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The Summer issue of American Affairs Journal is available; included is a review of Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, published by Penguin this year. This review by Michael Toscano is titled “Scrolling Alone: Smartphones and Social Atomization.” If you cannot read the 400-page book, then click here to read this essay. Excerpted:
Haidt shows that Silicon Valley’s products are, by design, structurally at odds with the developmental needs of human children as members of the species. The only serious solution, then, is for government (and other responsible entities) to step in and restrict children’s access. ‘Even if the content on these sites could somehow be filtered effectively to remove obviously harmful material,’ Haidt says, it would not be enough.
But Haidt’s critique of Big Tech goes far deeper than concern for the mental health of Gen Z, as important as that is. His analysis reveals a more fundamental crisis of which the above is a mere symptom: that these devices and platforms sever the mental tissue that makes embodied relationships possible, dramatically weakening the possibility of collective action for the common good.
Yikes.
I do not believe government intervention will do anything except worsen the problem, but I’ll just mention a bill is percolating in the U.S. Senate that ostensibly would make it a little difficult for minors to access social media platforms. Introduced last month, the “Protecting Kids on Social Media Act” is intended to “require that social media platforms verify the age of their users, prohibit the use of algorithmic recommendation systems on individuals under age 18, require parental or guardian consent for social media users under age 18, and prohibit users who are under age 13 from accessing social media platforms.”
Toscano is executive director of the Institute for Family Studies.
Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU’s Stern School of Business. “My mission is to use research on moral psychology to help people understand each other and to help important social institutions work better,” he explains on his website.
