The State of the Conversation
Welcome new subscribers—and longtime subscribers as well! Last week’s post about the politics of refusal apparently struck a nerve. I’ve loved reading your comments, including the many that were sent privately. The response made me wonder about the current state of the discourse about Gaza and why so many people are expressing frustration with it. I’d love to hear from you about your personal role in the public conversation (particularly if you use social media).
And Now On To This Month’s Links and Thinks
On The Impacts of Social Media
Jonathan Haidt has a new book about teens and smart phones, which has resulted in a number of pieces on the topic in the standard-bearing media outlets. (Whatever else you might think about him, the guy definitely knows how to get a conversation started.) Having spent the past five years exploring the impact of social media on teens, I don’t need to be persuaded that we need to erect some barriers between young people and a technology that makes them more anxious and isolated, less resilient and independent, and dramatically increases the threat and the impact of bullying. The question is, how?
Kids want to know this as well. When I talk to groups of middle and high school students, I don’t have to convince them that social media is bad for them. They know. They just don’t know how to escape it. As this New Yorker piece explains:
A University of Chicago working paper published last year found that fifty-seven per cent of college students who are active users of Instagram would “prefer to live in a world without the platform.”
When he was in high school, my son told me once that he wished social media had never been invented.But since social media had been invented, he continued, he had no choice but to use it. I often feel the same way. We are all shackled to the same engine and while each of us knows that we could theoretically unshackle ourselves and walk away, the interconnectedness of the structure makes it hard to do alone.
That’s why schools have such an important role to play in limiting smart phone access, as this Washington Post piece describes. Because not only do phones disrupt classroom learning, they also disrupt the social learning that happens during unstructured time. The article quotes an eighth-grader named Gabe Silver about the self-locking Yondr pouches that students at a Connecticut middle school have to put their phones in at the start of the school day. (The pouches allow students to keep their phones with them but cannot be opened on school grounds.)
When the pouches first arrived, “everyone was miserable and no one was talking to each other,” he said. Now he can hear the difference at lunch and in the hallways. It’s louder. Students are chatting more “face to face, in person,” Gabe said. “And that’s a crucial part of growing up.”
Some Troubling Tech-Fueled Trends
Peggy Orenstein is one of my favorite writers. Her work on teens and sex is unparalleled for its candor, compassion, and intelligence. So when she says that we need to be worried about young women experiencing brain damage from both consensual and nonconsensual sexual strangulation, I believe her. Her recent New York Times article, which is deeply troubling, underscores the problem with young people getting their sexual education from online porn, where choking is portrayed as something women either want or deserve.
For the past four years, Dr. Herbenick has been tracking the rapid rise of “rough sex” among college students, particularly sexual strangulation, or what is colloquially referred to as choking. Nearly two-thirds of women in her most recent campus-representative survey of 5,000 students at an anonymized “major Midwestern university” said a partner had choked them during sex (one-third in their most recent encounter). The rate of those women who said they were between the ages 12 and 17 the first time that happened had shot up to 40 percent from one in four.
Sometimes I wish that all technology innovation had to be vetted by middle schoolers, who are certain to take the newest and shiniest innovations and use it to do the dumb and hurtful stuff they’ve always done. Such is the case with Fizz, an anonymous social media apt that is the latest delivery system for cyberbullying, and AI, which has created an epidemic of fake nudes. Over the past month or two, nearly every school I’ve visited has dealt with an incident in which a male student has used AI to generate nudes of female students. The New York Times discusses how schools are addressing this distressing trend here. A quote:
Boys in several states have used widely available “nudification” apps to pervert real, identifiable photos of their clothed female classmates, shown attending events like school proms, into graphic, convincing-looking images of the girls with exposed A.I.-generated breasts and genitalia. In some cases, boys shared the faked images in the school lunchroom, on the school bus or through group chats on platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, according to school and police reports.
And, in case you missed it, it turns out that the racist and antisemitic rant that caused a Maryland high school principal to be placed on leave was indeed an AI-generated fake. The culprit in this case was the school’s athletic director, but there’s no doubt in my mind that students will be using vocal simulations in appalling ways in the very near future.
On Discussions Across Differences
Remember that high school in Queens where students rioted after a Jewish teacher changed her social media profile photo to an image of her holding up an “I Stand With Israel” sign? It was one of the big stories of the fall, as hundreds of students tried to get into the teacher’s classroom while calling for her to be fired. Recently, the teacher wrote a piece about what happened next, after the outrage machine moved on to the next jump scare:
I had a choice to transfer to a different school. I stayed to use the experience to connect, to listen, learn, debunk misinformation and combat intolerance. The day I returned to school, a Palestinian friend (a fellow teacher) and I met with students. I answered their questions and shared my feelings. I repeated the hurtful, threatening and untrue things that students had said during the riot and on social media − helping them connect with my humanity, and their own. Many of my students hugged me and apologized for what had occurred.
Thanks to the wonderful Article Club newsletter, which I highly recommend, I came across this piece about students at a liberal arts college in Boston taking a class on conservative thought. I was intrigued by the premise. What happens when left-leaning students are asked to engage with right-leaning material? A quote:
Perhaps somewhat ironically, on the first day of class, Hersh issues a “trigger warning.” He tells students to expect conversations about intense political issues, and while everyone has “hateful thoughts” from time to time, the spirit of the class is to foster genuine discussion and curiosity. To achieve that, he advises the students to ease up on language policing. “Give each other wiggle room,” he cautions, “because as you try to articulate a position, at first, it may come out wrong.”
It should be no secret to readers of this newsletter that I believe passionately in the power of conversation, particularly around topics that are emotional, challenging, and complex. We should all be familiar with the threats to those conversation that are coming from authoritarian forces on the right. But the same impulses are also troublingly visible on the left, as George Packer writes in this week’s Atlantic in response to the controversy art PEN America that I wrote about last week. A quote:
But authoritarianism is not just a form of government where leaders jut out their chins, jackbooted police march around with batons, and jails fill up with dissidents. It’s also a habit of mind, marked by impatience with complexity, intolerance of dissent, readiness to coerce agreement. The authoritarian spirit can infect democracies that have long traditions of freedom, but it uses weapons other than state power. The main one is public opinion.
Social media has turbocharged the power of public opinion, group-think, and social shaming to short-circuit our critical capacities. We all should be particularly vigilant in the places where we feel the most comfortable.
Two Short Films
Filmmaker Tiffany Shlain has made an informative and compassionate short film about the adolescent brain. Anyone who is a teenager or who spends time with one should watch it.
Filmaker Andy Sarjahani animates the story of an Iranian woman who must decide whether to take a stand during the recent protests for democracy and women’s rights. It feels particularly salient in this historical moment, for many reasons.
Link Recap
Can We Get Kids Off Smart Phones? — The New Yorker
How a Connecticut middle school won the battle against cellphones — Washington Post
The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex—New York Times
Teen Girls Confront an Epidemic of Deepfake Nudes in Schools—New York Times
School athletic director arrested for framing principal using AI voice synthesis—Ars Technica
My students rioted after I said, 'I stand with Israel.' Here's how we came together after.—USA Today
A Conservative Thought Experiment on a Liberal College Campus—Boston Globe
When Writers Silence Writers—The Atlantic
The Teen Brain—Directed by Tiffany Shlain
The Smallest Power—Directed by Andy Sarjahani
What did you read this month? Let me know in the comments.
Thank you for the great articles — Peggy Orenstein’s in particular. And thank you for the shout-out!