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I thought y'all should read this

I have a free trial to News+ so I copy-pasted it for you here. I don't think Jonathan Haidt would object to more people having this info.

Tumblr wouldn't let me post it until i removed all the links to Haidt's sources. You'll have to take my word that everything is sourced.

End the Phone-Based Childhood Now

The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.

By Jonathan Haidt

Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.

The problem was not limited to the U.S.: Similar patterns emerged around the same time in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, the Nordic countries, and beyond. By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.

The decline in mental health is just one of many signs that something went awry. Loneliness and friendlessness among American teens began to surge around 2012. Academic achievement went down, too. According to “The Nation’s Report Card,” scores in reading and math began to decline for U.S. students after 2012, reversing decades of slow but generally steady increase. PISA, the major international measure of educational trends, shows that declines in math, reading, and science happened globally, also beginning in the early 2010s.

As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likelyto live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z.

Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley’s preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. “Something has really gone wrong,” Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

Generations are not monolithic, of course. Many young people are flourishing. Taken as a whole, however, Gen Z is in poor mental health and is lagging behind previous generations on many important metrics. And if a generation is doing poorly––if it is more anxious and depressed and is starting families, careers, and important companies at a substantially lower rate than previous generations––then the sociological and economic consequences will be profound for the entire society.

What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theories abound, but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.

I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents’ smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.

As a social psychologist who has long studied social and moral development, I have been involved in debates about the effects of digital technology for years. Typically, the scientific questions have been framed somewhat narrowly, to make them easier to address with data. For example, do adolescents who consume more social media have higher levels of depression? Does using a smartphone just before bedtime interfere with sleep? The answer to these questions is usually found to be yes, although the size of the relationship is often statistically small, which has led some researchers to conclude that these new technologies are not responsible for the gigantic increases in mental illness that began in the early 2010s.

But before we can evaluate the evidence on any one potential avenue of harm, we need to step back and ask a broader question: What is childhood––including adolescence––and how did it change when smartphones moved to the center of it? If we take a more holistic view of what childhood is and what young children, tweens, and teens need to do to mature into competent adults, the picture becomes much clearer. Smartphone-based life, it turns out, alters or interferes with a great number of developmental processes.

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world.

My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.

1. The Decline of Play and Independence

Human brains are extraordinarily large compared with those of other primates, and human childhoods are extraordinarily long, too, to give those large brains time to wire up within a particular culture. A child’s brain is already 90 percent of its adult size by about age 6. The next 10 or 15 years are about learning norms and mastering skills—physical, analytical, creative, and social. As children and adolescents seek out experiences and practice a wide variety of behaviors, the synapses and neurons that are used frequently are retained while those that are used less often disappear. Neurons that fire together wire together, as brain researchers say.

Brain development is sometimes said to be “experience-expectant,” because specific parts of the brain show increased plasticity during periods of life when an animal’s brain can “expect” to have certain kinds of experiences. You can see this with baby geese, who will imprint on whatever mother-sized object moves in their vicinity just after they hatch. You can see it with human children, who are able to learn languages quickly and take on the local accent, but only through early puberty; after that, it’s hard to learn a language and sound like a native speaker. There is also some evidence of a sensitive period for cultural learning more generally. Japanese children who spent a few years in California in the 1970s came to feel “American” in their identity and ways of interacting only if they attended American schools for a few years between ages 9 and 15. If they left before age 9, there was no lasting impact. If they didn’t arrive until they were 15, it was too late; they didn’t come to feel American.

Human childhood is an extended cultural apprenticeship with different tasks at different ages all the way through puberty. Once we see it this way, we can identify factors that promote or impede the right kinds of learning at each age. For children of all ages, one of the most powerful drivers of learning is the strong motivation to play. Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: to wire up their brains by playing vigorously and often, practicing the moves and skills they’ll need as adults. Kittens will play-pounce on anything that looks like a mouse tail. Human children will play games such as tag and sharks and minnows, which let them practice both their predator skills and their escaping-from-predator skills. Adolescents will play sports with greater intensity, and will incorporate playfulness into their social interactions—flirting, teasing, and developing inside jokes that bond friends together. Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play.

One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail—often—in environments in which failure is not very costly. This is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate in order to take on larger challenges later. The ever-present possibility of getting hurt while running around, exploring, play-fighting, or getting into a real conflict with another group adds an element of thrill, and thrilling play appears to be the most effective kind for overcoming childhood anxieties and building social, emotional, and physical competence. The desire for risk and thrill increases in the teen years, when failure might carry more serious consequences. Children of all ages need to choose the risk they are ready for at a given moment. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults.

Human childhood and adolescence evolved outdoors, in a physical world full of dangers and opportunities. Its central activities––play, exploration, and intense socializing––were largely unsupervised by adults, allowing children to make their own choices, resolve their own conflicts, and take care of one another. Shared adventures and shared adversity bound young people together into strong friendship clusters within which they mastered the social dynamics of small groups, which prepared them to master bigger challenges and larger groups later on.

And then we changed childhood.

