Project 2 by Mark Christian

Central claim

mmc382 — 2025-02-20 15:35:57 UTC

Gen Z’s close proximity to the internet is making them sick and stopping them from developing positively. We should change how society handles children's technology and Internet use.

Reflection

mmc382 — 2025-02-20 15:38:40 UTC

His Introduction

Haidt utilizes surprising statistics in order to catch the reader's attention immediately. He also mentions that the issue he's highlighting is global, making sure his audience is as large as possible. This is because he has a specific goal to give everyone his claim. I will make sure to write an introduction which has the write hook for my target audience.

The Evidence's Flow

The way Haidt uses evidence almost makes it seem like he is not using evidence in the first place. What I mean by this is his clever flow stitches together his evidence in a discrete way, making it unsure to the audience when one evidence starts and another ends. In this way, his evidence is a lot easier to read together, making it much stronger. I'll try to use evidence in the same way in my essays.

The Overall Structure

Haidt specifically added titles to his sub-sections, to make it as clear as possible. He has a lot of content to get through, so he wanted to label and sort his evidence so that it's much more coherent. I'm not sure yet if I want to use sub-headings, but I will definitely find pieces of evidence which work well together and at least have sub-sections without the headers.

Key Terms

mmc382 — 2025-02-20 15:39:01 UTC

5. So Many Harms

mmc382 — 2025-02-20 16:25:58 UTC

Social media causes lower grades from fragmented attention
Internet use is addictive, bringing emotional changes
Internet exposure causes a saturation of many less important issues, clouding the major ones.
Not even Gen Z themselves sees their social media as positive

Study

mmc382 — 2025-02-20 16:46:32 UTC

"Studies confirm that when students have access to their phones during class time, they use them, especially for texting and checking social media, and their grades and learning suffer"

Book

mmc382 — 2025-02-20 16:51:46 UTC

"The neural basis of behavioral addiction to social media or video games is not exactly the same as chemical addiction to cocaine or opioids. Nonetheless, they all involve abnormally heavy and sustained activation of dopamine neurons and reward pathways. Over time, the brain adapts to these high levels of dopamine; when the child is not engaged in digital activity, their brain doesn’t have enough dopamine, and the child experiences withdrawal symptoms. These generally include anxiety, insomnia, and intense irritability."

Statistics

mmc382 — 2025-02-20 17:10:34 UTC

"But as soon as they adopted a phone-based life and many began to live in the whirlpool of social media, where no stability can be found, every measure of despair increased. From 2010 to 2019, the number who agreed that their lives felt 'meaningless' increased by about 70 percent, to more than one in five."

Freya India's Perspective

mmc382 — 2025-02-20 18:20:26 UTC

"Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncontrolled global social experiment. We were the first to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us, all the time, before we had any sense of who we were. We didn’t just grow up with algorithms. They raised us. They rearranged our faces. Shaped our identities. Convinced us we were sick."

7. Collective-Action Problems

mmc382 — 2025-02-20 19:41:49 UTC

Social media is averse from drugs because you can't really choose to not use the internet
Also, it affects people who don't use it as well.
Even adolescents who dislike social media keep in to not become socially isolated.

Statistic

mmc382 — 2025-02-20 19:44:02 UTC

"Teens could and did choose, in large numbers, not to smoke. Even at the peak of teen cigarette use, in 1997, nearly two-thirds of high-school students did not smoke."

Reasoning

mmc382 — 2025-02-20 19:49:53 UTC

Social media, let alone the Internet, is forcibly pushed onto almost everyone.

Study

mmc382 — 2025-02-20 19:52:27 UTC

"On average, students said they’d need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen."

Collective-Action Problem:

mmc382 — 2025-02-20 19:54:44 UTC

An issue where the members of a group would benefit more from working together, except they don't because of conflicting interests.

Socially Isolated:

mmc382 — 2025-02-20 19:56:17 UTC

A state of mind in which the person feels as if they are alone, with no connections, even if they are around people and even if they talk to others.

Fragmented Attention

mmc382 — 2025-02-20 19:58:52 UTC

A state of attention which is split between multiple trains of thought or activities. As opposed to multi-tasking, this is only negative.

Article

mmc382 — 2025-02-20 20:01:10 UTC

"Early app developers deliberately and knowingly exploited the psychological weaknesses and insecurities of young people to pressure them to consume a product that, upon reflection, many wish they could use less, or not at all."

