An Anxious Generation? The Eternal Return of Media Effects on Children.
Spanish version
The book “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt (2024) has brought to the forefront a series of questions about the effects of digital platforms and mobile devices on new generations that cannot be ignored. Accompanied by an apparently indisputable mass of data and statistics — mostly from the United States but with global aspirations — Haidt proposes a discontinuist perspective: between the years 2010–2015, a radical change occurred in the media ecosystem that is negatively affecting the mental health of Generation Z. Welcome to the Anxious Generation.
The debate is on. The dimensions of the phenomenon are multiple, and any simplification can be dangerous. Furthermore, this type of approach is situated within the long tradition of studies on the effects of media on childhood. There is much to unpack. Let’s take it step by step and review Haidt’s book.
The Anxious Generation in 10 Ideas
1. The Great Rewiring of Childhood
The introduction and widespread use of smartphones and social media between 2010 and 2015 fundamentally changed the landscape of childhood. This period, termed the Great Rewiring, saw the rapid adoption of smartphones, transforming how children and adolescents interact with the world and each other.
2. Surge in Adolescent Mental Illness
There has been a dramatic increase in the rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among adolescents starting in the early 2010s. This increase is particularly pronounced among girls, with significant rises in reported cases of major depressive episodes and self-harming behaviors.
3. Impact of Social Media on Girls
Social media has especially affected girls, contributing to higher levels of anxiety, depression, and body image issues. The culture of social comparison and the pressure to maintain a perfect form have exacerbated these problems.
4. Underprotection in the Virtual World
Despite known risks, there has been a lack of adequate protection for young people’s online activities. Many parents are unaware of the extent of these activities; additionally, existing regulations are insufficient.
5. Decline of Play-Based Childhood
The shift from a play-based childhood to one organized around mobile devices has reduced opportunities for physical play and in-person social interactions. This transition began in the late 1980s and accelerated with the advent of smartphones.
6. Parental Overprotection
In recent decades, there has been a trend towards parental overprotection, limiting children’s independence and their opportunities to take risks. This has further restricted their ability to engage in outdoor play and develop essential life skills.
7. Historical Context and Comparison
Haidt’s book compares the current mental health crisis with previous generational challenges, arguing that the unique aspect of the current crisis is the technological component. Unlike past crises, which were often economic or political, the current problem is rooted in the digital transformation of society.
8. Economic and Environmental Factors
Although economic downturns and environmental concerns have always impacted mental health, Haidt’s book argues that these factors alone cannot explain the sharp increase in adolescent mental illnesses observed in the 2010s.
9. Global Patterns
The rise in adolescent mental health problems is not limited to the United States; similar trends are observed globally, particularly in other Western and Nordic countries. This indicates a widespread phenomenon linked to the global proliferation of digital technology.
10. Recommendations
The book advocates for several key reforms to address the mental health crisis, including delaying the use of smartphones and social media, implementing phone-free school policies, and encouraging more unsupervised play in the “real world”. Jonathan Haidt, by this point, becomes an activist promoting immediate social actions, through videos with striking scenes and low blows (like the empty swing) that take us to a well-known and studied territory: the fascinating world of ‘media panics’.
The Effects of Television on Children
A quick review of the history of the media allows us to confirm that these ‘media panics’ are not new. What’s more, they are a recurring phenomenon in the long evolution of the media. Let’s take a brief look at these panics.
At the beginning of the 20th century, some doom-mongers warned that cinema — at the time an emerging media — would prevent viewers from “differentiating fiction from reality.” These fears reappeared with radio, a medium considered omnipotent and hypnotizing in the 1930s. Two decades later, comics emerged as the great corrupters of children’s minds; publishers like EC Comics had to close under pressure from families, censors, and authorities steeped in McCarthyism.
However, the communication technology that stirred the most controversy was television, the new media that emerged in the 1950s and produced the largest scientific corpus on its effects on children. We could say that for at least three decades, thousands of sociologists and psychologists of communication enjoyed excellent funding to investigate “the effects of television on children.” One of the most comprehensive studies on the subject, after rigorous fieldwork and analysis, reached conclusions as compelling as this:
“For some children, under some conditions, some television is harmful. For other children under the same conditions, or for the same children under other conditions, it may be beneficial. For most children, under most conditions, most television is probably neither particularly harmful nor particularly beneficial.” (Schramm, W., J. Lyle, and E. B. Parker, 1961, Television in the Lives of our Children, Stanford University Press).