The changes started slowly in the late 1970s and ’80s, before the arrival of the internet, as many parents in the U.S. grew fearful that their children would be harmed or abducted if left unsupervised. Such crimes have always been extremely rare, but they loomed larger in parents’ minds thanks in part to rising levels of street crime combined with the arrival of cable TV, which enabled round-the-clock coverage of missing-children cases. A general decline in social capital––the degree to which people knew and trusted their neighbors and institutions––exacerbated parental fears. Meanwhile, rising competition for college admissions encouraged more intensive forms of parenting. In the 1990s, American parents began pulling their children indoors or insisting that afternoons be spent in adult-run enrichment activities. Free play, independent exploration, and teen-hangout time declined.

In recent decades, seeing unchaperoned children outdoors has become so novel that when one is spotted in the wild, some adults feel it is their duty to call the police. In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that parents, on average, believed that children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in front of their house, and that kids should be 14 before being allowed to go unsupervised to a public park. Most of these same parents had enjoyed joyous and unsupervised outdoor play by the age of 7 or 8.

2. The Virtual World Arrives in Two Waves

The internet, which now dominates the lives of young people, arrived in two waves of linked technologies. The first one did little harm to Millennials. The second one swallowed Gen Z whole.

The first wave came ashore in the 1990s with the arrival of dial-up internet access, which made personal computers good for something beyond word processing and basic games. 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. Millennial teens (born 1981 through 1995), who were the first to go through puberty with access to the internet, were psychologically healthier and happier, on average, than their older siblings or parents in Generation X (born 1965 through 1980).

The second wave began to rise in the 2000s, though its full force didn’t hit until the early 2010s. It began rather innocently with the introduction of social-media platforms that helped people connect with their friends. Posting and sharing content became much easier with sites such as Friendster (launched in 2003), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2004).

Teens embraced social media soon after it came out, but the time they could spend on these sites was limited in those early years because the sites could only be accessed from a computer, often the family computer in the living room. Young people couldn’t access social media (and the rest of the internet) from the school bus, during class time, or while hanging out with friends outdoors. Many teens in the early-to-mid-2000s had cellphones, but these were basic phones (many of them flip phones) that had no internet access. Typing on them was difficult––they had only number keys. Basic phones were tools that helped Millennials meet up with one another in person or talk with each other one-on-one. I have seen no evidence to suggest that basic cellphones harmed the mental health of Millennials.

It was not until the introduction of the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and high-speed internet (which reached 50 percent of American homes in 2007)—and the corresponding pivot to mobile made by many providers of social media, video games, and porn—that it became possible for adolescents to spend nearly every waking moment online. The extraordinary synergy among these innovations was what powered the second technological wave. 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.” Their younger siblings in elementary school didn’t usually have their own smartphones, but after its release in 2010, the iPad quickly became a staple of young children’s daily lives. It was in this brief period, from 2010 to 2015, that childhood in America (and many other countries) was rewired into a form that was more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development.

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

The phone-based childhood created by that second wave—including not just smartphones themselves, but all manner of internet-connected devices, such as tablets, laptops, video-game consoles, and smartwatches—arrived near the end of a period of enormous optimism about digital technology. The internet came into our lives in the mid-1990s, soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. By the end of that decade, it was widely thought that the web would be an ally of democracy and a slayer of tyrants. When people are connected to each other, and to all the information in the world, how could any dictator keep them down?

In the 2000s, Silicon Valley and its world-changing inventions were a source of pride and excitement in America. Smart and ambitious young people around the world wanted to move to the West Coast to be part of the digital revolution. Tech-company founders such as Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin were lauded as gods, or at least as modern Prometheans, bringing humans godlike powers. The Arab Spring bloomed in 2011 with the help of decentralized social platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. When pundits and entrepreneurs talked about the power of social media to transform society, it didn’t sound like a dark prophecy.

You have to put yourself back in this heady time to understand why adults acquiesced so readily to the rapid transformation of childhood. Many parents had concerns, even then, about what their children were doing online, especially because of the internet’s ability to put children in contact with strangers. But there was also a lot of excitement about the upsides of this new digital world. If computers and the internet were the vanguards of progress, and if young people––widely referred to as “digital natives”––were going to live their lives entwined with these technologies, then why not give them a head start? I remember how exciting it was to see my 2-year-old son master the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone in 2008. I thought I could see his neurons being woven together faster as a result of the stimulation it brought to his brain, compared to the passivity of watching television or the slowness of building a block tower. I thought I could see his future job prospects improving.

Touchscreen devices were also a godsend for harried parents. Many of us discovered that we could have peace at a restaurant, on a long car trip, or at home while making dinner or replying to emails if we just gave our children what they most wanted: our smartphones and tablets. We saw that everyone else was doing it and figured it must be okay.

It was the same for older children, desperate to join their friends on social-media platforms, where the minimum age to open an account was set by law to 13, even though no research had been done to establish the safety of these products for minors. Because the platforms did nothing (and still do nothing) to verify the stated age of new-account applicants, any 10-year-old could open multiple accounts without parental permission or knowledge, and many did. Facebook and later Instagram became places where many sixth and seventh graders were hanging out and socializing. If parents did find out about these accounts, it was too late. Nobody wanted their child to be isolated and alone, so parents rarely forced their children to shut down their accounts.

