Get Smart

Jean discovered that 2012 was the first year that a majority of Americans owned a smartphone; by 2015, two-thirds of teens did too. This was also the period when social media use moved from optional to ubiquitous among adolescents….

By 2012, as the world now knows, the major platforms had created an outrage machine that made life online far uglier, faster, more polarized and more likely to incite performative shaming. In addition, as Instagram grew in popularity over the next decade, it had particularly strong effects on girls and young women, inviting them to “compare and despair” as they scrolled through posts from friends and strangers showing… lives that had been edited and re-edited until many were closer to perfection than to reality.

In a paper they recently published related to teenage loneliness, Haidt and Twenge report the findings of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which surveys 15-year-olds in dozens of countries every three years. It asks six questions about loneliness at school, and although loneliness is certainly not the same as depression, “the two are correlated — lonely teens are often depressed teens, and vice versa. And loneliness is painful even without depression.”

In 36 out of 37 countries, loneliness at school has increased since 2012. They found the same pattern in all regions, regardless of geography or culture: “Teenage loneliness was relatively stable between 2000 and 2012…. But in the six years after 2012, rates increased dramatically. They roughly doubled in Europe, Latin America, and the English-speaking countries…. This synchronized global increase in teenage loneliness suggests a global cause, and the timing is right for smartphones and social media to be major contributors.”