Texting and Social Media
“I’m going to kill you while you’re both asleep!” the wild-eyed 13-year-old girl said as she flailed and kicked her father before biting his arm. This was the second time in less than a week that “Heidi” had flown into a violent rage because her parents had taken away her Chromebook and her access to social media. It would also be the second time that she would have to be taken to the psychiatric emergency room.
When her parents, “John” and “Melanie,” first called me to help with their daughter, they described a sweet, happy, loving girl whom her teachers had always described as their favorite student. With a tendency to gravitating toward overachievers, she loved playing soccer and hiking and would take mountain-bike rides with her dad—the man she bit.
John and Melanie, supportive suburban New Jersey parents with college degrees and their own tech business, were blindsided by Heidi’s social media addiction. “It all started when she came home in seventh grade with a Chromebook that the school had given her.” Ostensibly given for school purposes, the Chromebook came loaded with Google Classroom—which also, unfortunately, included Google Chat and various Google Chat communities.
Once the “educational” Trojan Horse entered their home, John and Melanie found that Heidi was more and more preoccupied with the social media chatrooms within that Chromebook and that she would spend hours every night on those various chatrooms. Since the chatrooms were part of the Chromebook platform, John and Melanie were not able to disable them. Then Heidi started becoming preoccupied with raunchy YouTube videos and also started playing Squarelaxy, an addictive progression game similar to Minecraft, which allowed her to be online with other Squarelaxy players.
Eventually, Heidi’s parents discovered that she was chatting with strange boys all over the country; when confronted, she admitted that she had been talking to a boy in Texas who had bragged to her that he had just killed his mother with a hanger the night before. In her next breath, she asked if she could go visit the boy in Texas. Increasingly concerned that their sweet little 12-year-old was being exposed to very corrosive influences, John and Melanie asked the school for help. The school suggested that they use a filter called OpenDNS to block their daughter from the problematic sites. Heidi’s tech-savvy parents found OpenDNS “absolutely worthless,” and Heidi’s problem’s continued to escalate.
After a year with her Chromebook and social media addiction, Heidi had transformed from a sweet, innocent girl who loved spending time with her parents into a sexualized, foul-mouthed and violent terror who has kept her parents hostage. And, sadly, a girl who now has a psychiatric profile after her two hospitalizations. I’m currently working with John and Melanie, who are beside themselves with fear, to explore treatment options for Heidi.
The question some might ask: How did the “miracle” of social media connection go so terribly wrong with this young girl?
* * *
Best-selling author Johann Hari is standing on the famous red dot, well-known to viewers of TED Talks, as he looks out at the packed auditorium at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, in London.
He is presenting his powerful and well-received TED talk on addiction (almost four million views) where he discusses a new addiction paradigm that stresses the importance of human connection and heavily references the work of Professor Bruce Alexander and his Rat Park research. He concludes his talk by saying that he’s come to understand that “the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety—the opposite of addiction is connection.”1 The crowd then breaks out into thunderous applause as he gets a standing ovation.
Social connection. It’s not only the most essential part of being human but also a key ingredient in our happiness and health as well. Yet a few minutes earlier in his talk, Hari had looked out into the crowd and said: “It might sound weird to say . . . I’ve been talking about how disconnection is the major driver of addiction, and it’s weird to say [addiction has] grown, because we’re the most connected society that’s ever been, surely.”
He’s right. We are indeed the most connected society that’s ever lived—each second we send over 7,500 tweets, 1,394 Instagram photos, over two million emails and view over 119,000 YouTube videos.2 And we keep texting and texting as if our lives depended on it: Americans send 69,000 texts a second, with over six billion texts sent in the United States every day; globally, that number is 23 billion daily texts and 8.3 trillion annually.3
And, as we would all suspect, the younger the texter, the more texting. According to a 2011 Pew Research Poll, cell phone owners between the ages of 18 and 24 exchange an average of 109.5 messages on a normal day—more than 3,200 texts per month—while in the adult population, users send or receive an average of 41.5 messages on a typical day, with the median user sending or receiving only ten texts daily.4
As for social media, according to a 2015 report by Digital, Social and Mobile, more than two billion people have active social media accounts—who knew the young and awkward Mark Zuckerberg would change the world in 2004 from his Harvard dorm room? Beyond social media, a little over three billion people on the planet are active Internet users.
That’s a lot of connecting. For a species that’s hardwired for social connection, that should be a wonderful thing; we should all be walking around with smiles on our faces.
Then why the hell are we so depressed and lonely? That shouldn’t be the case—the more connected that we are, the happier and more fulfilled we should be. Yet we’re not. As Hari points out during his TED Talk, “We’re one of the loneliest societies that has ever been.”
Recent studies back up the theory that as social media and technology have made us more connected, we’ve become increasingly depressed.
In a 2014 study published in the journal Social Indicators Research, Dr. Jean M. Twenge, a San Diego State University psychology professor and the author of Generation Me (2006) and co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic (2010), analyzed data from nearly seven million teenagers and adults from across the country and found that more people reported symptoms of depression than in the 1980s.5
According to that study, compared to their 1980s counterparts, teens are 74 percent more likely to have trouble sleeping and twice as likely to see a professional for mental health issues.
Another study indicates that people are ten times more likely to suffer from depression today than in 1945, with women and teenage girls twice as susceptible as men.6 Even more depressingly (pun intended), the World Health Organization (WHO) predicts that by 2020 depression will be second to heart disease as the leading cause of disability globally,7 as suicide rates have increased by 60 percent over the past 50 years.8
Again, that doesn’t appear to make sense; if we’re social animals with a hardwired need to connect, then why are we getting more depressed as we get more connected? Someone’s got some ’splaining to do.
Let’s start by looking at our need for human connection. We know that we can get both physically and psychologically ill without human contact. In fact, we can go crazy.
That’s what happened to Sarah Shourd.9 The 32-year-old American was hiking with two others in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan in July of 2009 when, having inadvertently strayed over the Iranian border, she and her friends were arrested by Iranian troops. Accused of spying, she was sentenced to solitary confinement in Evin prison in Tehran, where she endured a little over a year with minimal or no human contact before she was freed.
According to Sarah, she began to lose her mind after about two months in solitary confinement. She started hearing phantom footsteps and seeing flashing lights, and she spent most of her day crouched on all fours, listening through a gap in the door.
“In the periphery of my vision, I began to see flashing lights, only to jerk my head around to find that nothing was there,” she wrote in the New York Times in 2011. “At one point, I heard someone screaming, and it wasn’t until I felt the hands of one of the friendlier guards on my face, trying to revive me, that I realized the screams were my own.”
Being alone doesn’t agree with us. Biologists believe that human beings evolved as social animals because being with others had an evolutionary benefit: a group had a better shot at survival than a nomadic loner. This led to a hardwiring of social/tribal connection that, in turn, also helped to define the social and emotional life of the group member.