We had no idea what we were doing.

4. The High Cost of a Phone-Based Childhood

In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of … life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” It’s an elegant formulation of what economists would later call the opportunity cost of any choice—all of the things you can no longer do with your money and time once you’ve committed them to something else. So it’s important that we grasp just how much of a young person’s day is now taken up by their devices.

The numbers are hard to believe. The most recent Gallup data show that American teens spend about five hours a day just on social-media platforms (including watching videos on TikTok and YouTube). Add in all the other phone- and screen-based activities, and the number rises to somewhere between seven and nine hours a day, on average. The numbers are even higher in single-parent and low-income families, and among Black, Hispanic, and Native American families.

In Thoreau’s terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it. Everything else in an adolescent’s day must get squeezed down or eliminated entirely to make room for the vast amount of content that is consumed, and for the hundreds of “friends,” “followers,” and other network connections that must be serviced with texts, posts, comments, likes, snaps, and direct messages. I recently surveyed my students at NYU, and most of them reported that the very first thing they do when they open their eyes in the morning is check their texts, direct messages, and social-media feeds. It’s also the last thing they do before they close their eyes at night. And it’s a lot of what they do in between.

The amount of time that adolescents spend sleeping declined in the early 2010s, and many studies tie sleep loss directly to the use of devices around bedtime, particularly when they’re used to scroll through social media. Exercise declined, too, which is unfortunate because exercise, like sleep, improves both mental and physical health. Book reading has been declining for decades, pushed aside by digital alternatives, but the decline, like so much else, sped up in the early 2010s. With passive entertainment always available, adolescent minds likely wander less than they used to; contemplation and imagination might be placed on the list of things winnowed down or crowded out.

But perhaps the most devastating cost of the new phone-based childhood was the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face. A study of how Americans spend their time found that, before 2010, young people (ages 15 to 24) reported spending far more time with their friends (about two hours a day, on average, not counting time together at school) than did older people (who spent just 30 to 60 minutes with friends). Time with friends began decreasing for young people in the 2000s, but the drop accelerated in the 2010s, while it barely changed for older people. By 2019, young people’s time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day. It turns out that Gen Z had been socially distancing for many years and had mostly completed the project by the time COVID-19 struck.

You might question the importance of this decline. After all, isn’t much of this online time spent interacting with friends through texting, social media, and multiplayer video games? Isn’t that just as good?

Some of it surely is, and virtual interactions offer unique benefits too, especially for young people who are geographically or socially isolated. But in general, the virtual world lacks many of the features that make human interactions in the real world nutritious, as we might say, for physical, social, and emotional development. In particular, real-world relationships and social interactions are characterized by four features—typical for hundreds of thousands of years—that online interactions either distort or erase.

First, real-world interactions are embodied, meaning that we use our hands and facial expressions to communicate, and we learn to respond to the body language of others. Virtual interactions, in contrast, mostly rely on language alone. No matter how many emojis are offered as compensation, the elimination of communication channels for which we have eons of evolutionary programming is likely to produce adults who are less comfortable and less skilled at interacting in person.

Second, real-world interactions are synchronous; they happen at the same time. As a result, we learn subtle cues about timing and conversational turn taking. Synchronous interactions make us feel closer to the other person because that’s what getting “in sync” does. Texts, posts, and many other virtual interactions lack synchrony. There is less real laughter, more room for misinterpretation, and more stress after a comment that gets no immediate response.

Third, real-world interactions primarily involve one‐to‐one communication, or sometimes one-to-several. But many virtual communications are broadcast to a potentially huge audience. Online, each person can engage in dozens of asynchronous interactions in parallel, which interferes with the depth achieved in all of them. The sender’s motivations are different, too: With a large audience, one’s reputation is always on the line; an error or poor performance can damage social standing with large numbers of peers. These communications thus tend to be more performative and anxiety-inducing than one-to-one conversations.

Finally, real-world interactions usually take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen. But in many virtual networks, people can easily block others or quit when they are displeased. Relationships within such networks are usually more disposable.

These unsatisfying and anxiety-producing features of life online should be recognizable to most adults. Online interactions can bring out antisocial behavior that people would never display in their offline communities. But if life online takes a toll on adults, just imagine what it does to adolescents in the early years of puberty, when their “experience expectant” brains are rewiring based on feedback from their social interactions.

Kids going through puberty online are likely to experience far more social comparison, self-consciousness, public shaming, and chronic anxiety than adolescents in previous generations, which could potentially set developing brains into a habitual state of defensiveness. The brain contains systems that are specialized for approach (when opportunities beckon) and withdrawal (when threats appear or seem likely). People can be in what we might call “discover mode” or “defend mode” at any moment, but generally not both. The two systems together form a mechanism for quickly adapting to changing conditions, like a thermostat that can activate either a heating system or a cooling system as the temperature fluctuates. Some people’s internal thermostats are generally set to discover mode, and they flip into defend mode only when clear threats arise. These people tend to see the world as full of opportunities. They are happier and less anxious. Other people’s internal thermostats are generally set to defend mode, and they flip into discover mode only when they feel unusually safe. They tend to see the world as full of threats and are more prone to anxiety and depressive disorders.

