Jonathan Haidt: observation

Transcript context

…At Emergent Ventures, we support many teenagers, young women. Many of them not 13 years old, but very often 16 to 19 years old. They’re doing science. They’re remarkably smart. They get in touch with their collaborations and with each other using social media. They exchange information. They’re doing phenomenally well. They’re an incredible generation, smarter, more dynamic, probably more productive than any other scientific generation ever, and that’s because of social media. Now, you might think the costs outweigh that, but there’s no mention in your book of the benefits that I can see. Oh, no, no, no. Well, I do have a section on the benefits. It’s short. Here’s what I say. First, the discussions of benefits are always for older teens. The benefits of being able to collaborate with people far away when you’re 16 or 18 — I totally see that. For middle school students, they don’t need that. They need to develop basic social skills and be with each other. I’ve never heard anyone make a good case that 11-, 12-, and 13-year-olds benefit from social media. Second, whenever I hear this argument, it usually seems to conflate the internet with social media. During COVID, a lot of people said, “Oh, thank God for social media. What would the kids do if they didn’t have social media? ” To which I say, “Yes, can you imagine if the only way they could connect was by calling them up on the phone or texting them, or Skype or Zoom or FaceTime, or multiplayer video games or many, many other ways that the internet allows you to connect. ” Social media is very different from everything else. Social media is a distorting mirror. It’s not a connection device. Well, it is that, but it’s a weird connection device. That would be my first response: Don’t confuse social media and the internet. We need the internet. The internet is amazing. Remember what it was like in the ’90s when we all discovered it? It was one of the greatest things we’ve ever seen. It didn’t harm mental health. It was good for democracy. That’s not true anymore in our modern . . . These purported benefits of social media — I’m just not seeing the evidence for it. There are hardly any studies — Which is Twitter? Is Twitter internet or social media?…

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