Links - 9th February 2020 (1) (Screen time and children)

A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley - The New York Times - "The people who are closest to a thing are often the most wary of it. Technologists know how phones really work, and many have decided they don’t want their own children anywhere near them... Jason Toff, 32, who ran the video platform Vine and now works for Google, lets his 3-year-old play on an iPad, which he believes is no better or worse than a book. This opinion is unpopular enough with his fellow tech workers that he feels there is now “a stigma.”"
The Dangers of YouTube for Young Children - "whereas Disney has long mined cultures around the world for legends and myths—dropping them into consumerist, family-friendly American formats—ChuChu’s videos are a different kind of hybrid: The company ingests Anglo-American nursery rhymes and holidays, and produces new versions with subcontinental flair. The characters’ most prominent animal friend is a unicorn-elephant. Nursery rhymes become music videos, complete with Indian dances and iconography. Kids of all skin tones and hair types speak with an Indian accent... As YouTube became the world’s babysitter—an electronic pacifier during trips, or when adults are having dinner—parents began to seek out videos that soaked up more time. So nowadays what’s most popular on Toddler YouTube are not three-minute songs, but compilations that last 30 to 45 minutes, or even longer... Watching my daughter play with my phone is a horrifying experience, precisely because her mimicry of adult behaviors is already so accurate. Her tiny fingers poke at buttons, pinch to zoom, endlessly scroll. It’s as though she’s grown a new brain from her fingertips. Most parents feel some version of this horror. Watching them poke and pinch at our devices, we realize that these rectangles of light and compulsion are not going away, and we are all dosing ourselves with their pleasures and conveniences without knowing the consequences."

Social media, but not video games, linked to depression in teens, according to Montreal study - "Screen time — and social media in particular — is linked to an increase in depressive symptoms in teenagers... "What we found over and over was that the effects of social media were much larger than any of the other effects for the other types of digital screen time"... Conrod and her team found an increase in depressive symptoms when the adolescents were consuming social media and television... increased symptoms of depression are linked to being active on platforms such as Instagram, where teens are more likely to compare their lives to glitzy images in their feeds... "These sort of echo chambers — these reinforcing spirals — also continually expose them to things that promote or reinforce their depression, and that's why it's particularly toxic for depression."They also tested to see if the additional screen time was taking away from other activities that might decrease depressive symptoms, such as exercise, but found that was not the case. The most surprising finding for Boers was that time spent playing video games was not contributing to depressive symptoms.The study suggests the average gamer is not socially isolated, with more than 70 per cent of gamers playing with other people either online or in person."The findings surprised us," he said. "Video gaming makes one more happy. It's a good pastime."""

Is our use of digital technologies negatively affecting our brain health? We asked 11 experts. - "The answers, you’ll see, are far from certain or even consistent. There’s a lot not yet known about the connection between media use and brain health in adults and kids. The evidence that does exist on multitasking and memory, for instance, suggests a negative correlation, but a causal link is still elusive. Still, many of the researchers and human behavior experts we spoke with still feel an unease about where the constant use of digital technology is taking us.“We’re all pawns in a grand experiment to be manipulated by digital stimuli to which no one has given explicit consent,” Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, told us. But what are the results of the experiment?...
One of the ways you sense moral panic is that it tends to be focused on our kids or sexuality. So when you see someone saying we are going to have a lost generation, or that Bluetooth is leading youth to have sex at unprecedented rates, these are always indications of moral panic rather than concern about real things. From what I can tell, parenting culture in Silicon Valley is this performative craziness. I’m going to virtue-signal harder than anyone else. I am a better parent than you are because I put crazier restrictions on my family than you do. [Banning screens] feels very consistent with that.The reason those stories are satisfying is you come out of it thinking, “What assholes. If they think this stuff isn’t good, why do they continue to do it?” Then you have folks like Jaron Lanier who say, “Quit your social media now; it’s bad for you.” That feels irresponsible in another way — there are clearly billions of people who aren’t going to quit social media in part because it’s become a critical communications tech. It’s core to how they interact with the world. For a lot of work and play, it’s essential these days."

With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there's a likely culprit - "What happened so that so many more teens, in such a short period of time, would feel depressed, attempt suicide and commit suicide? After scouring several large surveys of teens for clues, I found that all of the possibilities traced back to a major change in teens’ lives: the sudden ascendance of the smartphone... Not only did smartphone use and depression increase in tandem, but time spent online was linked to mental health issues across two different data sets... Of course, it’s possible that instead of time online causing depression, depression causes more time online. But three other studies show that is unlikely (at least, when viewed through social media use).Two followed people over time, with both studies finding that spending more time on social media led to unhappiness, while unhappiness did not lead to more social media use. A third randomly assigned participants to give up Facebook for a week versus continuing their usual use. Those who avoided Facebook reported feeling less depressed at the end of the week. The argument that depression might cause people to spend more time online doesn’t also explain why depression increased so suddenly after 2012. Under that scenario, more teens became depressed for an unknown reason and then started buying smartphones, which doesn’t seem too logical... teens now spend much less time interacting with their friends in person. Interacting with people face to face is one of the deepest wellsprings of human happiness... Teens are also sleeping less, and teens who spend more time on their phones are more likely to not be getting enough sleep. Not sleeping enough is a major risk factor for depression"

Kids Whose Parents Limit Screen Time Do Worse in College, New Study Shows - "young people whose parents explicitly stated they were limiting tech to boost academic achievement actually did worse when they got to college. That was true even when the researchers controlled for the possibility that parents who set strict rules were simply responding to kids who were already struggling in school... parent who carefully control their kids' tech use might have a more general tendency towards helicopter parenting, and once their kids get to college and experience a taste of freedom and responsibility, they can't handle it."