Being social creatures, we find purpose and meaning and bolster our emotional states largely through the social and cultural context created by contact with others. Without the group to act as a sort of mirror to help us contextualize our feelings and our self-concept, before very long we are gazing, as it were, into a fun-house mirror—and the distorted perceptions and irrational thinking that occur can look very much like psychosis.
This insanity-creating effect of isolation was also confirmed in several human experiments. The most notorious of these, involving not only isolation but sensory deprivation as well, took place at McGill University Medical Center in Montreal in the 1950s.10 Initially motivated by a desire to better understand alleged “brainwashing” by the Russian and Korean military, psychologist Dr. Donald Hebb and his researchers enlisted mostly college students as paid volunteers—$20 per day—to spend several weeks by themselves in soundproof cubicles, deprived of human contact.
The researchers’ aim was to eliminate social contact and perceptual stimulation to see how their subjects would behave when left totally alone. In order to also minimize what the volunteers could feel, see, hear and touch, the researchers fitted them with translucent visors, cotton gloves and cardboard cuffs extending beyond the fingertips. The volunteers also had to lie on U-shaped foam pillows to restrict noise, and air conditioners were set up to create a continuous hum to mask any additional noise.
After only a few hours, Dr. Hebb’s volunteers started to crave stimulation; many began talking, singing or reciting poetry to themselves to break the monotony. Later, many of them became highly emotional and anxious and were unable to perform simple math and word-association tests.
But anxiety, restlessness and adverse cognitive effects weren’t the worst of it. The most shocking thing that happened to human beings in isolation with minimal stimulation, the researchers discovered, was psychosis. Test subjects started hallucinating, seeing points of light, lines or shapes. Eventually the hallucinations became more bizarre, as subjects reported seeing squirrels marching with sacks over their shoulders or processions of eyeglasses filing down a street. The test subjects seemed to have no control over what they saw: one man saw only dogs; another, babies.
Beyond visual hallucinations, some subjects had auditory hallucinations as well, hearing a music box or a choir, for instance. Still others had tactile hallucinations: one man had the sense that he had been hit in the arm by pellets fired from guns; another reached out to touch a doorknob and felt an electric shock instead.
The results were so disturbing that the researchers had to cut the experiment short; the subjects became too disoriented and distressed to keep going. Hebb had originally hoped to observe his subjects for six weeks, but in the end, only a few lasted beyond two days, and no one lasted for an entire week. Afterward, Hebb wrote in the journal American Psychologist that the results were “very unsettling to us . . . to find, in your own laboratory, that merely taking away the usual sights, sounds, and bodily contacts from a healthy university student for a few days can shake him, right down to the base.”
In 2008 clinical psychologist Ian Robbins re-created Hebb’s experiment in collaboration with the BBC for a reality television show called Total Isolation.11 In the show, six volunteers were put in soundproof rooms in a former nuclear bunker for 48 hours. The results were similar. The volunteers suffered anxiety, extreme emotions, paranoia and significant deterioration in their mental functioning. And, like Hebb’s participants, they also went a bit insane and hallucinated.
One of the volunteers, the comedian Adam Bloom, started getting paranoid after just 18 hours, fearful that he’d be trapped in the bunker. After 24 hours he began to pace endlessly. According to Dr. Robbins: “This behaviour is often seen in animals, as well as people, when they are kept in confinement. It’s a way of providing input into your life physically.”
Forty hours in, Bloom started to go insane. He described vividly seeing 5,000 empty oyster shells: “I could see the pearly sheen on the oyster shells as clear as day,” he explained, adding, “then I felt as though the room was taking off from underneath me.”
Two other volunteers also described their hallucinations. Mickey, a postal worker, was frightened when he saw mosquitoes and fighter planes buzzing around his head; Claire, a psychology student, didn’t mind the little cars, snakes and zebras but was scared when she suddenly felt that somebody else was in the room.
We also know that like human beings, our cousins the primates don’t do well in isolation either. One of the most graphic examples comes from psychologist Harry Harlow’s experiments on rhesus macaque monkeys at the University of Wisconsin–Madison during the 1960s, in which he deprived them of social contact after birth for months and, in some cases, even years. They became “enormously disturbed” after only 30 days. After a year of isolation, they were “obliterated” socially, incapable of interaction of any kind.12
So we’ve seen that being alone can drive a person—and a monkey—crazy. But it’s not just being alone that’s problematic. Not getting the right kind of human contact and nurturing support at key developmental periods in childhood can lead to profound emotional and psychological problems.
We know this from the seminal work of psychiatrist John Bowlby in the 1930s at the Child Guidance Clinic in London, where he treated many emotionally disturbed children. Bowlby observed that children experienced intense distress when separated from their mothers; even being fed by other caregivers didn’t diminish the children’s anxiety.13
From all of these studies, we clearly see that we need social connection as much as we need oxygen. But interestingly, human beings also appear to have a couple of other basic psychological needs: the need for reward and a thirst for novelty.
Let’s start with our need for novelty, also known as neophilia. Evolutionary biologists have come to understand that our exploration for something new had certain life-sustaining implications. As Winifred Gallagher points out in her book New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change (2011), our human brains are biologically primed for novelty, which, in turn, has helped us to survive cataclysmic environmental change: “Our genius for responding to the new and different distinguishes us from all other creatures, saved us from extinction 80,000 years ago, and has fueled our progress from the long epoch of the hunter-gatherers, through the agricultural and industrial eras into the information age.”14
Gallagher points out that from the time a baby can crawl, it seeks the new and different, a trait that has fueled our ability to create life-sustaining and life-enhancing innovations from the bow and arrow to the refrigerator to the computer. Unfortunately, as Gallagher points out, this hardwired thirst for novelty can be overwhelming in the information age, when every hyperlink, tweet, text, email and Instagram photo can be an opportunity to experience something new and novel; as with an alcoholic in a liquor store or a chocolate lover at Willy Wonka’s, the multitude of opportunities for novelty can be exhaustingly hyperstimulating.
And what about the human need to experience reward? We know that humans like dopamine-activating rewards—a lot. As was pointed out in chapter three, evolution incentivized us via the “dopamine tickle” to pursue certain life-sustaining activities like eating and sex because dopamine made us feel good. But we’ve discovered that digital stimulation feels pretty good, too, and similarly lights up our dopamine-reward pathways.
So then where does modern digital technology, which plays off of these intersecting human needs of connection, reward and novelty, leave us? Short answer: Addicted. Or, at the very least, vulnerable to the potential for screen addiction.
