Gen Z Has Regrets
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/opinion/social-media-smartphones-harm-regret.html
Jonathan Haidt and Will Johnson:
What about social media platforms? They achieved global market penetration faster than almost any product in history. The category took hold in the early aughts with Friendster, MySpace and the one that rose to dominance: Facebook. By 2020, more than half of all humans were using some form of social media. So if this were any normal product we’d assume that people love it and are grateful to the companies that provide it to them — without charge, no less.
But it turns out that it can be hard for people who don’t like social media to avoid it, because when everyone else is on it, the abstainers begin to miss out on information, trends and gossip. This is especially painful for adolescents, whose social networks have migrated, since the early 2010s, onto a few giant platforms. Nearly all American teenagers use social media regularly, and they spend an average of nearly five hours a day just on these platforms.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/opinion/social-media-smartphones-harm-regret.html
Jonathan Haidt and Will Johnson:
What about social media platforms? They achieved global market penetration faster than almost any product in history. The category took hold in the early aughts with Friendster, MySpace and the one that rose to dominance: Facebook. By 2020, more than half of all humans were using some form of social media. So if this were any normal product we’d assume that people love it and are grateful to the companies that provide it to them — without charge, no less.
But it turns out that it can be hard for people who don’t like social media to avoid it, because when everyone else is on it, the abstainers begin to miss out on information, trends and gossip. This is especially painful for adolescents, whose social networks have migrated, since the early 2010s, onto a few giant platforms. Nearly all American teenagers use social media regularly, and they spend an average of nearly five hours a day just on these platforms.