Screen time -- even before bed -- has little impact on teen well-being - "The study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, casts doubt on the widely accepted notion that spending time online, gaming, or watching TV, especially before bedtime, can damage young people's mental health."

Tech's Brain Effect: It's Complicated - “In fact, a recent study examining over 350,000 adolescents found a small but negative association with technology use and well-being, but they also found similar relationships between eating potatoes and wearing eyeglasses and well-being. And yet we don’t ask if potatoes and eyeglasses have destroyed a generation.”

Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS 237 - Andy Przybylski on "Is screen time bad for you?" - "Listening to music, let's say another type of technology use, the effect of listening to music on well-being was about 13 times larger than screen time, in the negative direction. That doesn't mean that Mozart makes teenagers depressed. That means that if you're a kid and you're listening to loads of music, there probably might be something else going on in your life. It's nowhere near bullying or drug use... the negative effect is somewhere between whether or not you wear glasses, and how much potatoes you eat...
'A different kind of correlational fact that often comes up, in discussions of harmful effects of social media and smartphones, is just the trendline -- that depression and suicide rates among adolescents have been going up dramatically ever since smartphones became widespread, which was in about 2011, 2012'...
'It all depends on which dataset you look at. You don't see things like it in more tech-saturated countries, or in other industrialized countries. You don't see, two or three years ahead of the United States, the South Koreans and the Japanese having spiking rates of self-harm or depression, you know?In places where you know there's more internet penetration at an earlier time, or at a later time, or at the same time, you don't see the same trends in Germany, or the United Kingdom. Or Canada, where you have just as many iPhone sales per thousand kids...
Kids were, across all metrics, looking way, way, better from where they were in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and early 90s... if you chop things off at 2005 and 2014, and you exaggerate the Y axis, you can tell yourself a story that something happened in 2011, right?... it doesn't matter which way the tiny trend goes, right? It's evidence that -- there's directly conflicting headlines sometimes, where it's like it doesn't matter if the tiny trend means teens are having more sex or less sex. The very fact that there's any difference, it will get attributed to technology... this is the logic that that does undergird things like debates about violent video games, or other things where you kind of say, “Oh, I see the participants in one condition, they put slightly more hot sauce on a taco than in the other condition, after they've played Grand Theft Auto versus Tetris.”'...
'I presume that the person was told the hot sauce would be painful for the recipient? Because I could imagine a lot of people who like spicy food were like, “I want to be helpful! Here's a lot of hot sauce.”'
'I am so sorry your listeners have to hear about how embarrassing social psychology is... Let's say that you find a difference in the amount of hot sauce, or how angry somebody is, right? Do violent video game players just become infinitely angry, the more doses of gaming they have? That idea is actually insane. There's nearly a perfect negative correlation between violent video game sales over time and youth aggression and arrests... this is all about an opportunity cost. So we have a situation where someone has screamed, "There's a wolf in the forest, and it's a blue wolf." And what's happened is, Google and Facebook have jumped up and said, "Here's our blue wolf trap. We've created this new tool that will help you control the blue wolf." Right?But nobody asks... it's like, okay, well we're going to make a tool now. Here's a new tool to get rid of the “wolf in the forest” problem.And this is an opportunity cost. This costs us... by making it into a feature, we are actually diminishing the serious attention we should be giving to this idea that these platforms are bad for us. And are bad for our society.Let's just imagine that obesity was a problem in our society. Right? And what's happened is that the maker of the worst cereal -- you know, the cereal that we all think is really bad for us -- they say, “At the bottom of every new box of this cereal, there's a stopwatch. And you can use this stopwatch to measure how much time you've spent eating the cereal.”And then they have a website called, stopwatch.cereal.com, where they list all the new tools they've put at the bottom of their horrible cereal, as like their corporate responsibility to us. Promoting our wellbeing. And fighting our obesity.At best, it's homeopathy. Sorry, sorry -- Probably, it's homeopathy. At best, it's something that some high functioning people in society can use to exert more control, if there's like a nugget of something effective there, right?And then at worst what it does, is it distracts us from getting the real data, and figuring out if these things are actually used and whether or not they work.'"
More on the costs of worrying about non-existent problems like liberals love to do

Kids Are Not Hurt by Screen Time - Scientific American - "Overall, what we find is no connection between the amount of time that young people spend online using digital technologies and mental health symptoms like depression, anxiety. When we do find associations, they were actually quite surprising to us. We found that young people who sent more text messages actually reported better mental health. Now, again, this was a small association, but it reflects what other people have found: that people who are very connected off-line, that use technology in the positive ways to stay connected often, are more connected online as well and experiencing better mental health... “One of the issues with the research that’s been done to date has been that youth are, you know, in school. They have a survey put in front of them, and they’re asked to recall, over the past six months, ‘How often are you online?’ and ‘Have you ever felt depressed?’ And the correlation between those two things has been used to spread a lot of fear around this connection between social media use and things like depression—99.5 percent of the reasons that kids differ in their depression is due to something other than the time they spend online.”"