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.” These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.

5. So Many Harms

The debate around adolescents’ use of smartphones and social media typically revolves around mental health, and understandably so. But the harms that have resulted from transforming childhood so suddenly and heedlessly go far beyondmental health. I’ve touched on some of them—social awkwardness, reduced self-confidence, and a more sedentary childhood. Here are three additional harms.

Fragmented Attention, Disrupted Learning

Staying on task while sitting at a computer is hard enough for an adult with a fully developed prefrontal cortex. It is far more difficult for adolescents in front of their laptop trying to do homework. They are probably less intrinsically motivated to stay on task. They’re certainly less able, given their undeveloped prefrontal cortex, and hence it’s easy for any company with an app to lure them away with an offer of social validation or entertainment. Their phones are pinging constantly—one study found that the typical adolescent now gets 237 notifications a day, roughly 15 every waking hour. Sustained attention is essential for doing almost anything big, creative, or valuable, yet young people find their attention chopped up into little bits by notifications offering the possibility of high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences.

It even happens in the classroom. 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. This might explain why benchmark test scores began to decline in the U.S. and around the world in the early 2010s—well before the pandemic hit.

Addiction and Social Withdrawal

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. Kids with these kinds of behavioral addictions often become surly and aggressive, and withdraw from their families into their bedrooms and devices.

Social-media and gaming platforms were designed to hook users. How successful are they? How many kids suffer from digital addictions?

The main addiction risks for boys seem to be video games and porn. “Internet gaming disorder,” which was added to the main diagnosis manual of psychiatry in 2013 as a condition for further study, describes “significant impairment or distress” in several aspects of life, along with many hallmarks of addiction, including an inability to reduce usage despite attempts to do so. Estimates for the prevalence of IGD range from 7 to 15 percent among adolescent boys and young men. As for porn, a nationally representative survey of American adults published in 2019 found that 7 percent of American men agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I am addicted to pornography”—and the rates were higher for the youngest men.

Girls have much lower rates of addiction to video games and porn, but they use social media more intensely than boys do. A study of teens in 29 nations found that between 5 and 15 percent of adolescents engage in what is called “problematic social media use,” which includes symptoms such as preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, neglect of other areas of life, and lying to parents and friends about time spent on social media. That study did not break down results by gender, but many others have found that rates of “problematic use” are higher for girls.

I don’t want to overstate the risks: Most teens do not become addicted to their phones and video games. But across multiple studies and across genders, rates of problematic use come out in the ballpark of 5 to 15 percent. Is there any other consumer product that parents would let their children use relatively freely if they knew that something like one in 10 kids would end up with a pattern of habitual and compulsive use that disrupted various domains of life and looked a lot like an addiction?

The Decay of Wisdom and the Loss of Meaning

During that crucial sensitive period for cultural learning, from roughly ages 9 through 15, we should be especially thoughtful about who is socializing our children for adulthood. Instead, that’s when most kids get their first smartphone and sign themselves up (with or without parental permission) to consume rivers of content from random strangers. Much of that content is produced by other adolescents, in blocks of a few minutes or a few seconds.

This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations and, to some extent, from the accumulated wisdom of humankind, including knowledge about how to live a flourishing life. Adolescents spend less time steeped in their local or national culture. They are coming of age in a confusing, placeless, ahistorical maelstrom of 30-second stories curated by algorithms designed to mesmerize them. Without solid knowledge of the past and the filtering of good ideas from bad––a process that plays out over many generations––young people will be more prone to believe whatever terrible ideas become popular around them, which might explain why videos showing young people reacting positively to Osama bin Laden’s thoughts about America were trending on TikTok last fall.

All this is made worse by the fact that so much of digital public life is an unending supply of micro dramas about somebody somewhere in our country of 340 million people who did something that can fuel an outrage cycle, only to be pushed aside by the next. It doesn’t add up to anything and leaves behind only a distorted sense of human nature and affairs.

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; it is, rather, a place where disoriented individuals have difficulty setting goals and exerting themselves to achieve them. Durkheim argued that anomie was a major driver of suicide rates in European countries. Modern scholars continue to draw on his work to understand suicide rates today.

Durkheim’s observations are crucial for understanding what happened in the early 2010s. A long-running survey of American teens found that, from 1990 to 2010, high-school seniors became slightly less likely to agree with statements such as “Life often feels meaningless.” 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.

6. Young People Don’t Like Their Phone-Based Lives

How can I be confident that the epidemic of adolescent mental illness was kicked off by the arrival of the phone-based childhood? Skeptics point to other events as possible culprits, including the 2008 global financial crisis, global warming, the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting and the subsequent active-shooter drills, rising academic pressures, and the opioid epidemic. But while these events might have been contributing factors in some countries, none can explain both the timing and international scope of the disaster.

An additional source of evidence comes from Gen Z itself. With all the talk of regulating social media, raising age limits, and getting phones out of schools, you might expect to find many members of Gen Z writing and speaking out in opposition. I’ve looked for such arguments and found hardly any. In contrast, many young adults tell stories of devastation.

