed clear. In any case, there were no (good) video games on Facebook so it seemed like a pointless exercise. Throughout my childhood, I engaged with the digital world in a deeply offline fashion, playing games consoles on the sofa. One of my earliest memories is playing with the Apple equivalent of MS Paint when I was something like 6.
I was a bit afraid of Facebook and bewildered at what its point was. I did get it eventually. However, my first profile picture (on record) dates from 2014 (when I was in my mid teens) and was this:
I don’t think I was using Facebook properly.
During this time I started playing video games with friends online, which was much more fun than sending people ‘pokes’ or writing statuses about what was in my packed lunch. The video games I played were mostly based on simulated small-arms fire, though some of them were exceedingly wholesome. The game that completely sucked me in, like millions of others, was Minecraft. This is basically a construction game involving some vaguely medieval elements such as armour and bows. For some reason it was socially acceptable to play this but not Lego.
I do not regret the hundreds of hours I spent playing video games. I particularly do not regret the time I spent playing Minecraft, building things; and neither do I regret playing games with friends either online or on the sofa with wired controllers. I have happy memories of both things and I can’t see how these activities should be thought of as any less enlightening than playing conkers.
Here is my challenge to you, dear reader. Do you have a single happy memory of your time on social media? Have you even generated a single memory of a time on social media? I can’t. All I might have a memory of is talking to people over social media, specifically, over voice call. What’s voice call? It’s the telephone. As far as I’m concerned, the best thing about social media is its ability to function as a glorified telephone.
Playing video games involved laughter, screaming, frustration, joy, etc. ‘Doing’ social media, on the other hand, involves sitting in front of a screen with an utterly blank expression and swiping through boring or anxiety-inducing nonsense. I regret almost every minute I waste on social media, and so do most people.
Fast forward to me as an undergraduate. Because I’m bloody minded and cheap, I refused to get a smartphone until 2020, after I graduated. I had a laptop from 2010, the cheapest model of Nokia (I think it was £20) and an iPod touch for music. The iPod died when I comically dropped it down a toilet, and I replaced it with one of my parents iPhones, with no sim card.
As a result, I always had two phones in my left pocket, each dysfunctional in a different way. When my peers found out I had two phones, particularly when they found out I had a Nokia, they would always make the same joke: I was a drug dealer. I genuinely think I detected a bit of nervousness in the laughter too: they weren’t quite sure that I wasn’t a criminal doing something extremely bad to pay for my college bill. Why have a phone that’s that crap if you haven’t got something to hide?
All this is to say: Not owning a smartphone is now socially transgressive!
Is that not a little unhinged? Since when did the un-possession of technology make one an outcast? Yet besides Google Maps and Waze, I regret my transition from brick to smart. I’ve got Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp, and my emails to haunt me wherever I go. These are not productivity tools, for the most part. They’re mental chewing gum.
I am so grateful that, for whatever half-thought-out reason, I avoided social media and smartphones for so long. Other than getting very, very lost in London (with no navigational aid), I’d like to go back. What makes me feel queasy is the fact that young people are no longer given a respite from this boring junk in their early years. For once I think we should ‘think of the children’ and do something prohibitive—I do think Haidt is right.
Absolutely brilliant article .I for one find myself scrolling on Instagram , I come off it find myself feeling less than , hopeless and like you have had one too many drinks a toxic aftertaste .then I scroll through face book , which isn't much better but for me less anxiety inducing...as your mother Alfie ! ..we didn't ban you from face book , rightly or wrongly we didn't ban you from anything believing in mutual trust and the fact we always felt we talked stuff through enough to set boundaries in that way .
I really do agree that's it's had a terrible impact on the youngs and oldies like me mental health ..bravo for this article.
I'd forgotten about Pokes on Facebook but they're still there! Just accidentally Poked someone.