According to Dr. Whybrow, “Our brains are wired for finding immediate reward. With technology, novelty is the reward. You essentially become addicted to novelty” as those new dopamine-tickling texts and social media updates feed into our ancient pleasure pathway.15
That’s the problem—many adults and kids have developed compulsive and addicting texting and social media habits precisely because they quench our thirst for novelty while tickling our dopamine-reward pathways.
And, like all addicts, they can go into withdrawal without it.
The Text Effect
In a 2010 study at the University of Maryland, 200 students were asked to give up all media, including texting, for 24 hours. Many showed signs of withdrawal, craving and anxiety. “Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort,” said one student. “When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded in my life.” Another student put it in even more direct terms: “I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening.”16
According to a more recent 2015 Pew Research Center study of millennial communication habits, published in the American Psychological Association’s journal Psychology of Popular Media, “Text messaging has increased dramatically over the past 10 years,” and many teenage texters share addict-like symptoms and behaviors. In fact, the researchers indicated that such teens have a lot in common with compulsive gamblers, including loss of sleep because of the activity, problems cutting back on it and a tendency to lie to cover up the amount of time they are doing it.17
Perhaps even more shockingly, the study of more than 400 eighth- and eleventh-graders found that only 35 percent of teens socialize face-to-face anymore, compared with a whopping 63 percent of teens who now communicate mostly via text message and average 167 texts per day.
The study also clarified the difference between compulsive texting and simply sending a large number of texts, as frequency of texting does not by itself equate to compulsion, just like drug quantity does not always equate to addiction. The key is the effect that the substance or behavior is having on a person and his or her life.
As Dr. Kelly Lister-Landman, lead author of the texting study, explained: “Compulsive texting involves trying and failing to cut back on texting, becoming defensive when challenged about the behavior, and feeling frustrated when one can’t do it.” Based on those criteria, although boys texted with the same frequency as girls, the study determined that a significantly higher percentage of girls had texting-related problems: 12 percent of the girls met the criteria for “compulsive texters,” while only 3 percent of the boys did—a ratio of four to one.
This indicates that while boys and girls text with the same frequency, the girls have more of an emotional/psychological attachment to the texting behavior and, thus, more difficulty controlling it. To put it in alcoholic terms, two people can drink the same amount of alcohol, but the one who is unable to cut back on drinking or lies about it would be considered the person who has the more serious drinking issue—just as, apparently, girls are developing a more problematic relationship with texting.
Compulsive texting has even led to a condition known as “text neck” and there’s even a medical institute that specializes in treating it. Chiropractor Dr. Dean Fishman coined the term and created the Text Neck Institute in Plantation, Florida, after seeing a huge influx of young patients complaining of neck, back, arm and shoulder pain related to their phone usage.18
According to Dr. Fishman: “Whenever kids came to the office with pain, I noticed they were always on their phones.” Not only that, he realized that they were assuming a troublesome phone posture: “They would be positioned at ‘forward head posture,’ but that term wasn’t resonating with parents. After I started calling it ‘text neck,’ we got an emotional response and decided to trademark the name to help change the way people hold their mobile devices.”
Compulsive texting can also lead to other problems as well. While the 2015 Pew study found a link between compulsive texting and poor academic behavior, an earlier study found a link between what they termed “hyper texting” (120 daily texts) and behavioral and psychological problems.
According to that 2010 research study done by Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, 20 percent of teens engaged in hypertexting.19 These hypertexters were shown to be at higher risk for unhealthy behaviors and mental health problems: they were twice as likely to have tried alcohol, 41 percent more likely to have used illegal drugs, nearly three and a half times more likely to have had sex and 90 percent more likely to have had four or more sex partners.
What are we to make of all of these statistics that show that more texting leads to more behavioral problems? I would look at this data a couple of different ways. First of all, a person’s being a “compulsive” or addicted texter indicates to me that that person has an impulse-control problem. People who have a harder time controlling their impulses also naturally tend to be more impulsive in other areas of their lives: trying drugs, drinking excessively, having sex.
It’s sort of like inferring that a person who is overweight—barring any thyroid issues—might also have other self-control issues or tend toward compulsive behavior. Indeed, we know from Dr. Shaffer’s syndrome model of addiction that an addictive personality can manifest itself in a variety of ways. So by that analysis, the compulsive texting isn’t “causing” the other problem behaviors, it’s merely reflective of an impulsive personality type.
However, we can also view it through another lens as well. According to Social Learning Theory, we model our behavior after that of our peers. What if I have hundreds of peers who text and use social media? I then increase the likelihood of getting exposed to certain problematic behaviors.
For example, if I hang out with ten kids and one of them smokes pot and has multiple sex partners, the influence on my own behavior might be minimal. Now, through social media, I’m hanging out with several hundred kids—and what if 40 or 50 of them have multiple sex partners? Or are taking Vicodin or Xanax? The impact of that larger—and potentially more troublesome—group on my own behavior is now greater.
Social Media and the Illusion of Real Connection
But perhaps even more worrisome than the addictive nature of our new digital way of connecting is the idea that electronic connection does not seem to satisfy our deep-seated need for true human contact. What in fact seems to have been spawned has been the illusion of social connection, via a medium that has our dopamine receptors on perpetual high alert as we anticipate, like Pavlovian dogs, the next “ping” that promises to offer us the novelty and pleasure of a text, IM, tweet, Facebook update or Instagram photo.
Perhaps it’s as Johann Hari concluded in his TED Talk: “I’ve increasingly begun to think that the connections we have—the connections we think we have—are like a kind of parody of human connection.” He went on to explain: “If you have a crisis in your life, you’ll notice something—it won’t be your Twitter followers who come to sit with you. It won’t be your Facebook friends who help you turn it around. It’ll be your flesh and blood friends who you have deep and nuanced and textured face to face relationships with.”
Hari’s insights are backed up by Oxford anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Dr. Robin Dunbar.20 Almost two decades ago, he proposed a now-famous theory that a person can maintain about 150 acquaintances but only five or so close relationships—our brains simply can’t handle any more. The figure 150, also known as Dunbar’s Number, was a measurement of the “cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships.”
He developed this theory while studying primates’ grooming habits and social groups. When Dunbar started working with primates in the 1980s, the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis (now known as the social brain hypothesis) was in vogue. According to that theory, a large primate developed a large brain—with a particularly large neocortex—by living in a complex social group. The larger the social group, the larger the neocortex, particularly the frontal lobe. So theoretically, if neocortex size is a function of social group size, then based on the size of the neocortex one should be able to predict the group size for that particular primate or human.
Dr. Dunbar did the math using a ratio of neocortical volume to total brain volume and mean group size to come up with his magic number of 150; his research indicated that anything beyond that would be too much for our social brains to handle and process.
