Haidt lays out in pitiless detail what happened to the children of Generation Z when life moved online ... A bitter read but also a galvanizing one ... Haidt describes how we might spare rising generations the same afflictions.
Erudite, engaging, combative, crusading ... Whether or not you agree with the zombie apocalypse diagnosis, it’s worth considering the failure of prior absolutist stances ... This dialectic is compelling, but the moral matrix of the problem — and the scientific foundations — are more complex. Yes, digital absolutism might convince policymakers to change laws and increase regulation. It might be a wake-up call for some parents. But it also might backfire, plunging us into defense mode and blocking our path of discovery toward healthy and empowered digital citizenship.
The Anxious Generation is, to a considerable extent, a reiteration and expansion of Coddling. But it is also a vastly superior work. It’s less hung up on campus-outrage stuff, and it benefits from six additional years of research on how smartphones and social media dice the nerves and tamp the spirits of young people.
Proving causation (rather than mere correlation) is an iffy proposition. It’s especially risky for Haidt in the face of a large body of scholarly literature on the psychological harms of social media that’s ambiguous at best ... He acknowledges this, and tries to get around the problem with the sheer amount of correlational evidence he pools together ... Some blind spots ... There are a couple of big-picture questions Haidt doesn’t ask, much less answer.
One avenue Haidt doesn’t explore, which feels like an omission, is that his critics might be partly right about teenagers feeling anxious and depressed in response to global events ... Nonetheless an urgent and essential read, and it ought to become a foundational text for the growing movement to keep smartphones out of schools, and young children off social media.
I realised in the end that I didn’t need Haidt to prove causation. Of all the likely causes — existential or economic gloom, something in the water — this seems the frontrunner.