Prominent Person

mmc382 — 2025-02-20 20:08:26 UTC

When our public life becomes fragmented, ephemeral, and incomprehensible, it is a recipe for anomie, or normlessness. The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim showed long ago that a society that fails to bind its people together with some shared sense of sacredness and common respect for rules and norms is not a society of great individual freedom

2. The Virtual World Arrives in Two Waves

mmc382 — 2025-02-20 20:12:30 UTC

The internet arrived in two waves: One which barely affected millennials, and the other which changed Gen Z forever
The second, which came with high-speed internet and the iPhone, changed the virtual world forever.
- It became possible for adolescents to spend every waking moment online.

Slow impact in the first wave

mmc382 — 2025-02-22 21:44:32 UTC

By 2003, 55 percent of American households had a computer with (slow) internet access. Rates of adolescent depression, loneliness, and other measures of poor mental health did not rise in this first wave. If anything, they went down a bit.

The Age of Smartphones

mmc382 — 2025-02-22 21:47:47 UTC

In 2011, only 23 percent of teens had a smartphone. By 2015, that number had risen to 73 percent, and a quarter of teens said they were online “almost constantly.”

Summary

mmc382 — 2025-02-25 20:18:33 UTC

I decided to structure my map almost like a timeline, with my sub-claims connected to each other. This is to give myself more space for each sub-claim. I placed key terms from each sub-claim above them to make it so you can read them all at once or read them with each sub-claim as well. Every one of his paragraphs has essentially hidden evidence among the words, where he references it and then the words are a hyperlink to the evidence. So, I decided to link the evidence to each sub-claim and some have reasoning to make it more clear on why they connect.

Sedentary

mmc382 — 2025-02-26 00:17:48 UTC

The tendency to stay inactive and seated, usually inside for a lot of your life. A type of lifestyle.

3. Techno-optimism and the Birth of the Phone-Based Childhood

mmc382 — 2025-02-26 00:20:18 UTC

Technology was viewed as positive and the negatives weren’t thought about when it was established.

Digital Natives:

mmc382 — 2025-02-26 00:21:27 UTC

The first generation of humans who were born surrounded by the "Digital Age", ore the forefront of the Internet. This roughly covers Gen Z.

Counterpoint: Techno-Optimism

mmc382 — 2025-02-26 00:24:59 UTC

The Internet, when it was created, was obviously the first of its kind. The people behind it were almost idolized as gods as their age, many wanted to be just like them. "When pundits and entrepreneurs talked about the power of social media to transform society, it didn't sound like a dark prophecy"(Haidt).

Reasoning: Digital Frontier

mmc382 — 2025-02-26 00:28:04 UTC

The internet and computers were seen as "the vanguards of progress", and young people as "digital natives"(Haidt), as of they were conquering a new frontier. So, why not give children a head start? Haidt himself though giving his 2 year old son Haidt's phone, and how that the child could learn how to use it as "his future job prospects improving"(Haidt).

Parent's policy at the forefront

mmc382 — 2025-02-26 00:31:07 UTC

Many parents still did have concerns on children talking to strangers and such.

4. The High Cost of a Phone-Based Childhood

mmc382 — 2025-02-27 15:53:11 UTC

Phone-based childhood is much less healthy than in person meeting, and Gen Z has been doing much less of the latter.

Book

mmc382 — 2025-02-27 16:20:22 UTC

The cost of anything is the amount of life that is exchanged for it, whether it be immediately or in the long run. - Henry David Thoreau in Walden

Reasoning

mmc382 — 2025-02-27 16:31:44 UTC

American teens spend five hours a day on social media, with 7-9 hours total screentime. The numbers are higher for single-parent, low-income, and some minority families

Article

mmc382 — 2025-02-27 16:32:19 UTC

51% of U.S. teenagers spend at least four hours daily on social media
Older teens, girls exceed the overall average in social media time
Personality traits, parental restrictions are key factors in teens’ use

Census

mmc382 — 2025-02-27 16:33:47 UTC

Between 2019 and 2021, the total amount of screen media used each day went from 4:44 to 5:33 among tweens, and from 7:22 to 8:39 among teens. This is a much faster increase in just two years than was seen in the previous four years.

Article

mmc382 — 2025-02-27 16:34:57 UTC

Given the sociodemographic differences in problematic screen use, digital literacy education strategies can focus on at-risk populations, encourage targeted counseling by pediatricians, and adapt family media use plans for diverse backgrounds.

Opportunity Cost

mmc382 — 2025-02-27 16:40:44 UTC

An economist term which details that choosing an opportunity has a cost of not choosing the alternatives

Addiction

mmc382 — 2025-02-27 16:57:04 UTC

A condition in which someone feels compelled to a specific drug or activity

Heady

mmc382 — 2025-02-27 16:58:22 UTC

To have a strong effect on a group of people.

Reasoning

mmc382 — 2025-02-27 17:34:23 UTC

Although cigarettes and video games are both addictive, the difference is that the internet is almost required to use and even pressured by others..