Boom -- Screen-culture wars trilogy lands on my desk

Which to read first? "The Anxious Generation," "Family Unfriendly" or "Bad Therapy"?

I arrived back home in Oak Ridge after the long drive from visiting family in Kansas and found the usual stack of mail waiting for me — including an amazing trio of books.

In terms of Peak Rational Sheep, it would be hard to imagine a stack of more relevant new books arriving at the same time. I have already mentioned two of the three here at Rational Sheep, but it’s time to add a third:

* “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewriting of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” by Jonathan Haidt of New York University. I have been reading his work on this topic for several years now, primarily through his essays at The Atlantic Monthly (surf this Google file).

* “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up,” by journalist Abigail Shrier, who previously tossed a hand grenade into the public square — with good cause, methinks — with her often banned “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.” If you read that bestseller (despite the bans), you know that smartphones and social-media influencers play a major role in its pages.

* “Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than it Needs to Be,” by Washington Examiner columnist Timothy P. Carney, author of the must-read 2019 political culture book “Alienated America.” The new book covers a wide range of topics linked to family life issues — but there’s no way to avoid the digital screens angle.

I know that I have, in the first month of this Substack weblog, already offered several features (here and here, for example) on the topics in these books — while warning readers that there would be more ahead. As I said the other day, I could do an entire weblog-podcast project on the smartphones debates, alone.

This is a signal from our culture, a signal about the strengths and weaknesses of a technology, as well as all of that content flowing through Big Tech’s social-media offerings.

Instead of looking at one article from mass media about this, consider the following a mere sampler of what is out there.

Let’s start with an entire Axios newsletter — this is a secular source — about several trends linked to social-media and screens culture. Here is a quick summary of the headlines found in this package:

* “1 big thing: Kids are dying inside.”

The startling data: Rates of depression and anxiety among American adolescents jumped by more than 50% in multiple studies between 2010 and 2019, writes Jonathan Haidt, a leading expert on the spike in teen mental illness. Those numbers were relatively stable in the 2000s.

— The suicide rate for kids between 10 and 14 tripled between 2007 and 2021, according to the CDC.

— The share of high school girls who seriously considered attempting suicide jumped from 19% in 2011 to 30% in 2021.

* “2. 👀 TikTok's addictive algorithm.”

Between the lines: A study from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that new TikTok accounts were shown self-harm and eating disorder content within minutes of scrolling.

— Suicide-related videos popped up within 2.6 minutes.

— Eating disorder content popped up in 8 minutes.

* “3. 👎 Charted: The kids are not alright.”

Depression has hit teens much harder than adults in the smartphone era (charted above), according to National Survey on Drug Use and Health data.

The massive gap is clear in the World Happiness Report: In the oldest age group, America was the world's 10th happiest country. Among the young, America fell to 62nd place.

* “4.📱 Case against smartphones.”

🥊 Reality check: Putting the cellphones-and-social-media genie back in the bottle is going to be a tough sell.

— Parents are often the ones demanding to be able to reach their kids during the school day.

— They're also the ones pleading with their kids to put the phones down — without success.

That’s only half the Axios list. Things get more complex, when discussing what TO DO about this crisis. Note that “4.” item: Parents are torn. They want to do something, but not really. They want the problem to go away on its own?

During an interview on PBS, Haidt also took a stand on one of the most controversial Big Tech questions out there — whether smartphone addiction is linked to the stunning rise in gender dysphoria in girls. Here is a piece of that, via a tweet on X. This is long, but essential:

So there’s very important, older research by Nicholas Christakis and, James Fowler where they looked at, they had gigantic health data sets, the Framingham Heart Study. … The things we do spread out through social network. We affect each other. Now it turns out, when you’re looking at emotions, girls and women, when they study women, when a woman is depressed, that spreads out to her network. Whereas when a man is depressed, it doesn’t. Women talk about their feelings. They’re more connected in that way. Girls are connecting on social media, where it just turns out in many communities, the more anxious and depressed you are, the more you get support. The more extreme your symptoms, the more you get likes and followers. You know, of course it’s good to destigmatize social, mental illness. We don’t want people to be ashamed. But boy, is it a terrible idea to valorize it, to tell young people, ‘You know what? The more you have this, the more popular you’ll be, the more support you’ll get.’ And so you get this explosion, not just of anxiety – anxiety is in part, I think, spread sociogenically, it’s called, from social causes, not from internal causes – but we get it for dissociative identity disorder. …

It happens in clusters of girls who had no previous gender dysphoria when they were young. So it’s very different from the kinds of gender dysphoria cases that we’ve known about for decades. I mean, it is a real thing. But what happened, especially when girls got, was YouTube and Instagram early, but then especially TikTok, girls just, you know, girls get sucked into these vortices and they take on each other’s purported mental illnesses.

I hope to do an interview soon with Carney on the wider range of issues contained in his “Family Unfriendly” book. So, let’s end this survey of a few items — repeat, only A FEW — from the current wave of online discussions of these books and their takes on smartphone culture.

Let’s end with this from a Ross Douthat column at the New York Times, which raises yet another hot-button subject linked to screens culture: “The Birth Dearth and the Smartphone Age.” Note that this points to Carney’s new book and its take on changes in family life, period.

One of the best reviews of Carney’s book, from Leah Libresco Sargeant in First Things, pairs it with Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” about the effect of phones and screens and social media on childhood and adolescence. Carney’s book has a discussion of the screen world’s negative effects on family life, and Haidt’s book offers a portrait of what’s gone wrong with Western childhood in the smartphone age, the loss of independence and unscheduled play and face-to-face interactions between kids, that would be fully at home in “Family Unfriendly.”

Uniting these accounts, Sargeant makes the point that screens have arguably become a substitute for better forms of family friendliness, a way of managing kids in a society that doesn’t want to really deal with all their disruptive energy, their irreducible non-adultness. It’s a new way of making them seen and not heard, or neither seen nor heard: “A child stooped over a phone,” after all, “is quiet, nondisruptive, and doesn’t have to be in public at all.” If screens are possibly making them unhappier, they’re also making them more tractable in a way that substitutes for any larger social transformation that might make them welcome.

That’s a depressing vision.

Here is my final question: Which book in this trilogy do I read first? Please leave a comment, so we can discuss that matter.

More to come, in the weeks ahead — including a look at that Haidt piece at The Free Press that ran with this headline: “Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones Rewired Childhood. Here’s How to Fix It.”

Like I said, I will get to other topics. But there is no way to ignore a “signal” of this magnitude.