Voices in the Ether

This book is about how the rise of tiny pocket computers has been bad for children. It goes after, not only the pocket computers, but social media and video games. The video games bit feels a little "old man yells at clouds" and reminds me of the concern trolling about metal music and rap music. It just feels like someone doesn't like video games and has not played them with their friends.

Chapters five, six and seven are probably the most important parts of this book. Chapter five talks about social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation and addiction.

Then chapter six insists that social media harms girls more than it harms boys. Basically, girls and boys use social media differently. The girls are more social online, and this can make disorders that are social worse. For example, eating disorders can become worse when girls engage in social media. If you are interested in girls sports, social media will be happy to send you down an anorexia rabbit hole. Self-harm can become worse when girls are discussing it. There are girls who do not have dissociative identity disorder acting like they have it because they see it on the internet, and it seems cool. The same thing happens with Tourette syndrome. Girls are more affected by visual social comparison. Their aggression is relational. They will harm each other's friendships to attack one another. Girls share emotions and disorders. It says that girls are more subject to predation and harassment, but I think we should worry about boys with this too because over the past few years there have been sextortion scams against teen boys that have led to suicide.

Chapter seven on boys is more vibes-based. Boys are not engaging socially on the internet. They are watching a bunch of YouTube and playing video games. Haidt leans heavily into Johann Hari's book Stolen Focus that I reviewed here about two years ago. This chapter has graphs, but it is vibes-based because they did not actually find evidence of pocket computers harming boys in the literature. There is some discussion about how boys fail to launch, and hikikomori, a Japanese term for man children who hide in their rooms and come out at night when the rest of the family is asleep. There is a section on boyhood without real-world risk that was common in boyhood before. Mary Pat Campbell, an actuary, likes to discuss "the fatal stupid period" where boys are taking the type of risks that lead to their own deaths. The age range that she is discussing is probably in the early twenties while the one that Haidt is discussing is in the teens. Anyway, the chapter on boys discusses a lot of addictions that are not real like "video game addiction" and "porn addiction." I mean, people can choose not to control themselves with this stuff and can get into repetitive habits, but classifying a bunch of this as addiction feels like people should be exerting some self-control. Haidt mentions that the research on video games shows that video games have benefits.

Then in Chapter 8, he talks about spiritual degradation, and how people should have spiritual practice. This is the type of Haidt nonsense that drives me up the wall. If you think spiritual practice is important, then let us know what spiritual framework you are working in. A lot of people are honest about what religion they are operating in but Haidt always has a spiritual view from nowhere in his books. There was a graph with an x-y-z axis in this chapter to make it feel more science-y. My son was looking over my shoulder and made fun of it. The x axis was closeness. The y axis was hierarchy, and the z axis was divinity.

Chapter 10 is asking for laws, and it mentions that the Age Appropriate Design Code was passed in the UK. Then it mentions the US Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). A lot of people were concerned about KOSA because some implementations seem to want companies that are doing bad things with user data to collect more user data on children. Haidt proposed that the information be gathered by a third party, but having a third party gather the information does not reduce the risk of a database of children's information being out there. He suggested blockchain could fix this problem, but I am not sure how blockchain could fix this problem. This chapter discusses how congress has been pretty useless on passing laws related to tech, and he is correct on that one.

This book seemed very tech-forward for a book that is telling you to keep your kids away from phones. It is talking about blockchain and AI as if these are useful things. It is talking about the metaverse as if it is a positive thing. And some of this stuff like the metaverse has not actually proven to be useful in any way at all. With AI, it is just too soon to tell, and we probably should not be throwing AI at kids just to find out if it is useful or if they are going to be using it to generate porn.

Chapters 11 and 12 about what schools can do and what parents can do were a lot stronger than some of the earlier chapters.

The Facebook whistleblower testimony from Frances Haugen was mentioned in this book, and that was some of the stronger stuff about the ages of kids Facebook is collecting information on.

There are probably a lot of people doing research on Human Computer Interaction who have studied the behavior of teens online, but the folks who worked on this book did not look into any of that it seems. I think it would have been stronger if they looked into some of the research in that field.