A new way of thinking about how social media affects us.

If you're the kind of person that follows technology, psychology, and/or adolescence content on social media, then you've probably heard quite a bit about Jonathan Haidt's new book on what he calls The Anxious Generation. In short, he attributes the relatively recent increases in adolescent mental health issues to social media and the phones that have made accessing it so available. Some people find his arguments very compelling, whereas others have serious critiques. I'm going to wait to solidify my own view until I've read Haidt's book, but I will say that I'm concerned his ideas might be yet another moral panic about technology.

Such moral panics are dangerous for lots of reasons (the moral panic about Dungeons and Dragons in the 80s briefly made me wary of bring my Dungeon Master guides to school...wait, maybe that was a good thing...). But one of the more serious dangerous of incorrect and overly simplistic moral panics is that they distract time and energy from more complex but more accurate models of what's really going on. These days, there's lots of evidence that many adolescents are struggling with their mental health, so we really need to address this, but blaming it all on social media and phones feels a little...simplistic.

Ferguson and colleagues (2024) have a different perspective on how social media might be affecting us, and I think it's worth considering. Basically, they argue that humans strive to reduce the uncertainty in their world, and social media is a really unique place where uncertainty comes in unfamiliar and challenging forms. For example, it's harder to understand what other people are thinking online, because communication is often asynchronous and we can't see people's expression or hear their tone of voice. This increases the uncertainty people feel when on social media. But in other ways social media decreases uncertainty, such as by giving us metrics of people's social status (e.g., numbers of likes, followers, etc.). These unique affordances of social media interact with people's individual differences to affect how and why people engage online. In the article, Ferguson and colleagues show how their ideas might explain why and how social media's affordances can affect how people with autism spectrum disorder and how adolescents interact online. Really interesting ideas, and much more complicated than the "silver bullet" implied by moral panics (e.g., "just get rid of social media and everything will be fine"). More complicated doesn't always mean better, but neither does more simplistic. I wish social media companies would open up their data to research, so we could more easily figure out what, if anything, social media is doing to adolescents, and the rest of us.