Freya India, a 24-year-old British essayist who writes about girls, explains how social-media sites carry girls off to unhealthy places: “It seems like your child is simply watching some makeup tutorials, following some mental health influencers, or experimenting with their identity. But let me tell you: they are on a conveyor belt to someplace bad. Whatever insecurity or vulnerability they are struggling with, they will be pushed further and further into it.” She continues:

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.

Rikki Schlott, a 23-year-old American journalist and co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind, writes,

"The day-to-day life of a typical teen or tween today would be unrecognizable to someone who came of age before the smartphone arrived. Zoomers are spending an average of 9 hours daily in this screen-time doom loop—desperate to forget the gaping holes they’re bleeding out of, even if just for … 9 hours a day. Uncomfortable silence could be time to ponder why they’re so miserable in the first place. Drowning it out with algorithmic white noise is far easier."

A 27-year-old man who spent his adolescent years addicted (his word) to video games and pornography sent me this reflection on what that did to him:

I missed out on a lot of stuff in life—a lot of socialization. I feel the effects now: meeting new people, talking to people. I feel that my interactions are not as smooth and fluid as I want. My knowledge of the world (geography, politics, etc.) is lacking. I didn’t spend time having conversations or learning about sports. I often feel like a hollow operating system.

Or consider what Facebook found in a research project involving focus groups of young people, revealed in 2021 by the whistleblower Frances Haugen: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens,” an internal document said. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

7. Collective-Action Problems

Social-media companies such as Meta, TikTok, and Snap are often compared to tobacco companies, but that’s not really fair to the tobacco industry. It’s true that companies in both industries marketed harmful products to children and tweaked their products for maximum customer retention (that is, addiction), but there’s a big difference: 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.

Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on nonusers, at a much younger age and in a more insidious way. Once a few students in any middle school lie about their age and open accounts at age 11 or 12, they start posting photos and comments about themselves and other students. Drama ensues. The pressure on everyone else to join becomes intense. Even a girl who knows, consciously, that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the loop, clueless, and excluded. And indeed, if she resists while most of her classmates do not, she might, in fact, be marginalized, which puts her at risk for anxiety and depression, though via a different pathway than the one taken by those who use social media heavily. In this way, social media accomplishes a remarkable feat: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.

A recent study led by the University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn captured the dynamics of the social-media trap precisely. The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That’s a standard economist’s question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. 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.

Social media is all about network effects. Most students are only on it because everyone else is too. Most of them would prefer that nobody be on these platforms. Later in the study, students were asked directly, “Would you prefer to live in a world without Instagram [or TikTok]?” A majority of students said yes––58 percent for each app.

This is the textbook definition of what social scientists call a collective-action problem. It’s what happens when a group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but each actor is deterred from acting, because unless the others do the same, the personal cost outweighs the benefit. Fishermen considering limiting their catch to avoid wiping out the local fish population are caught in this same kind of trap. If no one else does it too, they just lose profit.

Cigarettes trapped individual smokers with a biological addiction. Social media has trapped an entire generation in a collective-action problem. 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.

8. Four Norms to Break Four Traps

Young people and their parents are stuck in at least four collective-action traps. Each is hard to escape for an individual family, but escape becomes much easier if families, schools, and communities coordinate and act together. Here are four norms that would roll back the phone-based childhood. I believe that any community that adopts all four will see substantial improvements in youth mental health within two years.

No smartphones before high school

The trap here is that each child thinks they need a smartphone because “everyone else” has one, and many parents give in because they don’t want their child to feel excluded. But if no one else had a smartphone—or even if, say, only half of the child’s sixth-grade class had one—parents would feel more comfortable providing a basic flip phone (or no phone at all). Delaying round-the-clock internet access until ninth grade (around age 14) as a national or community norm would help to protect adolescents during the very vulnerable first few years of puberty. According to a 2022 British study, these are the years when social-media use is most correlated with poor mental health. Family policies about tablets, laptops, and video-game consoles should be aligned with smartphone restrictions to prevent overuse of other screen activities.

No social media before 16

The trap here, as with smartphones, is that each adolescent feels a strong need to open accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms primarily because that’s where most of their peers are posting and gossiping. But if the majority of adolescents were not on these accounts until they were 16, families and adolescents could more easily resist the pressure to sign up. The delay would not mean that kids younger than 16 could never watch videos on TikTok or YouTube—only that they could not open accounts, give away their data, post their own content, and let algorithms get to know them and their preferences.

Phone‐free schools

Most schools claim that they ban phones, but this usually just means that students aren’t supposed to take their phone out of their pocket during class. Research shows that most students do use their phones during class time. They also use them during lunchtime, free periods, and breaks between classes––times when students could and should be interacting with their classmates face-to-face. The only way to get students’ minds off their phones during the school day is to require all students to put their phones (and other devices that can send or receive texts) into a phone locker or locked pouch at the start of the day. Schools that have gone phone-free always seem to report that it has improved the culture, making students more attentive in class and more interactive with one another. Published studies back them up.

