SOCIAL CLIMATE CHANGE

A psychotherapist I know was talking to a young woman about her life and the young woman suddenly exclaimed: ‘what makes it worse is my parents have just read that ******* book’. The book in question is ‘The Anxious Generation’ by Jonathan Haidt, and it is causing quite a stir. For the young woman in question, the attention of her parents to the impact the use of a smartphone was having on her mental health was unwelcome and intrusive. But you can see it from both sides.

 

The smartphone is her primary means of relating to the world she is growing up in; to be deprived of it – even to be limited in its use – amounted to social death. Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is perhaps the deepest social anxiety of all; we long to be in a crowd, not apart from it.

 

Her parents would see it differently, if they have read Haidt’s book. Most of us use smartphones and social media and common sense suggests it has many negative effects. The Anxious Generation adds empirical data to this sense to show that what Hadit calls a ‘Great Rewiring’ has taken place in the minds of young people, specifically the generation exposed to social media for the first time between 2010 and 2015. In this short period, play based childhood activities were rapidly replaced by a phone based childhood as the smartphone became ascendant. And Haidt observes:

 

The first generation of Americans who went through puberty with smartphones (and the entire internet) in their hands became more anxious, depressed, self-harming, and suicidal.

 

Though his findings relate to the USA, many countries may have similar outcomes; indeed, the evidence shows that English speaking and Scandinavian nations do.

 

Adults who consume social media know how performative and attention seeking other adults can be as they carefully craft personal images – in some cases, personal brands – online. The search for validation and the dopamine hit that likes and retweets afford is addictive and the ability to measure the attention we receive is an especially cruel way of quantifying popularity. We continue to play the game while denying its rules and its winners and losers.

 

If adults struggle with the unsparing and endless game of comparison, what must that feel like to a young person going through puberty, unsure of their identity, self-worth and body image and desperate to fit in? Social media is ‘asynchronous’ according to Haidt. Face to face interactions are essential to our development and the historic means by which we mature and find fulfilment in life. On Instagram and TikTok, the interactions lack the deep meaning and blessing of being with someone. They are elsewhere, we cannot see them physically, we do not respond to them in real time. Most especially, we cannot pick up the facial clues others emit, by which we navigate and entrench our relationships.

 

In The Perfection Trap, the London based academic Thomas Curran addresses three kinds of perfectionism: self-oriented, others-oriented and socially prescribed. The first is where we push ourselves hard and judge ourselves by unachievable goals; the second is where we inflict this on others. But it is the third which has grown in size in recent years, and this is the sense that the wider culture expects perfection of us. The outsize shadow of the astutely filtered images of other people’s lives looms over this. ‘We expect you to be perfect’ is a dishonest and destructive view of life, and young people may be tempted to either game it or suffer in their self-worth.

 

The worst thing adults can do is to blame young people for this turn of events. Generation Z did not create these apps and their algorithms and adults are just as susceptible to their effects but have the luxury of brains that aren’t still being moulded like plasticine. If we care about this, there should be a multi-agency response, one that involves society, law and tech. There is now mounting evidence of a social health crisis driven by tech advances and we should not allow tech companies to obfuscate just because it will affect profits. Changes to the digital architecture can be made and future generations may look back with surprise, if not dismay, that we did not address this earlier.

 

Part of that societal response should emerge from the churches. We have been created to flourish in relationships – with God and with one another. The resurrection of Jesus shows the embodied nature of the renewal of creation. Though there is plenty to love about social media, there are ways in which it hinders us from enjoying life in all its fulness in the disembodied culture of comparison, disinhibition and judgment. The DNA of being made in the image of God is relational. This is part of our message about the life Jesus has given us. More critical thinking around the subject is called for, theology that could inform a wider debate around the social climate change that’s happening in and around us all.