Jonathan Haidt makes his key points from the start of the book, and you truly wonder what he will write in the next 300 pages that will interest the reader, yet he manages to be substantiated, broad in his knowledge base, and equally generous to the opinion of other perspectives, yet the data and evidence are clear enough. Children learn a lot of social skills by playing: outdoor, physical activities with changing alliances, and with the obvious insight that nobody is good at everything all the time. You win, you loose. He uses Gray's definition on the value of play: "play requires suppression of the drive to dominate and enables the formation of long-lasting cooperative bonds". Social media do the exact opposite.
"The way young people use social media is generally not much like free play. In fact, posting and commenting on social media sites is the opposite of Gray's definition. Life on the platforms forces young people to become their own branq. managers, always thinking ahead about the social consequences of each photo, video, comment, and emoji they choose. Each action is not necessarily done for its own sake: rather, every public action is, to some degree, strategic. It is, in Peter Gray's phrase, consciously pursued to achieve ends that are distinct from the activity itself. Even for kids who never post anything, spending time on social media sites can still be harmful because of the chronic social comparison, the unachievable beauty standards, and the enormous amount of time taken away from everything else in life" (p. 57)
And the value of outdoor play is clear:
"Unsupervised outdoor play teaches children how to handle risks and challenges of many kinds. By building physical, psychological, and social competence, it gives kids confidence that they can face new situations, which is an inoculation against anxiety. (...) a healthy human childhood with a lot of autonomy and unsupervised play in the real. world se'ts- children's brains to operate mostly in ''discover mode," with a well-developed attachment system and an ability to handle the risks of daily life. Conversely, when there is society-wide pressure on parents to adopt modern overprotective parenting, it sets children's brains to operate mostly in ''defend mode, with less secure attachment and reduced ability to evaluate or handle risk. (p. 72)
The systematic use and access to social media as of a young age, can have devastating results for future development:
"The human brain reaches 90% of its adult size by age 5, and it has far more neurons and synapses at that moment than it will have in its adult form. Subsequent brain development, therefore, is not about overall growth but about the selective pruning of neurons and synapses, leaving only the ones that have been frequently used. Brain researchers say, ''Neurons that fire together, wire together," meaning that activities that repeatedly activate a constellation of neurons cause those neurons to connect more closely. If a child goes through puberty doing a lot of archery, or painting, or video games, or social media, those activities will cause lasting structural changes in the brain, especially if they are rewarding. (p. 102)
And this also results in effects on gender activities and motivations:
"The two motives are woven together in changing patterns across the life course, and that weaving is particularly important for adolescents who are developing their identities. Part of defining the self comes from successfully integrating into groups; part of being attractive to groups is demonstrating one's value as an individual with unique skills. Researchers have long found that boys and men are more focused on agency strivings while girls and women are more focused on communion strivings. The fact that these gender differences have decreased over time tells us that they result in part from cultural factors and forces. The fact that they emerge early in children's play and can be found in the gendered play patterns of other primates tells us that there is probably a biological contribution as well. (p. 163)
In user statistics across the globe, the impact of social media on the mental well-being, suicides and school results are confirmed again and again.
"When everything moved onto smartphones in the early 2010s, both girls and boys experienced a gigantic increase in the number of their social ties and in the time required to service these ties (such as reading and commenting on the posts of acquaintances or maintaining dozens of Snapchat ''streaks'' with people who are not your closest friends). This explosive growth necessarily caused a decline in the number and depth of close friendships" (p. 180)
Young people become isolated instead of feeling part of a larger group, one that gives them confidence, in which they can play an active role, in which they can listen and be listened to.
"Durkheim argued that Homo sapiens could just as well be called Homo duplex, or two-level man, for we exist on two very different levels. We spend most of our lives as individuals pursuing our own interests. He called this the realm of the ''profane,'' which means the ordinary day-to-day world where we are very concerned about our own wealth, health, and reputation. But Durkheim showed that nearly all societies have created rituals and communal practices for pulling people 'up,' temporarily, into the realm of the sacred, where the self recedes and collective interests predominate. Think of Christians singing hymns together every Sunday in church; think of Muslims circling the Kaaba in Mecca; think of civil rights marchers singing as they walked. Evidence that these two levels are available to everyone, even outside a religious context, can be found in the ways that fans of sports teams use similar techniques to bind themselves toge.ther before a game with pep rallies, the singing of fight songs, and shared consciousness alteration (usually from alcohol), along with a variety of quasireligious rituals, superstitions, and body markings. It is a thrill to be one of thousands of fans in a stadium, all singing and stomping in unison after each goal or touchdown. Durkheim called this state of energized communion ''collective effervescence.';
This is one of the founding insights of sociology: Strong communities don't just magically appear whenever people congregate and communicate. The strongest and most satisfying communities come into being when something lifts people out of the lower level so that they have powerful collective experiences. They all enter the realm of the sacred together, at the same time. When they return to the profane level, where they need to be most of the time to address the necessities of life, they have greater trust and affection for each other as a result of their time together in the sacred realm. They are also happier and have lower rates of suicide. (p. 218)
He takes it a step higher when discussing the value of spiritual experience in the largest sense, better described by 'awe' for the world around us, including man-made elements:
"Awe is triggered by two simultaneous perceptions: first, that what you are looking at is vast in some way, and, second, that you can't fit it into your existing mental structures. That combination seems to trigger a feeling in people of being small in a profoundly pleasurable - although sometimes also fearful - way. Awe opens us to changing our beliefs, allegiances, and behaviors. Dacher (...) and his students collected thousands of accounts of awe experiences from people around the world and sorted them into the 'eight most common categories, which he calls the ''eight wonders of life": they are moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spiritual and religious awe, life and death, and epiphanies (moments in which a new and grand understanding dawns). 'p. 228)
"Soon before his death in 1662, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote a paragraph often paraphrased as ''there is a God-shaped hole in every human heart." I believe he was right. In "The Righteous Mind" I drew on the writings of Charles Darwin and the biologist David Sloan Wilson to explain how natural selection might have carved that hole: humanity went through a long period of what is known as multilevel selection in which groups competed with groups, while at the same time individuals competed with individuals within each group. The most cohesive groups won, and humans evolved - by both biological and cultural evolution - an adaptation that made their groups even more cohesive: religiosity (including both the fear and the love of gods). (p. 213)
An excellent book that I can recommend to any parent and grandparent, even if his writing is very scientific and aimed at policy-makers and educators more than to citizens, but I think we will all benefit if the monster of social media can be reigned in to create value instead of devastation.
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