Source item

Quoted context

These are the quoted author’s words.

Social media's effect on teenagers is about the same size as the effect of wearing glasses on a teenager's life satisfaction. A 2019 study in Nature Human Behaviour, using three datasets totalling more than 355,000 adolescents, found that digital technology use explained about 0.4 percent of the variation in wellbeing. Eating potatoes was associated with a similar-sized effect. The study was led by Andrew Orben at the University of Oxford and Amy Przybylski at the Oxford Internet Institute. They used a method called specification curve analysis, which runs every possible way of analysing the data and reports all the results, rather than picking the one that looks best. Out of over 40,000 possible statistical models, the average effect of digital technology on wellbeing was negative but tiny. The researchers compared the effect size to other variables in the same dataset. Eating breakfast regularly had a larger positive effect on wellbeing than quitting social media entirely. Getting enough sleep had a much larger effect. Bullying had a much larger negative effect. Technology use was real, but it was lost in the noise of things that mattered more. A companion study by the same team in PNAS tracked the same question over time and found that social media had a small negative effect on life satisfaction, about the size of one-third of the effect of being bullied. It was detectable, consistent, and dwarfed by almost everything else in the teenager's life. This post will generate heat because parents want a villain and the phone is an easy one. The data says the phone matters, a little, and sleeping, eating, and not being bullied matter more. The debate is not whether screens are harmless. It is whether they are the thing we should be screaming about. https://t.co/sts21LDhx2

anishmoonka ↗