The Dunbar Number, though, actually represents a range of several different numbers. The number 150 represents the high end of casual friends or acquaintances. From there, that number changes according to a precise formula that Dunbar called the “rule of three”: the next step down is the 50 or so people we call friends—you see them often, but not so much that you consider them to be truly close friends. The step after that is the circle of fifteen: the friends you can turn to and confide in about most things. Finally, the most intimate Dunbar Number is five: these are your closest friends—the small circle of trust—whom you call in the most serious situations, like those 3:00 a.m. crises.
Amazingly, Dunbar discovered that these numbers have remained constant throughout human history: the size of a typical hunter-gatherer community was about 150, just as the average size of a small village has been throughout the ages.
Interestingly, social media hasn’t really affected this dynamic. When Bruno Gonçalves and his colleagues at Indiana University looked at whether Twitter had changed the number of relationships that users could maintain, they found that the number of individuals whom people could manage to follow was still between 100 and 200 stable connections.21
Yet the important number is that small circle of close friends with whom we keep in face-to-face contact. Dunbar attributed this to the nature of what he termed the “shared experience” effect: when you laugh or cry with someone; when you go to a social event or have dinner together; when you experience life together, there is a deepening of the social bond that can’t be replicated by social media.
In social media, you can “share” and “like” something with your Facebook friends, or you can watch the same hysterical YouTube clip of a dancing chimp, but it’s not the same as if you had done something together—which is the phenomenon that Dunbar referred to as the synchronicity of shared experience. Let us look beyond social media: if I tell you to watch a funny movie that I saw last week, it’s just not the same in terms of deepening our social bond as if we had watched it together.
There may also be a physiological aspect of friendship that Facebook friends can never replace. Over the past several years, Dunbar and his colleagues have been looking at the importance of physical contact: “We underestimate how important touch is in the social world,” he said. He already knew that in primate grooming, the endorphin system was activated; now we know that the same is true for humans. In a series of studies, Dunbar and his colleagues showed that light touch triggers an endorphin response that’s important for creating a personal bond. According to Dunbar, our skin has a set of neurons, common to all mammals, that respond to light stroking, but not to any other kind of touch.
“We think that’s what they exist for, to trigger endorphin responses as a consequence of grooming,” Dunbar said. Just as dopamine incentivizes eating and procreating, it seems that endorphins released with physical touch incentivize human touch and bonding. Facebook friends just can’t replicate that; they can’t pat us on the back, rub our knees or give us hugs.
Dunbar is also concerned about the negative developmental impact that our new digital world will have on children. From past research on social interaction, we know that early childhood experiences are crucial in developing those parts of the brain that are dedicated to social interaction, empathy and other interpersonal skills. If we deprive a child of interaction and touch early on because they mostly socially interact via screens, those areas won’t fully develop.
What would that digitally raised Glow Kid look like as an older person? “This is the big imponderable. We haven’t yet seen an entire generation that’s grown up with things like Facebook go through adulthood yet,” Dunbar said. “It’s quite conceivable that we might end up less social in the future, which would be a disaster because we need to be more social—our world has become so large.”
Yes, ironically, we will be more socially stunted in the social media age. As Hari pointed out, we have created a parody of real connection; our 500 Facebook friends have given us the illusion of being socially connected, oftentimes at the expense of real flesh-and-blood friendships.
What then happens to a person—particularly a kid—who doesn’t have those real-life connections and is already feeling a bit alienated and sad? In those instances, the illusion of connection actually does more harm than good. The great social-media-as-genuine-and-meaningful-social-connection myth has been debunked by several studies that correlate social media with mood disorders and a higher incidence of mental health problems.
Facebook, with its 1.23 billion active users, has not led to happiness; instead, it has led to a phenomenon known as “Facebook depression,” whereby the more “friends” one has on Facebook, the higher the likelihood of depression. There is also, as mentioned, the double whammy that the more time spent on social media and the more texting a person does, the higher the likelihood of not just depression but tech addiction as well, which only further amplifies the isolation and disconnect from healthier activities and true, meaningful face-to-face social contact.
The previously mentioned Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine hypertexting study also looked at “hypernetworking”—more than three hours per school day spent on social networking sites. The 11.5 percent of students who met the criteria for hypernetworkers were linked to higher rates of depression, substance abuse, poor sleep, stress, poor academics and suicide. These are not good outcomes. Perhaps not so shockingly, hypernetworkers were also found to have more permissive parents.
It gets worse: hypernetworking teens were found to be 69 percent more likely to have tried sex, 60 percent more likely to report four or more sexual partners, 84 percent more likely to have used illegal drugs and 94 percent more likely to have been in a physical fight.
According to the lead researcher, Dr. Scott Frank: “The startling results of this study suggest that when left unchecked texting and other widely popular methods of staying connected can have dangerous health effects on teenagers.” He added: “This should be a wake-up call for parents to not only help their children stay safe by not texting and driving, but by discouraging excessive use of the cell phone or social websites in general.”
With that warning in mind, let’s take a closer look at the dynamics of Facebook depression. A 2015 University of Houston study published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology confirmed that Facebook usage can lead to depressive symptoms.22 The mechanism for this increase in depressed mood? A psychological phenomenon known as “social comparison.”
I call it the “class reunion effect”: it’s a natural tendency that we all have to compare ourselves with our peers or former classmates; and if they seem to be living wonderful, fulfilling lives and we happen to be in a bit of a rut, it makes us feel worse. On Facebook, it’s the constant stream of “look-at-me!” vacation highlight reels and cute baby pics that can make a person already feeling down feel even more envious and blue.
According to the study’s author, Mai-Ly Steers: “It doesn’t mean that Facebook causes depression, but that depressed feelings and lots of time on Facebook and comparing oneself to others tend to go hand in hand.”
For a 2014 study called “Facebook’s Emotional Consequences: Why Facebook Causes a Decrease in Mood and Why People Still Use It,” published in 2014 in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, the researchers Tobias Greitmeyer and Christina Sagioglou, from the University of Innsbruck, in Austria, conducted three different studies with three different sets of participants.23
Their first study showed that the longer people are actually on Facebook, the more negative their mood is afterward. The second study provided “causal evidence for this effect by showing that Facebook activity leads to a deterioration of mood compared to two different control groups.” As the experimental group was instructed to spend time on Facebook, the control group was instructed to browse the Internet without going to any social media site.
Why do the researchers think that Facebook made people feel worse? They pointed to a reason other than just the previously mentioned “social comparison” effect: “It appears that, compared to browsing the internet, Facebook is judged as less meaningful, less useful, and more of a waste of time, which then leads to a decrease in mood.” When the participants were asked afterward how they felt and how “meaningful” they felt their time spent online had been, the researchers found that “meaningfulness” directly correlated to mood.
According to Sagioglou: “The meaningfulness actually accounts for the mood effects. It’s not surprising that if you do something you don’t consider very meaningful, you’re not in a good mood afterward.”
