Is the smartphone panic dumb?

This episode examines the complex relationship society, especially teens, have with smartphones and social media, questioning whether concerns about their mental health impacts are justified or exaggerated.

1. The episode challenges the outright demonization of social media, suggesting its impacts are nuanced.
2. It introduces legislative attempts to curb usage among minors, reflecting societal concerns.
3. Discussions emphasize the lack of conclusive scientific evidence tying social media to mental health declines.
4. Experiments with reduced smartphone use highlight how less digital interaction might encourage more meaningful real-world engagements.
5. The dialogue advocates for a balanced approach to technology, incorporating awareness and moderate use without extreme restrictions.

1: Introduction

The episode opens with a general introduction to the topic, focusing on the ubiquity of smartphones and the ongoing debate about their effects on society. Amanda Ripley sets the stage for a detailed discussion. Amanda Ripley: "This is Impromptu from Washington Post opinions. It's a podcast where we bring you conversations about the issues we can't stop thinking about."

2: The Cultural Impact

Ted Johnson discusses his personal observations of his children's interaction with technology, stressing the nuanced impact of social media on teenagers. Theodore R. Johnson: "I'm less concerned with the time of use and more concerned with how certain content can subtly influence behavior."

3: Regulatory Responses

Discussion about recent legislative actions aimed at restricting social media access for minors, highlighting different approaches and their potential effectiveness. Amanda Ripley: "Earlier this year, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a social media ban for minors into law."

4: Technological Dependence

Molly Roberts shares her experiment of switching from a smartphone to a 'dumb phone' to explore how device dependency affects behavior. Molly Roberts: "Only once you've gotten rid of the smartphone and replaced it with the chunk of plastic that the dumb phone is, do you start to lose that reflex."

1. Reduce Screen Time: Gradually decrease the daily amount of time spent on smartphones to mitigate dependency.
2. Engage in Real-World Activities: Replace screen time with physical activities or hobbies that encourage real-world interactions.
3. Use Technology Mindfully: Be conscious of why and how you use digital devices, aiming to use them purposefully rather than compulsively.
4. Experiment with Less Advanced Technology: Try using simpler devices that do not support extensive social media functionalities to lessen the urge to constantly check updates.
5. Educate About Digital Footprints: Understand and discuss the long-term impacts of digital footprints and social media usage with peers and family.

Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy recommended putting a warning on social media for minors last week, while governors from coast to coast have pushed for restrictions on teen phone use. But how worried should we really be, and what is there to do about it? Post columnists Amanda Ripley, Molly Roberts and Theodore Johnson talk through the dumbphone trend, how explicit lyric warnings on CDs backfired and what actually worked in the campaigns to stop kids from smoking.

People

Amanda Ripley, Molly Roberts, Theodore R. Johnson

Companies

The Washington Post

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

Speaker A
This podcast is brought to you by intel vpro.

Amanda Ripley
Do you have one app on your phone that you just really couldn't live without?

Theodore R. Johnson
I spend a lot of time on TikTok for the laughs, mostly, and also for, like, the military reunions and the surprise friends and the proposals and the, you know, the tearjerkers.

Speaker A
The one that I use a lot more than I should and would feel the emptiest without is discord. I use discord to chat with some friends that I play a video game with. So it's another form of connection to people. But these are people I would never use just WhatsApp to talk to. They're people with whom my relationship is purely online.

Amanda Ripley
But this is good, because this is right to the point of what we're gonna talk about today, right, is that, you know, if you ask kids if we should take away social media or their phones, there's a lot of things that they really would miss and suffer from, and there's a lot of good that would come from it, too. So we can already empathize with that. Right? It's a complicated relationship with the phone. This is impromptu from Washington Post opinions. It's a podcast where we bring you conversations about the issues we can't stop thinking about. I'm Amanda Ripley, a contributing columnist. And today we're talking about cell phones and social media and whether there's any way to get us or our kids to use them less. There's been a continuous drumbeat of bad news in recent years about how social media use can damage teens mental health. Is it true? And if so, what should we do? The surgeon general last week recommended putting a tobacco like warning label on social media to remind people that it's not always safe. Earlier this year, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a social media ban for minors into law. And last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom said he would like to restrict cell phone usage in schools. Still, cell phones and the apps that glue us to them are so embedded in our lives. Can we even find a way for us to get less hooked? I'm joined by two of my colleagues to discuss.

