Jonathan Haidt and Abigail Shrier's new books document how the twin addictions of social media and therapy are crippling the mental health, cognition and resilience of younger generations.
There is two scenarios that I'm getting concerned about.
One is the general degradation of human capital resulting from the reduced attention span induced by social media. It's difficult to see a substitute to prolonged engagement with challenging topics as a means of accumulating human capital. In English: if you want to become a doctor, you need to spend thousands of hours learning biochemistry, anatomy, etc. If you want to become an engineer, it's math and physics. If you want to become an economist, it's ... erm ... anyway, you get my point.
The other, which partly follows from the first, is social inequality. It looks like the ability to pay attention and to spend hard hours learning could become a means of social stratification. The children whose parents have shielded them from excessive social media use seem to me likely to do better.
There is two scenarios that I'm getting concerned about.
One is the general degradation of human capital resulting from the reduced attention span induced by social media. It's difficult to see a substitute to prolonged engagement with challenging topics as a means of accumulating human capital. In English: if you want to become a doctor, you need to spend thousands of hours learning biochemistry, anatomy, etc. If you want to become an engineer, it's math and physics. If you want to become an economist, it's ... erm ... anyway, you get my point.
The other, which partly follows from the first, is social inequality. It looks like the ability to pay attention and to spend hard hours learning could become a means of social stratification. The children whose parents have shielded them from excessive social media use seem to me likely to do better.