But if Facebook makes people feel like crap, then why do they keep using it?
That was the $64,000 question that the third study attempted to answer. Contrary to their prior experiences, participants still indicated that they had the expectation that they would feel better after getting on Facebook—even though the opposite was true. The researchers call that “affective forecasting error.” It’s similar to thinking, “Eating that chocolate cake is going to make me feel great!”—and then having the depressing post-cake reality hit.
In the addiction field, we know this phenomenon quite well. I would explain it this way: things that initially and briefly make us feel good—chocolate cake, Facebook, heroin—can tempt us because they are all dopaminergic and may have, once upon a time, felt good. So we focus more on that remembered short-term feel-good dopamine surge that we may have experienced in the past—this is known as “euphoric recall”—and tend not to consciously remember the less pleasant and more recent realities of our engagement with the formerly feel-good activity. From a neurological standpoint, we know that dopaminergic temptations can sometimes override the you-should-know-better rationality of our frontal cortex.
Indeed, recent research shows that Facebook can lead to social networking addiction; one recent study had participants who met all diagnostic criteria for substance addiction. In that 2014 study, conducted by the State University of New York at Albany, out of 253 undergraduate participants who completed a modified version of an assessment that measures for problem drinking, almost 10 percent were found to have “disordered online social networking use”—a fancy way of saying that they had an addiction-like problem related to using Facebook. This included showing signs of withdrawal, craving and increased tolerance—all benchmarks of substance addiction.24
Some more Facebook research:
An article titled “Too Many ‘Friends,’ Too Few ‘Likes’? Evolutionary Psychology and ‘Facebook Depression,’” published in the Review of General Psychology in 2015 by Charlotte Rosalind Blease of University College Dublin, provided an overview of the research into Facebook depression.25
Blease concluded that Facebook users may be more “susceptible” to “causal triggers” for depression (a) the greater the number of “friends” the user has online, (b) the greater the time that the user spends reading updates from this wide pool of friends, (c) the more regularly the user does so and (d) the more the content of the updates tends to a bragging nature.
In addition to the previously mentioned social comparison effect, Blease points out the extremely negative comments that Facebook users may leave as contributing to low self-esteem and depression. Going as far back as 2004, psychologist John Suler coined the term “online disinhibition effect” and described the tendency for people to be more forward, taunting, mean or aggressive when interacting online as opposed to in person, an effect that was amplified if the poster was anonymous.26
We know that people are more polite in person and tend to be more cruel or abusive the greater the distance separating them from others. Also, eye contact deepens the personal bond, which also makes it more difficult to look someone in the eye and say something hurtful. That’s why some people choose to end relationships via text: it’s easier because it’s less personal. Just as it’s easier to be cruel behind someone’s back—or anonymously, on a blog post—than it is to say the same thing to a person’s face.
Mean Girls, Social Media and Suicide
As has been noted, there appears to be a gender divide in kids’ digital habits: in the Brave New e-World of addicting screens, if video games are digital cocaine for boys, then social media and texting are the electronic equivalents for girls, as the majority of hypertexters and hypernetworkers are female.
Unfortunately, social media amplifies already existing young-female dynamics. Insecurities are magnified; Mean Girl cyberbullying attacks are tweeted and retweeted in a virtual echo chamber as social media decreases the quality of socialization and increases isolation. So-called Facebook depression and epidemic levels of female teenage suicides linked to social media cyberbullying are all byproducts of this social media phenomenon.
I’ve done probably about two dozen suicide risk assessments over the last couple of years; invariably, the depressed and suicidal young person is a plugged-in social media devotee. In fact, many young people who get referred to me for suicidal ideations are feeling that way because of some type of social media trouble—cyberbullying, sexting gone wrong, being defriended by key friends.
“I don’t want to live anymore.”
‘Why?” I asked the young girl with blue hair sitting across from my desk.
“A boy who I liked—who I had dated . . . he posted a picture of me that I had sent him—a naked picture—on Instagram . . . now there’s a page up with my pictures on it and everyone is making fun of me and I just can’t handle it anymore.”
Commonly known as “slut pages,” these are the new scarlet letters for the teenage crowd. A young girl succumbs to pressure to send nude photos, only to have them show up on publicly viewed sites where the girl gets shamed by both the boys and the girls in her school. Social media has seemingly set the women’s movement back several generations.
After determining that my blue-haired client was not what we would call “acutely suicidal,” I contacted her parents and she eventually withdrew from school and enrolled in a private school.
Other times the suicidal ideations can be more acute and require psychiatric hospitalizations. Recently, I had just such a case.
“Emily” had recently transferred schools and was trying hard to fit into her new school. She was pretty, social and, outwardly, seemed fairly well adjusted. Unfortunately, as part of her effort to fit in and assimilate, she was sucked into the social media vortex and the accompanying drama at her new school as she started running with the Mean Girls. She also succumbed to the pressure of her handsome-yet-slimy new boyfriend to Instagram several explicit pictures of herself to him. Sadly, while that relationship proved to be short lived, the shelf-life of those explicit photos was not. Soon, everyone had gotten Emily’s nude photos.
But unlike my blue-haired client, it wasn’t the mass dissemination of her private photos that sent her over the edge; instead, it was the threat by her mother of cutting her off of all social media. Her mother had texted her as she sat in my office that she was on her way to get her and that she would lose the use of her phone and computer indefinitely.
As Emily sat in my office, she began to shake, sob and hyperventilate; I tried to calm her down and encouraged her to breathe as I tried to reassure her that everything would be alright. But her hyperventilating only got worse and she had a full-blown panic attack as her entire body shook.
In between gasps and sobs she cried: “Now I’ll be all alone . . . all alone!” as she rocked back and forth while her body shook. The way she kept repeating “All . . . alone . . . all . . . alone!” was heartbreaking. You could palpably feel the existential anguish and fear of being so utterly isolated that the loss of her telephone represented for her. By the time her mother arrived, she had indicated that she was going to go home and hang herself. With that, she earned herself a ride to the psychiatric hospital where she was held for several weeks and treated with heavy psychiatric medications.
Sadly, her time at the adolescent wing of the psych hospital was not a pleasant one. Girl, Interrupted was a walk in the park compared to her horrific experience; she was jumped and violently assaulted by three other Mean Girls of the very psychiatric variety and loaded with enough psych meds to drop an elephant. Her mother was beside herself with horror at what had happened to her little girl. In what had seemed like the blink of an eye, a once pretty and social girl was now a beaten-up and overmedicated psychiatric patient—all because of the soul-crushing fear that she might lose her phone and be “all alone.”
Clearly, her phone represented a lifeline and connection to her social world; while obviously addicted to her phone, it also provided her with a soothing sense of anxiety relief.