More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

Many parents are afraid to give their children the level of independence and responsibility they themselves enjoyed when they were young, even though rates of homicide, drunk driving, and other physical threats to children are way down in recent decades. Part of the fear comes from the fact that parents look at each other to determine what is normal and therefore safe, and they see few examples of families acting as if a 9-year-old can be trusted to walk to a store without a chaperone. But if many parents started sending their children out to play or run errands, then the norms of what is safe and accepted would change quickly. So would ideas about what constitutes “good parenting.” And if more parents trusted their children with more responsibility––for example, by asking their kids to do more to help out, or to care for others––then the pervasive sense of uselessness now found in surveys of high-school students might begin to dissipate.

It would be a mistake to overlook this fourth norm. If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.

The main reason why the phone-based childhood is so harmful is because it pushes aside everything else. Smartphones are experience blockers. Our ultimate goal should not be to remove screens entirely, nor should it be to return childhood to exactly the way it was in 1960. Rather, it should be to create a version of childhood and adolescence that keeps young people anchored in the real world while flourishing in the digital age.

9. What Are We Waiting For?

An essential function of government is to solve collective-action problems. Congress could solve or help solve the ones I’ve highlighted—for instance, by raising the age of “internet adulthood” to 16 and requiring tech companies to keep underage children off their sites.

In recent decades, however, Congress has not been good at addressing public concerns when the solutions would displease a powerful and deep-pocketed industry. Governors and state legislators have been much more effective, and their successes might let us evaluate how well various reforms work. But the bottom line is that to change norms, we’re going to need to do most of the work ourselves, in neighborhood groups, schools, and other communities.

There are now hundreds of organizations––most of them started by mothers who saw what smartphones had done to their children––that are working to roll back the phone-based childhood or promote a more independent, real-world childhood. (I have assembled a list of many of them.) One that I co-founded, at LetGrow.org, suggests a variety of simple programs for parents or schools, such as play club (schools keep the playground open at least one day a week before or after school, and kids sign up for phone-free, mixed-age, unstructured play as a regular weekly activity) and the Let Grow Experience (a series of homework assignments in which students––with their parents’ consent––choose something to do on their own that they’ve never done before, such as walk the dog, climb a tree, walk to a store, or cook dinner).

Parents are fed up with what childhood has become. Many are tired of having daily arguments about technologies that were designed to grab hold of their children’s attention and not let go. But the phone-based childhood is not inevitable.

The four norms I have proposed cost almost nothing to implement, they cause no clear harm to anyone, and while they could be supported by new legislation, they can be instilled even without it. We can begin implementing all of them right away, this year, especially in communities with good cooperation between schools and parents. A single memo from a principal asking parents to delay smartphones and social media, in support of the school’s effort to improve mental health by going phone free, would catalyze collective action and reset the community’s norms.

We didn’t know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It’s time to end the phone-based childhood.

This article is adapted from Jonathan Haidt’s forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

#phones are bad #childhood

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castielsdeadlyparasol · 2 months

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I am sitting in a now empty bathtub and realizing that my blood sugar is a little low. This is unfortunately the place in my apartment where I am furthest from any food. I am also feeling POTSy and the two thing mixed together leave me kind of frightened to stand as this is also the room where i am most likelyto hit my head on something hard and/or pointy if I fall. Now, I do have friends in my building but unfortunately my door is both locked and has the chain on so that is not an option. There is the added difficulty of my cat laying on the bath mat exactly where I would step to get out of the tub. This is also a clawfoot tub. So not only is it one and a half to two feet deep, it is another four to six inches off the ground. This is no dinky little hotel tub that I could basically roll out of, this is a real grown up tub. And while I normally love it, tonight is is a trap.

#pots #spoonie #spoonie problems

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fagcrisis · 1 year

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bc i rembered tma exists i am now thinking about. which one of them is most likelyto watch wrestling (its georgie)

#galléros fecó naplója

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fishcommunity · 7 months

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so. I have a green Texas cichlid (well. My parents have) in a 180 litre tank with total 8 African cichlids, 4 dragon blood peacocks, 3 electric yellow, and 1 I forgot the name of but he's like the electric yellows just with white fins. I know my guy should have a bigger tank and not be with the other fish, how much longer can he stay in there safely? He is only slightly bigger than my hand (over 10 cm long?) and is adorable. We've had him for a year now already. I'm going to save up and see if we can get a 300 litre aquarium just for him, will that be enough? He's already bigger than every other fish in there. I'll probably be able to get a new tank by June, hopefully. And if I can get a tank for him, should I try and make it planted? I'm pretty sure he'd destroy the plants but I want something interesting for him. Can I put objects in the aquarium for him to play with? I will cycle the tank properly before he goes in of course, just want ideas for how it should be set up for him. The reason him and the others are in the 180 litre is mostly because my dad.

Hi there! Let's see if I can help some.

African and American Cichlids are kind of difficult to place together consistently. They don't really "speak the same language" and getting a peaceful tank with both kinds is usually harder. But that said I have seen it work before. As for length of time - there are a lot of factors including sex and length and hiding spots and feeding and tempterature, but the easiest answer is that it lasts as long as it lasts. Either somebody will get mean one day and beat up the others. Or not. But peacocks and yellows are among the more peaceful african cichlids so I give you better odds.