Speaker A
I'm Molly Roberts. I'm an editorial writer and columnist at the Post. I mostly cover tech.

Theodore R. Johnson
And I'm Theodore R. Johnson, or Ted. And I'm a contributing columnist for the Washington Post, usually writing about topics of race, democracy, and identity, but also about culture, aging, all the things that surround us as we go about our days.

Amanda Ripley
Okay, so I'm gonna start with you, Ted. Are you concerned about the issue of social media? And teens, do you think this is, like, a real cause for worry, or is this kind of overblown?

Theodore R. Johnson
So I'm kinda worried, but not really. I'm on my third teen. I've seen the evolution of unsophisticated smartphones to super smart AI smartphones and the evolution of applications and algorithms. And I'm less concerned with the time of use and less concerned with how social media personalities influence my kids. I'm a bit concerned about AI and algorithms and the extent to which teens are sort of pushed to a certain kind of content that tends to be antisocial because that it's more sensational. It sort of gets people angry, or gets them really emotionally connected to whatever the topic is. And so to the extent it sort of pushes our kids to topics and viewpoints that in the house, we've sort of raised them not to adopt or to be very critical of, that worries me a little bit, I'll be honest with you. I see it a little like the warning labels. They started putting on cassettes and cds back in, like, the eighties or nineties. Lets parents know, hey, there's some bad words or maybe some adult situations on this cassette, but that alone isn't the thing that parents should be worried about. It's when that song or that app begins to change their child's behavior, their thinking, in a way that parents and other positive influences are left disempowered to try to counter.

Speaker A
Hmm.

Amanda Ripley
Yeah. And I remember when those warnings, explicit warnings, appeared. I feel like they made the music seem more attractive.

Theodore R. Johnson
Yes.

Amanda Ripley
Not loves the sticker.

Theodore R. Johnson
I would not have bought NWA or two live crew or any of these groups, except for the sticker, because I was underage. And that was the cool thing to have.

Amanda Ripley
Right. It felt like, you know, a little bit naughty and kind of exciting. That's right. So we definitely don't want that to happen here. But, Molly, what do you think? What is your take on this?

Speaker A
Yes, I think there's reason to be concerned. And, yes, I think it's overblown. I think.

Amanda Ripley
Okay. Yes and yes.

Speaker A
Yes and yes. It's always the best answer. I think you have people on one side of things saying, this is a complete disaster. Our children's brains are being rewired, they're melting, and you have people on the other side who are saying, don't worry about it at all. Social media is actually very good for kids under some circumstances. And when you look at the science, what you cannot find is a clear causal relationship between social media and the mental health issues that folks are concerned about. You can find that particular types of social media use aren't good for particular types of people. I don't think it's beneficial to anybody right now to make generalizations, partly because, say that you're an lgbt kid in a household that's not very supportive. You go into social media, you meet people like you. That's a good thing. On the other hand, say that you are already struggling with body image issues. You go into Instagram, you're fed a bunch of bikini photos of models, and you start to feel even worse about yourself. In a lot of ways, it seems like the biggest predictor of what happens online to people is what's happening offline. So there is some risk in focusing too much on online life and then not attending to offline causes.

Amanda Ripley
Right. It's a little too convenient to just lay it all at the house of Google or Facebook or meta, whereas laying.

Speaker A
Nicotine addiction all at the house of cigarettes is totally reasonable. And that can be proven by science. And that's a toxin. Maybe. Sometimes I feel like Instagram is a toxin after I've been staring at it for 3 hours, but other times I'm really happy I went on there and it reminded me about some friend from college I haven't talked to in a while and what she's up to, and it makes me send her a text. So.

Theodore R. Johnson
And I agree, you know, pinning the problems to social media exclusively, or even predominantly, suggests that the solution is to fix social media. And once you do that, you have now corrected the kid problem. And it's not that easy. There's clearly a need or a demand for what those apps are putting out. And so kids will just find it elsewhere, just like kids in the eighties and in the twenties, I suspect, found ways of accomplishing similar things. Clicks and bullying and influencing beyond the platform. Yeah, I completely agree that it's not just the technology.