The story repeated with the World Wide Web, video games, and now with social media and mobile phones. For those of us who study the evolution of media, the recurring emergence of fears and media panics is a pattern that repeats every time a new media appears. However, this should not overshadow the consequences of transformations in the media sphere or empirical data. But are the data presented by Jonathan Haidt as solid as they appear?
The great rewiring, unplugged
Haidt’s book, despite being a bestseller that will soon be translated and published by Deusto (the same publisher of my book Narrativas Transmedia. Cuando todos los medios cuentan in 2013), already has its detractors. Candice L. Odgers, in an article published in Nature in April, questions much of Haidt’s arguments; according to this author, the book is not supported by solid scientific evidence and diverts attention from the real causes of the mental health crisis in young people (“The book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science”). Furthermore, by cross-referencing data on media expansion with the increase in mental health problems, a correlation is generated that does not demonstrate causation between social media use and youth depression and anxiety:
“Haidt supplies graphs throughout the book showing that digital-technology use and adolescent mental-health problems are rising together. (…) Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers.”
In “The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?” Odgers places great emphasis on the complexity of these processes and their multicausality. Among other things, today’s adolescents grew up after the great recession of 2008 and many continue to experience economic and social difficulties.
“Suicide rates among people in most age groups have been increasing steadily for the past 20 years in the United States. Researchers cite access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, the opioid epidemic, economic hardship and social isolation as leading contributors.”
In another part of her article, Odgers criticizes the author of The Anxious Generation: “Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence.” However, Odgers considers some of Haidt’s proposals to be positive, such as activating stricter content moderation policies or taking into account the age of users when designing platforms and algorithms; other solutions, such as age restrictions and mobile device bans, according to Odgers, may not be effective in practice and may also have counterproductive effects.
In the end, Odgers — a professor of psychology and informatics at the University of California (Irvine) — emphasizes the need to propose solutions based on scientific evidence to address the adolescent mental health crisis, instead of telling stories that are not backed by research: “We have a generation in crisis and in desperate need of the best of what science and evidence-based solutions can offer. Unfortunately, our time is being spent telling stories that are unsupported by research and that do little to support young people who need, and deserve, more.”
An Ecoevolutionary Interpretation
Marshall McLuhan and other authors from the Media Ecology tradition never tire of repeating that Homo sapiens create technologies that, in turn, generate environments that shape and transform us without our being aware of these changes. Media (technologies) ‘format’ us, modifying our way of thinking and living in the world; they also shape our way of perceiving time or space. These intuitions that McLuhan introduced 60 years ago have been confirmed by neurosciences in recent years. In this context, it is evident that social media and mobile devices act on our cognition and perception in the same way that books, radio, television, or comics do.
For saying these things, Marshall McLuhan was repeatedly criticized and crucified as a ‘technological determinist.’ I have not heard such criticisms regarding the brutal determinism of Jonathan Haidt in The Anxious Generation. Anyone who rereads McLuhan’s work will discover that his intuitions were much more complex, rich, and suggestive than Haidt’s causalities.
On the other hand, when we take a bit of distance and integrate Haidt’s work into the historical context, his discourse does not stray far from the repeated “media panics” promoted in the past by part of the scientific establishment and the media themselves. “Here we go again,” as Mafalda, a character who also dealt with TV panic, would say.
Today, almost no one worries if a child watches television or reads comics. It would seem that all past media were better.
But, to conclude, we cannot deny that there is a discomfort in cyberculture (A new version of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents?) and significant data on the deterioration of young people’s mental health. Media, as it could not be otherwise, are part of the problem but not the sole and exclusive cause of this phenomenon. Banning their use, in my opinion, is a hasty and falsely reassuring reaction to a complex problem. Pure digital populism. As I wrote in La guerra de las plataformas (Anagrama, 2022):
“Changes that previously took decades or centuries are now unfolding before our eyes like in a timelapse video. This further increases uncertainty and fear, which soon leads to simplified and Manichean visions (digital populism?) that often culminate in the sea of apocalypticism after skirting the paradisiacal beaches of infantile optimism. We must broaden our interpretive framework to understand the transformations of the media ecosystem and the socio-technological sphere.”
That’s where we are.