300 liters (about 80 gallons) is a little smaller than I'd recommend given their maximum size of 12 inches (30 cm), but they arent especially likelyto break 8 inches (20 cm) so it has a fair chance of being sufficient for the entire life of the fish.

He will probably destroy most plants you try planting, but you can give some cold water plants like anacharis and hornwort a shot. I've heard of some fish playing fetch but don't think you should expect it :) just change up the tank every so often if you think they need a change.

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dandelionstep-moved · 2 years

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im the viewer variety streamers who are former minecraft streamers areworried about being the majority cause frankly yeah i am like 75%more likelyto watch if youre doing mine craft than anything else.sorry #honesty

#txt #this iswhy origins coming back well it would be a big win for wilson.autism won today

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jamethedealmaker · 2 months

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So I'm wanting to transition so I look less feminine, and I hear writing things out can help ease stress, so here are things that stress¹ me out about it. (Keep in mind I haven't even scheduled an appointment to talk to a doctor about it lol) (these will be sorted by how reasonable my stress levels about it are (not reasonable to probably reasonable / least likely to happen to most likelyto happen))

1. Being forced to do injections or have a pellet implanted in my skin. These ones (from my reaserch) may be the most effective but needles stress me out especially when I could get by without it² and get simalar benefits to it (i.e gel/patches for testosterone)

2. Being denied for it like forever (this one is like least concern tbh)

3. Regular blood drawings. I know they have to monitor hormone levels but that requires blood drawing with requires needles (actually this might help me get over my needle related issues, especially if whoever does it manages to do it without blowing³ out my veins⁴)

Footnotes

¹ I'm using stress as a loose term which is covering fear as well

² vaccines, I get vaccinated cuz I hate being sick more then needles

³ I don't know the correct term, please correct in your head

⁴ the first time I got blood drawn the person who did it burst (blew out?) My veins 4 times and I was young and I kept getting stabbed by needles. It was a disaster

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drdamiang · 3 months

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KETTLE

the kettle

switched itself in

wanting ti discover

something about

the physics

of hor water

and me,

not

to get too critical,

invariably in

hot water myself

and thus everything

surrounding me

that has me

penned in here,

likelyto go

off at

a tangent,

reach boiling point

explode into metaphor

fire is my element

and elements

cannot be

destroyed just

changed, or replaced

feel myself combining over

issue of who has

what is needed, is eager

to give, to whom

of counter

inclination is

burning, bursting

with enthusiasm free and

eager to

give

or same, same,

weird as that sounds,

enough to take me way

past my

threshhold, over

limit

beyond containment itself

and so

I leave chains, splitting and

shredding, breed

such a kerfuffle

you, guiltless though

you might claim, bystander

though you might be

are simply

swept away, sucked

into my dance

know what it feels like

quintessence

of Sun

to have

become

to have been

(if but for a moment)

the light

of a star

my kettle

my cauldron

sweet devastation (we

secretly

seeded with)

all

you might ever

hope for

ultimately

scrawled here

on this backboard

board

black as

the Universe but

such an

elegant hand

#poem #satire #nuclear #creative #physics #elements

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salesmotivation · 11 months

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What is Confirmed Delivery?

In the world of marketing, it’s crucial to ensure that your messages reach their intended recipients. This is where “confirmed delivery” comes into play. Let’s explore what confirmed delivery means and why it matters for your marketing team:

Definition of Confirmed Delivery:

Confirmed delivery refers to a mechanism that verifies whether a message or communication has been successfully delivered to its intended recipient. It provides you with assurance that your message reached the target audience.

Why Confirmed Delivery Matters:

Reliability & Accountability:

With confirmed delivery, you can rely on the fact that your messages are being received by customers. – It holds both the sender and the service provider accountable for successful message transmission. – You can track and confirm which recipients have received your communications. 2. Optimize Communication Strategy: By knowing which messages were successfully delivered,you gain insights into engagement rates.& effectiveness of different campaigns.. Use this data to refine& optimize your communication strategy, focusing on channels or methods that yield higher confirmed delivery rates.. 3. Customer Satisfaction :

When customers receive important information in a timely manner,it enhances their experience withyour brand. – Confirmed delivery reduces instances of missed updates,ensuring customers don’t feel left outor uninformed. – Improved customer satisfaction leads to stronger relationships and fosters loyalty. 4. Regulatory Compliance :

In certain industries,such as finance or healthcare,maintaining compliance with regulations is critical.

– Confirmed delivery helps demonstrate adherence to regulatory requirements by providing evidenceof successful message transmission.. 5.Tracking Engagement Metrics :

Tracking confirmations allows you to monitor user behavior patternsand measure campaign success.. -* Analyze open rates,response rates,and click-through rates based on those who receivedthe messages*, enablingyou togauge interest levelsand make informed decisions moving forward.

Methods for Achieving Confirmed Delivery:

Read Receipts : Some communication channels,such as email,offer read receipts to confirm that a recipient has opened a message.. – This provides confirmation but depends on the recipient’s settings and may not be universally available.

Delivery Confirmation Notifications Many messaging platforms provide delivery notifications or status updates that indicate whether a message was delivered successfully..