Amanda Ripley
I mean, it does feel like maybe the fix is instead of just social media. And, I mean, we should say the surgeon general is not suggesting this is the only fix, right? Like, it needs to be part of a global set of solutions, but it's also like making. Like, limiting your access to it, like making it a little bit harder. I think it's the friction free, endless scroll that's the problem. Right? Like you said, Ted, kids will find it anyway. Kids will find porn, even violent porn, right? But when it's in your pocket all the time, immediately accessible, that's a different category, right, than when you actually had to go look for it. And maybe be embarrassed or get in trouble. Right. There's not enough friction and there's maybe not enough control over the device, is what I hear, especially from kids that I've talked to about this is like, look, it's not. You can talk all day about which platform, blah, blah, blah, but it's the whole device. And actually, there was a pew survey of adolescents, and four out of ten of them said they were spending too much time on their phones, but only a quarter of them said they were spending too much time on social media. So, you know, it was the phone. And so that leads me to my question for you, Molly, because I think you. Did you interestingly do an experiment recently with dumb phones? Because I'm wondering if some of this is just the actual device.

Speaker A
Very recently. How did that go? Yes, I traded out my iPhone for a Nokia TCL flip Pro, which is.

Amanda Ripley
That's a hot phone.

Speaker A
It is a good looking chunk of plastic. Yes. And I personally found exactly what you just said to be true, that it is the device that is the problem. It's the device that is the difference. I mentioned discord as that one app for me, and that's partly because social media doesn't allure me all that much. I don't spend a ton of hours on scrolling through Instagram, but I do, for whatever reason, spend a bunch of hours looking at my device. Sometimes not even doing anything active, sometimes just picking it up to check and see if anybody has sent me anything or if anything is going on. The thing about smartphones to me is that they're always going to have something interesting to offer. And when you have that in your pocket, in an idle moment, you are going to have the reflex to pick it up and figure out what that interesting thing might be. Only once you've gotten rid of the smartphone and replaced it with the chunk of plastic that the dumb phone is, do you start to lose that reflex, because you know there is nothing for you on there. And I think that it's the feeling that we can resort to these devices at any time, kind of independent of the particular things on them that disconnects us from real life, that fills our empty hours when we might otherwise make more of an effort to fill them with something enriching.

Amanda Ripley
It's almost like what you're describing with a smartphone is like. There's like an itch, right? My friend Monica Guzman calls it an itch. Like, whatever you're doing, you're talking to a friend, you're hanging out with your kid, you're walking your dog, and there's, like, this part of your brain that's like, I better check. I better check. That is really kind of, like, poisonous, right? Cause it pulls us out of the present. So how long did it take, Molly, on the dumbphone before you felt that itch subside?

Speaker A
I love the use of the word itch because I do feel as if it's almost physical. When I initially had the dumb phone, it was as if my hand were being drawn toward picking it up. And then when I did, it felt wrong. Cause it wasn't in the right shape. And so I would say it was the first two days. I still would reach for the dumbphone nonetheless.

Amanda Ripley
And then like a phantom limb situation for the first two days. Exactly.

Speaker A
Exactly. Yes, yes. And perhaps after day two, I realized that the limb was gone and I was no longer reaching for anything, but really only two days to lose that part of it. There were still moments where I really wanted something specific I could get out of the phone and was longing to be able to google something that I didn't know the answer to. That's a terrible thing, not being able to get the answer to something right away that went on longer, but the physical part broke it pretty quick.

Amanda Ripley
It does feel like an experiment that would be good for all of us if we can, right. And we can always come up with reasons not to do it, right? Like Google Maps. How can you expect me, what I need that or my kid needs to reach me? Whatever. Okay. I want to talk more about how we can move forward if we can't move backwards, necessarily. To the nokias from the early two thousands. But first, let's take a quick break.

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Speaker E
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Speaker F
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Amanda Ripley
Welcome back. I'm Amanda Ripley, and this is impromptu, so I mentioned before that the surgeon general suggested putting warning labels on social media, kind of like it's a pack of cigarettes. And I wonder if either of you have thoughts about what that warning should say. Let's just riff, right? Because apparently, if this were to ever happen, first of all, Congress would have to say, okay. And then also. Then there would be, like, a scientific analysis of what it should say and, you know, how big it should be and where it should appear and when. So there's a lot of devil in the details stuff, but I wonder if either of you have thoughts about what you'd like get to say or not say.

