An early Utah signal in our fierce social-media debates

Should Big Tech giants be considered a new version of Big Tobacco?

Back when my wife and I were in Champaign-Urbana for graduate school, I read a book that changed the lives of our future children.

This was 1981 and the television age was, for most people, about to leap into the cable-television age and VCRs were about to enter the picture. The book was “The Plug-In Drug/Television, Children, and the Family” by Marie Winn, a New York City journalist and social critic.

The key, for me, was that Winn didn’t focus on the content of television. Instead, in this book and others, she probed the social role that this technology was playing in millions of homes. Here is some vintage Winn:

"The very nature of the television experience apart from the contents of the programs is rarely considered. Perhaps the ever-changing array of sights and sounds coming out of the machine -- the wild variety of images meeting the eye and the barrage of human and inhuman sounds reaching the ear -- fosters the illusion of a varied experience for the viewer. It is easy to overlook a deceptively simple fact: one is always watching television when one is watching television rather than having any other experience."

Her thesis, and I paraphrase: Parents were hooked on television’s role as a free babysitter that appeared to make their lives easier. As a result, they were often allowing their children to be raised by fictional characters that, if the real people showed up at the front door, the parents would have called the police.

Winn was not saying that television, as a form of technology, was automatically bad. She was saying that it could easily be used as a numbing drug that wasted hours and hours of time, especially for children. Many children’s programs were crafted to be addictive. Hold that thought.

Keep this focus on technology in mind as we look at an important essay — from January, 2023 — relatively early in America’s increasingly fierce debates about smartphones (a technology) and social-media apps (a form of content).

Readers may have noticed that Rational Sheep has already offered several posts about the wave of books that, with good cause, are currently being released in mental-health issues in our age dominated by digital screens. These post will keep coming.

To be blunt: I think this is one of the most important issues facing religious groups today, one linked to many other issues in family life (falling fertility rates, anxiety, young people struggling to get married, etc.).

Here is the double-decker headline that ran on this Deseret News essay by Brad Wilcox and Riley Peterson. Yes, Wilcox is the author of the important book, “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.”

It’s time to treat Big Tech like Big Tobacco

A mounting body of evidence suggests that social media contributes to the skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression among teens. Utah is poised to step in

Once again, we are dealing with a technology that resembles a drug in far too many lives. Here is the overture:

Imagine if a man in a white panel van pulled up in your neighborhood and began enticing teens to look at pictures and videos featuring drug use, pornography and a range of other antisocial activities. In many neighborhoods, he’d be in handcuffs within the hour.

And yet, strangely enough, Mark Zuckerberg, Shou Zi Chew and Sundar Pichai do almost the same thing online at Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, where they have virtually unimpeded access to the neighborhood teens and manage to make billions of dollars poisoning their hearts and minds.

This is the strange moment we are living in, a moment where we still let Big Tech push products on our teens that, as the Facebook Files suggested, make them anxious, depressed and suicidal, among other pathologies.

We’re at a moment with Big Tech much like we were with Big Tobacco in the 1970s, when the studies were rolling in documenting the medical risks associated with smoking, but the government had not yet stepped in aggressively to limit smoking.

Yes, there is a political angle here — but that is not my main focus. But news consumers may have seen headlines such as this one at The Hill: “Congress must force Big Tech to protect children from online predators.”

Wilcox and Peterson want government officials to have the courage to force minimal safety standards on Big Tech (even as valid First Amendment issues loom in the background). For example, what if tech czars were required to, and I quote:

* Age verify their users.

* Get permission from parents for users younger than 18.

* Give parents access to kids’ social media accounts. …

* Prohibit Big Tech companies from using kids’ data or addictive algorithms on platforms serving children.

But here is my Big Idea, again, thinking back to how Winn’s books affected the Mattingly home.

Why isn’t this crisis an issue for religious congregations, faith-based schools, denominational leaders (Yo! Bishops!), seminaries, religious-market publishing houses, etc. What if more and more congregations, at least once a year, held retreats or seminars for parents and grandparents focusing on screen-culture issues in home life?

Does this issue matter? Here is Wilcox and Peterson again:

Social media appears to be especially problematic for today’s teens. Excessive time on social media has been linked to “fear of missing out,” cyberbullying, emotional insecurity and body-image problems. The time devoted to social media also inhibits in-person socializing, exercise and sleep, all of which are crucial for adolescents’ emotional well-being. Research by psychologist Jean Twenge found, for instance, that the share of teens who went on dates has fallen by almost 30 percentage points in recent years and that the number of times teens hang out with friends fell by about 20% from 2007 to 2015. “As long as teens are scrolling through Instagram more, and hanging in person with their friends less, depression is likely to remain at historically high levels,” noted Twenge.

To grab another image, the smartphone is the point on a very important spear. This technology is omnipresent. It makes television look like, well, a child’s toy.

Anyone hearing about this in your houses of worship?

Just asking, again. Can ordinary clergy, parents and teachers wave red flags requesting help?

FIRST IMAGE: Uncredited graphic posted at the Tobacco Stops With Me website.