It reminded me of the double-edged sword of anti-anxiety medications like Xanax and Klonopin: they are incredibly effective in lessening anxiety but are also highly addicting. Unless the underlying causes of the anxiety are treated—trauma, negative self-concept, etc.—the anxiety worsens and the dependence on the pharmaceutical crutch grows.
Similarly, with social media, it may temporarily relieve the loneliness and isolation that a person may feel, but it does not address the underlying need for real in-depth connection. Without those real friendships, the dependence on the phone and the various social media sites grows. Take away that crutch—that false lifeline to social connection—and you get the sort of meltdown that Emily had.
Unfortunately, cases like Emily’s are becoming increasingly more common in high schools and even in middle schools. And, sadly, there have been several instances of teenagers who have indeed committed suicide related to social media issues and triggers.
But to be very clear, anytime that a person takes their own life there necessarily has to be an emotional or psychiatric vulnerability that can make a person more susceptible to negative outcomes if triggered by social media shaming or bullying. Having said that, we do also understand that social media can act as an accelerant on a psychiatric fire.
The following is a sampling of such cases.
Megan Meier (1992–2006)
Megan was an overweight girl who struggled with ADD and depression. She found brief happiness in 2006 when a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans asked Megan to be friends on MySpace. The two stayed in frequent contact online, although they never met in person or spoke on the phone. According to Megan’s mom: “Megan had a lifelong struggle with weight and self-esteem, and now she finally had a boy who she thought really thought she was pretty.”
But by October, Josh started sending cruel messages and saying that he didn’t want to be Megan’s friend anymore. As the messages got more and more hurtful, Megan received this final message from Josh: “The world would be a better place without you.” Things got even worse as the cyberbullying escalated when classmates and “friends” on MySpace began writing even more hurtful messages.
Megan hanged herself in her bedroom closet. Her mother found her twenty minutes after she had gotten off her computer. She died the following day, three weeks before what would have been her fourteenth birthday. Shockingly, later that fall a neighbor would tell Megan’s parents that Josh didn’t even really exist—the MySpace account had been created by another neighbor, Lori Drew, her 18-year-old employee Ashley Grills, and Drew’s teenage daughter, who used to be friends with Megan.
One year later, the case began receiving national attention. While the county prosecutor declined to file any criminal charges in the case, federal prosecutors charged Lori Drew with one count of conspiracy and three violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for accessing protected computers without authorization. A federal grand jury indicted Drew on all four counts in 2008, but U.S. District Judge George Wu acquitted Drew in August 2009 and vacated the conviction.
In addition to forming the Megan Meier Foundation, her mother also worked closely to help Missouri legislature pass Senate Bill 818, unofficially known as “Megan’s Law” in August 2008. In April 2009, U.S. Representative Linda Sánchez of California introduced the “Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act”—but unfortunately it was never enacted.
Jessica Logan (1990–2008)
Jessica Logan was an 18-year-old Sycamore High School senior who sent a nude photo of herself to her boyfriend. Unfortunately, after the couple broke up, the photo was sent to hundreds of teenagers in at least seven Cincinnati-area high schools. The cyber bullying continued through Facebook, MySpace and text messages. Unable to handle the virtual taunting any longer, Jessica hanged herself after attending the funeral of another boy who had committed suicide.
Hope Witsell (1996–2009)
In a similar case, 13-year-old Hope Witsell’s boyfriend also shared a picture of her breasts that she had sent to him to students at six different schools in Florida. Soon, a “Hope Hater Page” was started on MySpace that led to additional cyber bullying. Unable to stand the ridicule, Hope hanged herself.
Jessica’s parents, Albert and Cynthia Logan, filed a lawsuit against Sycamore High School and the Montgomery police for not doing enough to keep their daughter from being bullied and harassed following the nude photos incident. They also filed a lawsuit in April 2011 against Hillsborough County school officials for failing to take appropriate action after learning that Hope had suicidal thoughts.
In February 2012, Ohio Governor John Kasich signed House Bill 116, also known as the Jessica Logan Act, into law. The legislation addresses cyber bullying and expands anti-harassment policies.
Ryan Halligan (1989–2003)
Ryan was a special education student who had been the regular target of a school bully. But in February 2003, Ryan fought the bully and the harassment ended, and Ryan even seemingly forged a friendship with his now former bully.
Unfortunately, after Ryan shared an embarrassing personal story with his new “friend,” the boy started a rumor that Ryan was gay. The teasing continued into the summer of 2003, although Ryan thought that he had struck a friendship with a pretty, popular girl through AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). Instead, he later learned that the girl and her friends had set him up to think that the girl liked him so that they could make fun of him and have him share more embarrassing material—which she copied and pasted into AIM exchanges with her friends.
On October 7, 2003, Ryan hanged himself in the family bathroom. After his son’s death, his father found a folder filled with IM exchanges from that summer that made him realize “that technology was being utilized as weapons far more effective and reaching [than] the simple ones we had as kids.”
Although there were no criminal charges filed because there was no law on the books that applied, seven months after Ryan’s death, Vermont’s Bully Prevention Law (ACT 117) was signed into law by Governor Jim Douglas and Ryan’s father John Halligan also authored Vermont’s Suicide Prevention Law (ACT 114), which passed unchanged in April 2006.
Amanda Todd (1996–2012)
On September 12, 2012, Amanda Todd made a YouTube video entitled “My story: Struggling, bullying, suicide, self-harm,” in which the British Columbia teenager uses flash cards to tell about her horrific experiences of being blackmailed and bullied. Amanda met a stranger on video chat when she was in the seventh grade who convinced her to bare her breasts on camera. The stranger then attempted to use the photo to blackmail Amanda, and the picture began circulating on the internet, including a Facebook profile that used the topless photograph as the profile image.
“The Internet stalker she flashed kept stalking her,” Amanda’s mother, Carol Todd, explained. “Every time she moved schools he would go undercover and become a Facebook friend.”
Her poignant YouTube clip received 17 million views.
A little over a month after she posted the video, Amanda hanged herself in her home on October 10, 2012. Canada’s CTV News reported that lawmakers would consider a motion for a national bullying prevention strategy.
Social Media, Vulnerable Girls and Sexual Predators
Back in the pre-social media days, to be sure, there were sexual predators, miscreants and lurking men waiting to take advantage of a girl who may have felt a bit lost or restless or who maybe had a fight with her parents. But these were tangible boogey men that the wary parent could look out for: the leering man at the playground; the overly friendly store clerk or the creep lounging around the mall.
But now they’re in your daughter’s bedroom; they’ve made it right past the front door, past your protective parent-armor and landed literally in her lap—with her lap top. No longer limited to luring victims in the street, sexual predators and sex traffickers can now message thousands of young girls through Instagram, Facebook, Kik, Tagged and Twitter, with a growing trend toward WhatsApp and Snapchat where messages evaporate over time, thus erasing the predator’s electronic trail.
