Is Jonathan Haidt right about smartphones?
tes.com
tes.com
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/us/high-school-english-te...
"Ford says he has missed some other obvious contributing factors in the UK data, including closures of youth clubs and other safe spaces for young people, the world becoming more expensive and difficult to navigate, social changes with looser community bonds and more."
Is there a connection between the closures of youth clubs and other safe spaces for young people? I might imagine that more youth on phones, means less youth wanting to go to youth clubs, means less demand for youth clubs, means youth clubs and safe spaces closing.
Won't argue with the view that poverty is bad.
I would be interested in seeing actually self-report survey data on how people wish they were spending their time. Like how many hours a week using your phones vs going to the movies, socializing with friends, etc. Part of the problem is the rise of phones and social media is self-perpetuating. The more people stay home to browse tik tok, the less people go out and spend at the movies or bars, therefor the less of those third places that exist, therefor the more folks that stay home and browse tik tok (or Netflix or whatever, I wonder if Haidt includes streaming in his diagnosis)
They talk about phone addiction and whether or not people are addicted to their phones, but I think I would add a new measure. Addiction is generally defined as causing negative impacts to their life.
“For most of us, we are [not addicted to our phones] - we are distracted by our phones…[Addiction is when] you’re so out of control that it results in pathological outcomes for the individual,” she says.
But I think I would add a like soft addiction category, or like impulsiveness category. That like - my life is "fine" but that I spend all my time doing a thing that I would rather not be doing. And based on what everyone I know says about their phones, I think this one would come up high. It's pretty pathological if as a society, we're all spending our time doing something we wish we weren't. And I think it's concerning dismissive to say if it's not addiction, we shouldn't attend to it.
This next section is just fucking bananas to me:
“When you fall in love, I can guarantee that person will be much more powerful than a cell phone in front of you, or 10 cell phones,” she says. “So it is understanding the relative position of the reinforcing stimuli that are salient.”
smart but not wise?
Volkow adds she would like to see regulation very specifically around algorithms. “Cell phones have many, many advantages. So [to ensure we can still benefit from those], it’s important we regulate…the algorithms being used, because that’s what’s targeting that extremely compulsive pattern of people. If you regulate that, you protect people.”
One thing I would really like is if my phone had better tools to protect me from myself. Go back to the days where I had to connect my phone to a laptop to install an application or like I can block a website from my phone, but have to login from my laptop to unblock. One of the big problems with "Personal and parental responsibility" in tech is the tool suck, because they want them to suck.
And finally:
“It is becoming increasingly difficult to say, ‘hang on, that’s not what the evidence says’, or ‘we don’t have evidence for that yet’, and I really, really worry about this,” he concludes. “There’s a road here where [people say], ‘well, we don’t need science and evidence because we can see it with our own eyes’.”
That's what the cigarette companies said too.
But seriously, smoking, drinking, having sex, all the things my parent worries about as a kid, and as a parent, I'm worried about the opposite, addiction to phones and no sex, drugs and rock and roll.