“Digital social media is damaging the mental health of young people. This is a statement you can find all over the media these days. Like a mantra repeated ad nauseam since the revelation of the Wall Street Journal on a hidden Facebook study validating this “truth” about the effects of Instagram on young people.
The Facebook study is a survey based on discussion groups that is part of an industrial logic and whose goal is to create communication tools for Facebook. This study has no scientific value and, by the company’s own admission, “cannot provide statistical estimates for the correlation between Instagram and mental health.” We believe that it is necessary to consider more what the data drawn from studies with validated scientific methodologies say, which are not subject to the interested expectations of industrialists, nor to worn media discourse on the dangerousness of social media towards mental health.
Since the 1920s and the first research into direct media effects, we often fall victim to this “media effects theory”.
We seek to confirm this widely shared intuition that media harms our mental health. The novels of the XIXe century would have caused hysteria among young women, then cinema and radio soap operas became the pet peeves of young people, and what about the strong effects of television and, more recently, video games.
Yet, numerous studies have shown that the direct effects of the media are weak or nonexistent. No, the media do not directly cause violence, delinquency, addiction, or anxiety. Rather, the scientific literature indicates that the use of the media is part of banal and ordinary practices, even harmless. If we find that a person is watching too much television, their mental health is rightly concerned. But not the “effect” of television on his state of health. Compulsive behavior is an indicator of a disorder in the individual, not the result of a prescriptive or addictive effect of the technology. We must not take the consequence for the cause.
Benefits
The same logic should apply when it comes to digital media and young people. While abusive and compulsive behaviors can be correlated with a variety of mental health problems, that doesn’t mean they cause those problems. Other positive correlations indicate as many benefits to mental health (Facebook research has also reported many positive effects, yet they are not reported with the same energy and the same interest). A nuanced and scientific reading of the evidence should lead us to instead value education and prevention in mental health instead of concluding that there is a ban on social media.
Research into social and digital uses reminds us that each new technology arouses a lot of deep concerns, even moral panics, about health and, in particular, that of young people. These debates have practically become a fundamental cultural aspect of our modernity.
Confirmation bias plays an important role here in the way we approach our relationship with digital technology. We tend to retrieve any information that confirms our intuition about the dangerousness of digital technology, particularly when we invoke the vulnerability of young people.
Yet, as eminent sociologist Henry Jenkins reminds us, “when we spend too much time worrying about what the internet is doing to our children, we lose track of what they’re doing with the internet.” If we want to have a healthy social debate, this narrow vision of juvenile practices must give way to a more nuanced, complex and less risky or conflictual reading and understanding. As a society, we go to great lengths to ban screens. But, much of this fear and anxiety comes from a misunderstanding (or at least an incomplete understanding) of what teens live, think and do.
Are there any teens who have an unhealthy relationship with technology? Yes. Yet the majority of those we label as screen junkies are actually their friend junkies. Young people say it: screens are not a rejection of life, on the contrary, they are a way for them to “engage” in life. Online, they create personal spaces for themselves where they can chat, flirt, complain, create, share passions, express emotions, have fun or just hang out. The screens multiply the possibilities of socializing between teenagers while allowing them to develop an identity and an independence. They offer spaces for experimentation, research for autonomy and, through connectivity, exchange between peers and the feeling of belonging to a group.
It is simplistic, even dangerous and deterministic, to reduce everything to the sole use of screens or social networks. It is also illusory to think that current social problems will disappear if young people use them less.
The health of our young people is serious and the current debates on the screens are more than important. Yes, screens and social media are transforming teens. Because they are actors – and not simple passive spectators – of this transformation. They allow them to understand an increasingly interconnected and entangled world brimming with possibilities for social interactions.
* Co-signer: Nellie Brière, digital communications strategist, trainer for the National Institute of Image and Sound (INIS) and techno columnist. In addition, Nina Duque is a doctoral student and lecturer in the department of social and public communication at the University of Quebec in Montreal.
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