Theodore R. Johnson
It should be specific and not general. It shouldn't say something like, the surgeon general has found that social media can be bad for mental health, especially among adolescents. Like, what about it is bad for teens mental health if it's body image things, if it's, you know, if it encourages depression or anxiety, sort of feelings or tendencies. Like, tell me what the bad stuff is instead of just saying it's bad. And, you know, this is maybe some of my scarring from childhood, growing up, especially in the church, you know, everything. Don't do bad stuff if you want to go to heaven. Okay? So if you have questions about where bad begins and good ends or vice versa, well, that's gray. And you just sort of have to take someone else's word for it that the thing that they've pointed out is bad, so don't do it. And I think kids, especially this generation, maybe more than others previously, are very wary of adults saying don't do x because x is bad without any further explanation.

Speaker A
Hmm.

Amanda Ripley
That makes sense.

Speaker A
I think there's some cigarette label from some point in history that says something along the lines of smoking can cause a slow and painful death. So perhaps we should just go with that.

Theodore R. Johnson
You know, in Australia, I think it was. This was years ago, they put pictures of what smoking does to your mouth. So, like, the missing teeth and the gums. And so the visual is more of a deterrent, maybe, than even the word. That's a great, great point, Molly.

Speaker A
I was thinking about that. What would the corresponding visual be for social media right now? We simply don't know enough about it. It would be some change in the brain, but we don't even know whether that really exists. Part of the difficulty of coming up with the specific label is that we don't have the specific answers. Now, I do think that if there's some scientific determination that there's a strong link with suicide or that something else really, really serious can happen, then the warning label has to be dire. I think that the same way you were talking about the ratings on music, you don't want social media to seem cooler, edgier, naughtier. So if you do something that's not sufficiently dire, then kids are probably just going to start seeing it as a bit rebellious and be more attracted to it.

Amanda Ripley
Well, I wonder if we could also learn here from, instead of warning labels, from smoking, from the anti smoking ads that have been really well researched, too. And it almost feels like maybe an education campaign that features the real stories and advice of kids. Right. Would be more effective. So let's say you have to watch. You know how you have to watch like a 32nd ad for a lot of social media anyway? Maybe you have to watch a 1 minute ad before you start. And it's kids talking about how we know that emotionally evocative ads that have personalized stories about the effects of harms, including smoking, had a strong impact, as did the famous ads where kids were piling up body bags outside the headquarters of Big Tobacco, which we know from this really cool study that was able to see how that ad affected different parts of the country. That that had a really significant effect. Because guess what? Teenagers don't like being manipulated, and they are being manipulated. Let's be clear now. Is it sometimes fun? Is it sometimes good? Is it sometimes helpful? Yes. And they are being manipulated. So the more we can kind of make that manipulation visible, then they can decide on their own, which is even better. If you make it a little easier for them to sort of limit the device, right? Then maybe they can decide. I don't know. Is that, do you think, naive.

Theodore R. Johnson
You know what? I like that idea. And I'm a former smoker, so I will tell you that aside from the health piece, which is not only does research show it, when I started climbing stairs and started being huffing and puffing, like, what's going on? I'm young. This is supposed to happen. It's the cigarettes. But the bigger thing for me was the ostracization. You now have to go somewhere to smoke. Whereas growing up, at least when I was growing up, you could smoke almost anywhere. Now you have to leave wherever you are and go somewhere else to do it. And then when you come back, you've got it on your fingers and your clothes. It's on your breath. If you're dating or if you're pushed out from the crowd, a problem. And maybe there's something, a social media corollary here or a phone corollary. I mean, we talk about social media like it increases people's ability to be social, but if you've ever seen a room full of people, it's like one of the most antisocial places you can be because everyone is on their phones. So to the extent high phone usage removes people, as you were saying, from their day to day life, I wonder if there's an ad campaign to be built about the things people miss because they're here with the phone on their nose instead of engaged in the world around them. And I think, especially, again, for teens, young adults, that might resonate even more than sort of the long term mental health challenges or complications that could result.

Amanda Ripley
Really trying to surface and make visible the cost.

Theodore R. Johnson
Right. The social penalty for checking out.

Amanda Ripley
Yeah. And shift the cultural norms around it, which is what happened. Like, as you described, you're being excluded, which is the worst and the reason people wanna be on social media. Right. So they feel like.

Theodore R. Johnson
Right. It's not to be.

Amanda Ripley
Exactly right. That script. Molly, what do you think about education or some advertising strategy?