“If just one of them answers . . . traffickers can make thousands of dollars off that girl very quickly,” said Andrea Powell, founder and director of FAIR Girls, a U.S.-based NGO which helps trafficked girls worldwide.27
The Huffington Post recently did a story about a young 17-year-old girl named Hope. “It all started because I posted on a social media site that I hated my mother,” she recalls. “A woman messaged me back telling me that I could go stay with her, and we’d go partying. She showed up within the next 45 minutes. I was gone.”28
She was then taken to a motel room, where a male accomplice beat her, drugged her and then trafficked her for sex—with up to 20 men a day. After three weeks and eight states, she was finally rescued. “I could never be Hope again after that; I was never going to be the same girl,” she says.
Sadly, there are millions of stories like Hope’s. Globally, nearly 21 million people are victims of human trafficking, a $150 billion industry, according to the United Nation’s International Labour Organization. An estimated 4.5 million of them are forced into sex work.
According to Andrea Powell at FAIR Girls, about 90 percent of the people they helped in Washington D.C. and Maryland had been sold online. Young girls are often lured by sex traffickers who contact them on social-media sites and invite them to parties, to meet at the mall or to just become friends.
I interviewed Anastasia Karloutsos, the Executive Director of Hope House, a residential home where victims of sex trafficking can find safety and a place to heal. A tall and imposing woman with a master’s degree in social work, Karloutsos is passionate about helping these young women.
“There is an epidemic in our country. We are literally allowing the selling of our children through websites such as Backpage. There are thousands of underage children whose bodies are being sold and lives are being devastated. Many rescued children describe being raped 20 times a day by different men.”
She proceeds to describe the seduction process: “Some are runaways who get picked up by a pimp with the promise of food, shelter and family. Others are seduced over the internet with the idea of a nice boyfriend. He is a faceless man that the girls meet on line. He is nice to her [or him], pays attention to her, listens to her problems about her parents, her friends at school, her teachers. He is a willing ear, someone who understands, someone who says he can make it better.”
But that is just the lure. “Then he asks for a picture. Then, another. Typically, the pictures he asks for at first will not be explicit, but little by little the requests will get more sexual in nature. He is grooming his victim. By the time they meet in person, he already has her. By the time they meet he can already tell her about all the things he knows about her and then what he can show her family—the pictures—the shame of that, will make it hard for her to go back. Once you are started down the rabbit hole, it’s very hard to feel that you are able to turn around and go back.”
I ask her if she ever worries about traffickers and pimps coming to find the girls who have escaped. The answer is heartbreaking. “No, we aren’t afraid. We aren’t afraid because these men will not come for the women. Unfortunately, there are so many other potential victims that they will not ‘fight for them.’” With an almost endless pool of victims to troll for online, the girls are considered to be easily replaceable spare parts by the predators.
Anastasia expressed exasperation that websites like Backpage, notorious for sexual trafficking, are allowed to continue to operate. But they have been shielded by first amendment protections and the ads often use code words for various ages and typically advertise for legal “escort” services.
But all is not lost. In 2015, the New York attorney general’s office announced a partnership with Facebook to help combat child sex trafficking, which includes technical assistance to help law-enforcement officials find perpetrators and rescue victims. And North Dakota congresswoman Kristi Noem has written a bill that’s in front of congress called the Stop Advertising Victims of Exploitation Act (SAVE) that would give law enforcement the resources and ability to prosecute companies that help sex traffickers advertise.
According to Congresswoman Noem: “76% of all sex trafficking that occurs in this country occurs over the internet. And we have over 5,000 different websites that sell children and women for sex every day.”
Noem points to the profit motive: “Backpage makes millions of dollars a month selling people for sex and they do it under the guise of some kind of escort services.”
Her proposed legislation is opposed by many free speech groups. But it is hard to defend sites that advertise thinly veiled ads for sex-trafficked kids—something which Backpage’s attorneys have conceded occurs on their site.
Years ago, there was a famous PSA commercial geared toward parents that would run in New York: “It’s 10 o’clock—do you know where your children are?” Today, answering yes to that that simple question could still be a problem; if there is a computer in that bedroom, your child is not alone and could potentially not be safe. Instead, the new PSA for this millennium needs to say “It’s 10 o’clock—do you know who your kids are online with?”
* * *
I think that most reasonable people can understand that texting as a way to communicate and social media as a way to stay connected both have a place in our society. But if you want healthy and happy kids, it’s vitally important that they have supportive, caring relationships with flesh-and-blood people in their lives.
If they absolutely must have Facebook accounts or phones with texting capability—although some parents now opt for nontexting “dumb” phones—at least wait until the children are further along developmentally and less likely to fall victim to tech addiction, Facebook depression or hypertexting. And even then, the research shows that closely monitoring your child’s digital habits and virtual friends is critical in the new social media and texting landscape.
But what should a parent do when it comes to school? Obviously they can’t monitor phone or computer usage once their little ones are within the confines of school. So what should they do?
To phone or not to phone—that is the question.
The Question of Phones in School
Certainly a child does not need a phone in school or in the classroom—the myth that parents need kids to have phones at school in order to be able to reach them is ludicrous. For decades, parents would call schools to contact their children. Now, under the pretense of “staying connected with mom and dad,” kids who have phones in school can text friends, play music, watch YouTube videos, tweet, post photos on Instagram and play video games to their hearts’ content.
The unfortunate teachers who work in schools with “out of sight” policies, which allow phones in school buildings but, ostensibly, not in classrooms, are engaged in a constant, disruptive “put-your-phone-away” struggle that takes away from class time.
Over the past few years, school policies have been shifting on this issue. In 2006, in the largest school district in America—New York City, with its 1.1 million students—Mayor Michael Bloomberg banned phones in all schools. That policy drew cries of racism, as the schools with metal detectors, traditionally in poorer neighborhoods with more students of color, were the only ones able to ensure that no phones entered the buildings. As a result, most kids in poorer neighborhoods would have to check their phones each morning at food trucks or bodegas that established a profitable dollar-a-day phone drop-off system; kids at more affluent schools, without metal detectors, became proficient at sneaking their phones into their schools and hiding them throughout the day.
Then, in March of 2015, Mayor Bill de Blasio, together with the schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, reversed Bloomberg’s ruling, indicating that doing so would reduce inequality. Let the texting begin!
But recent research from Great Britain clearly demonstrates the negative effects on academics when phones are allowed in school and indicates further that already marginalized poor students and special education students are the most adversely affected. Louis-Philippe Beland and Richard Murphy, whose study was published by the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, looked at how phone policies at 91 schools in England have changed since 2001, comparing that data with results achieved in national exams taken by 16-year-olds. The comprehensive study covered 130,000 pupils.29
The researchers found that following a ban on phone use, the schools’ test scores improved by 6.4 percent. Interestingly, the impact on underachieving students (mostly poor and special ed) was even more significant: their average test scores rose by 14 percent.
