Scrolling Alone: Smartphones and Social Atomization
May 20, 2024
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, is best known for his books on why “good people” on the left and right disagree (The Righteous Mind, 2012) and why young people educated under safetyist university bureaucrats are ill-prepared for disagreement (The Coddling of the American Mind, 2018). Liberalism stands or falls on developing independent, mature, and rational adults who can deliberate publicly in order to achieve the fullest promise of life together. A “coddled” mind, according to Haidt, is one that is blocked from encountering the diversity of viewpoints necessary to make informed judgments. Haidt, in other words, is firmly liberal in the larger sense. So, when he turned his research toward smartphones and social media, and announced a book on his findings, one expected a critique of the problem of censorship by social media platforms and the need for openness to numerous viewpoints—however “toxic”—to better prepare users, especially young users, for public life in a liberal democracy.
But that is not the book that Haidt has written. With Anxious Generation, Haidt comes to the very opposite set of conclusions that a reader might expect. There can be no content fix—i.e., no injection of speech—sufficient to address the deleterious effects that smartphones and social media have on the mental state of young people. Haidt shows that Silicon Valley’s products are, by design, structurally at odds with the developmental needs of human children as members of the species. The only serious solution, then, is for government (and other responsible entities) to step in and restrict children’s access. “Even if the content on these sites could somehow be filtered effectively to remove obviously harmful material,” Haidt says, it would not be enough.