Speaker A
I think some advertising strategy makes a lot of sense. I think telling the individual stories of kids who've become addicted to social media, started using social media in problematic ways. Had algorithms direct them down rabbit holes that have been very damaging to them, could be really effective for other children. I think that's probably more effective than just saying, hey, generally this is bad for you because everyone's using it, and they're saying, well, I'm doing just fine. For the most part, the idea of norm shifting is compelling. I don't know how it happens, but I do like to imagine a world in which you're at a restaurant and your dining partner goes to the bathroom, and it's considered weird if you take your phone out to look at it, and other people in the restaurant kind of side eye you when you take your phone out. How to build that is so difficult, but that would be a better world to live in. One thing that I remember from my dumb phone experiment was I was visiting New York and I was walking through Central park, and usually I would have been probably listening to a podcast, and I would, out of reflex, occasionally have been checking my phone, but I had nothing to listen to. So really all I could do was observe the other people walking through Central park, and I saw some families with their kids dancing to the street. Musician. All very nice, but a lot of what I observed was that people were looking at their phones in Central park, and if we could make it so that in a public space, the same way that if someone's smoking, someone might look at you sideways. Of course it's different because smoking has an effect on the people around you, a direct one. So it would be harder to build, but it would be so much better if our reflex to constant phone use was just slightly judgmental, slightly negative reaction. Again, I do not know how to get there, but it would be cool if we could.

Theodore R. Johnson
Better smartphone etiquette.

Speaker A
Yeah, right. Exactly. If we could build a. Right. If we could build some sort of code around when it is appropriate to use your phone. But I don't know who writes the code. I don't know whether Gen Z is more obsessed with smartphones than anyone before or whether there will at some point be some backlash against them. One of the reasons I did the dumb phone experiment was because a lot of Gen Z kids have been picking up dumb phones. So maybe that's a hopeful sign. Maybe there will be a sense that this has gone too far. Like you said, amanda, people don't like being manipulated. There's certainly some acrimony in Gen Z against the capitalist elite of Silicon Valley. So maybe that will lead to an impulse to change the degree to which we're tethered to and reliant on our devices. This is probably overly optimistic, but cling to something.

Amanda Ripley
Well, I think this is an interesting area for more research and reporting, really. I mean, what are kids already doing out there to try to manage their own attention and focus and relationships? Because I know they're doing things right. We've all heard this anecdotally. One of my son's friends gives my son his parental control password. Like, my son comes up with it, so that if the kid wants to check his phone and he's already hit his limit for the day, he has to go to my son. So it's not a parent, right, because they're 17 years old. But it's a way to kind of make it a little bit harder to be reflexively, as you said, molly, going to that phone, and I know there are other examples out there. So I guess I'd like to wrap up by inviting our listeners and their kids, students that, you know, to reach out to us, send us a voice memo about your thoughts about this. What are the things that you do to try to compensate for the fact that we are really outgunned by these devices? And it's very hard to resist and they also provide us some joy and information and connection at the same time. So we would love to hear from you if you could send us a voice memo. Our email is impromptuashpost.com. that's impromptuashpost.com dot. Thank you both for being here. This was fun. I have a feeling this problem isn't going away, so I hope we can get to do it again soon.

Theodore R. Johnson
That'd be great.

Speaker A
Yeah, thanks for having me. It's good to have some time away from my phone.

Theodore R. Johnson
Exactly.

Amanda Ripley
That's right, I haven't looked at my phone once. This episode was produced by Hadley Robinson and Damier Marusik, edited by Chris Sullentrop, Anne Allison Michaels, and mixed by Emma Munger. Chris Rukan designed our art. Special thanks to Millie Mitra and Nick Safin. A reminder that if you're a subscriber to the Washington Post, you can listen to impromptu ad free on Apple Podcasts when you connect your subscription. Thanks for listening.

Speaker G
With certificates, degrees, courses and specializations, University of Washington professional and continuing education makes it possible for you to learn anything, anywhere. Whatever you set out to accomplish, from updating your skills to delving into a new field, we can help you find a way to your future self. Applications are open. Learn more at pce uw.edu uw professional and continuing education there's a path for you.

Speaker A
It's better over here.

Speaker E
After investing billions to light up our network, T Mobile is America's largest 5G network. Plus, right now you can switch keep your phone and we'll pay it off up to $800. See how you can save on every plan versus Verizon and at and T at t mobile.com AcrossAmerica, up to four.

Speaker F
Lines via virtual prepaid card allow 15 days qualifying unlocked device credit service ported 90 plus days with device ineligible carrier and timely redemption required. Card has no cash access and expires in six months.