“The results suggest that low-achieving students are more likely to be distracted by the presence of mobile phones, while high achievers can focus in the classroom regardless of the mobile phone policy,” the researchers said. All told, they estimated that the academic gains of banning phones were the “equivalent of adding five days to the school year.”
In the study, “Ill Communication: The Impact of Mobile Phones on Student Performance,” the British authors even take a swipe across the pond at New York City mayor de Blasio’s ill-advised plan lifting the school cell phone ban: “de Blasio’s lifting of the ban on mobile phones with a stated intention of reducing inequalities may in fact lead to the opposite. Allowing phones into schools will harm the lowest-achieving and low-income students the most.” They added: “Schools could significantly reduce the education achievement gap by prohibiting mobile phone use in schools, and so by allowing phones in schools, New York may unintentionally increase the inequalities of outcomes.”
Unfortunately, New York City’s lifting of its phone ban is indicative of a national trend. Liz Kolb, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Education and author of Toys to Tools: Connecting Student Cell Phones to Education, says that close to 70 percent of schools that had cell phone bans five years ago are reversing their policies.
“First it was a very slow domino fall, and now we’re seeing more of a tidal wave,” Kolb explains. “Part of it is because it’s hard to fight the tidal wave and there’s so many students with cell phones.”
Yet some schools are not raising the white flag. Schools in Great Britain are trending in the opposite direction. In a survey conducted in 2001, no school in England had banned phones. By 2007, 50 percent of schools had done so, and by 2012 some 98 percent of schools either did not allow phones on school grounds or required them to be handed in at the beginning of the day.30
In addition to citing decreased academic performance, some critics of phones-in-the-classroom policies also express concern about increased cyberbullying and sexting during school hours; others point to opportunities to cheat with smartphones.
Ultimately, however, the main concern revolves around the battle to get students’ attention. According to Greg Graham, who teaches writing at the University of Central Arkansas and is a teacher-consultant with the National Writing Project: “Teachers are vying for their students’ attention. Of course, this is a venerable struggle, but in the past students’ only options were looking out the window, passing notes, or throwing spit wads at each other. Most teachers will tell you the struggle is much tougher today; it’s one of those things they talk about at meetings and lunch breaks.”31
Personally, having worked within public school buildings for many years as a mental health provider, I’ve sat in on countless classrooms to do student observations. In doing so, I’ve had the opportunity to see the various phone abuses firsthand: kids texting nonstop in class, listening to music on their headphones or playing video games on their devices. I’ve witnessed exasperated teachers trying to fight the good fight and constantly redirect kids to put their phones away, and, worse, I’ve seen frustrated or just cynical teachers who have grown apathetic and just allow their students to stay plugged in and disengaged.
“I tried and tried. But eventually I just had to give up” was what one well-respected high-school science teacher told me. “It would take so much classroom time away from the other students who did want to learn to constantly keep saying ‘put your phones away’ that I just decided that I had to focus on the kids who wanted to learn.”
I asked her in an average class how many students were having problems with their phones. “It can vary. Sometimes 5 kids; other times it’s 10 or 12 kids. In a class of 25, I just have to focus on the ones who really want to learn.”
I had a meeting with the high school principal of that suburban school where that science teacher works. I have known him to be a very thoughtful, well-educated and caring administrator. Yet, when I presented him with the complaints of the vast majority of his teachers—as well as the London School of Economics study that showed that test scores increase if phones are removed from the classroom—his response surprised me.
“Nick, we just can’t change the culture; the parents won’t allow it.”
“Change the culture? It’s a ‘culture’ that’s only been around less than 10 years, it’s not some time-honored tradition to have phones in the class.”
I then appealed to increased test scores: “What about justifying it by showing them the research—test scores will increase—6 percent across the board and up to 14 percent for special needs kids and kids from tougher socio-economic backgrounds—the kids least equipped to handle the addictive temptation of their phones?”
He stood his ground: “We just won’t be able to do it.” And then he effectively blamed the teachers: “I really believe that a great teacher who can engage their class effectively can overpower any addictive pull of a phone.”
“You’re wrong. This stuff is like digital crack for some kids; I don’t care if you have Katy Perry in front of the class teaching algebra on a unicycle—the gravitational pull of the phone is just too powerful for some of these kids.”
Meanwhile, the whole time that we were talking, his assistant principal was also in the office—checking texts on his phone the entire time.
In this case and in many others, the problem goes above the principals and into the district offices and the superintendents. Some get it and have put the brakes on screens in elementary schools and banned phones from the high schools. In this particular school district, the superintendent is a former technology teacher; her mandate has been clear: the district was going to go all in on tech, research to the contrary be damned. That’s meant smart boards, Chromebooks, a computer-based curriculum, and a superintendent’s meeting where she encouraged teachers to “text the kids their homework” and embrace the technology that the students were using.
While some parents hear about how wonderful it is for teachers to be able to text a homework assignment to their students or how kids can use their phones to research topics, the reality is that the overall negatives of the distraction effect far, far outweigh the alleged benefits of phones in school.
But that doesn’t stop the tech companies from shilling their products. I recently attended a presentation of an app that teachers and students could both use. It was a terribly sterile affair, where an overly enthusiastic presenter waxed poetic to morose teachers about the app’s benefits. The presenter then demonstrated how the teachers could use the app to ask their students a question from a question bank and then walk around the room to scan the students’ responses with their smart phones.
As this was demonstrated, the assembled teachers acted the part of the students; there were, of course, glitches and burps in the technology that led to snickers and giggles—this from adults with master’s degrees; one can only imagine the disruptive fun this would provide for distracted 16-year-olds. As I sat in the back watching, I thought: all of this scanning and smartphone usage just so a teacher can ask a damned (pre-programmed) question?
Have we really drifted so far from the Socratic ideal of the dialectic that we need to invite this distracting and addictive digital drug into the classroom to scan an answer? Do we really need a smartphone to teach 20 kids sitting in a circle? According to Greg Graham, an actual educator and not a sales rep for a tech company: “There never has been—nor will there ever be—a more dynamic learning context than face-to-face in close proximity. Everything possible should be done to protect that timeless environment from interruption and distraction.” Amen.
Regardless of school district policies, parents should be the ultimate arbiters of whether or not their children have phones and whether or not they are allowed to take those phones to school. If parents do allow their children to take phones to school, then, at the very least, they should put restrictions on the phones.
And, as we’ll see in the next chapter, in some cases where children show signs of clinical disorders, what may be needed is more than just a phone ban.