Response Tracking: By tracking responses to your messages,you can infer successful delivery. -* For example,in SMS marketing,if recipients respond with inquiries or take desired actions, it indicates they received the initial message*.

Third-party Services & APIs: Utilize third-party services and application programming interfaces (APIs)that offer advanced tracking capabilities for confirmed delivery.. These solutions integrate with various communication channels and provide detailed insights into message transmission.

Incorporating Confirmed Delivery in Your Marketing Strategy:

Choose Reliable Communication Channels :

Select trustworthy channels known for their high delivery rates& reliable performance.. – Consider factors like user preferences, audience demographics,and industry standards when determining which channels to prioritize.

Testing & Monitoring :

Regularly test your messaging systemsand monitor metricslike bounce ratesor undelivered messages.. -* Identify any issues earlyand implement necessary improvementsfor better confirmed delivery rates.*

Segment Recipients Based on Engagement :

Segmenting your audience based on engagement levels helps you focus resourceson those more likelyto receiveyour messages successfully.

-* Tailoring communicationsbased on these segments enhances confirmeddelivery ratesand improves overall campaign effectiveness.*

By prioritizing confirmed delivery in your marketing efforts, you ensure that your key messages reach the right people at the right time. It strengthens customer relationships, improves satisfaction, and allows you to gather valuable data for continuous improvement. Incorporate strategies such as read receipts, delivery notifications, response tracking, and third-party services/APIs, to achieve optimal results in your marketing campaigns

#saas #gamification #b2bmarketing #startup

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barbarewjohnson · 2 years

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Digital Content Creation Services: The Top 5 Providers

Are you looking for a digital content creation service? There are many options available, but how do you know which is the best for your needs? Here are 5 of the top digital content creation services to help you make an informed decision.

Digital content creation services can help you with a wide range of tasks, from creating website content to developing marketing materials. While there are many different providers to choose from, not all of them offer the same quality or level of service. To ensure that you find the right provider for your needs, it’s important to take the time to compare your options and read reviews from past clients.

What is a digital content creation service?

A digital content creation service is a company that specializes in the development and production of digital content. This can include anything from website design and development to video production and editing. A digital content creation service will have a team of experienced professionals who are skilled in various aspects of online marketing and media production.

The main goal of a digital content creation service is to help businesses promote their products or services online through the use of engaging and creative content. This type of service can be extremely beneficial for companies who want to reach a larger audience with their message but don’t have the time or resources to do it themselves.

When choosing a digital content creation service, it’s important to find one that has a good reputation and can provide you with examples of their work. You should also make sure that they understand your specific goals for the project and have a clear plan for how they will achieve them. If you take the time to find a reputable and experienced digital content creation service, you can be confident that your online presence will get the boost it needs to succeed.

What are the benefits of using a digital content creation service?

There are many benefits to using a digital content creation service. A digital content creation service can help you save time and money by creating high-quality content for your website or blog.Digital content creation services can also help you create unique, engaging content that will capture the attention of your audience and keep them coming back for more.

Here are just a few of the benefits of using a digital content creation service:

1. Save time – When you use a digital content creation service, you can save yourself a lot of time by having someone else create high-quality content for your website or blog. This way, you can focus on other aspects of running your business, such as marketing and customer relations.

2. Save money – Hiring a professional to create qualitycontent can actually end up saving you money in the long run. Sure, you may have to pay someone upfront to produce the content, but it will be worth it when you don’t have to spend time doing it yourself or paying someoneelse to do it forpoor quality results..

3 Increase traffic – Oneof the best ways to increase traffic to your website is by providing visitors with fresh, original and engaging content on a regular basis. Ifyou regularly update your site with new blog posts or articles, people will keep coming back for more informationand is likelyto share your site with others..

4 Enhance credibility – By featuring well-written and informative articles on your website or blog,you can enhance your credibility as an expertin your industryor niche market . This is essential ifyou wantto build trustwith potential customersor clients..

5 Generate leads – In additionto increasing trafficand enhancing credibility , regularly publishing greatcontentcan also help generate

How can you use a digital content creation service to improve your online presence?

There are many ways that a digital content creation service can improve your online presence. One way is by increasing traffic to your website. A well-designed and informative website is more likely to attract visitors than a site that is poorly designed or lacks information. A digital content creation service can help you design an attractive and informative website. In addition, a digital content creation service can also provide you with quality content for your website. This content can include articles, blog posts, e-books, infographics, and videos. Quality content helps to increase the amount of time that visitors spend on your site, which can lead to higher search engine rankings and more customers or clients.

Another way that a digital content creation service can improve your online presence is by helping you create social media accounts and populate them with high-quality content. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ are excellent places to connect with potential customers or clients. However, simply creating social media accounts is not enough; you must also populate them with engaging content on a regular basis. A digitalcontentcreation service can help you develop a social media strategy and create qualitycontent for your social media accounts

What are some tips for creating great digital content?

Assuming you want tips for creating digital content:

1. Get to know your audience and what they want to see from you. This will help guide the type of content you create and how you format it to be most effective.

2. Plan ahead! Having a editorial calendar can help keep you organized and on track with producing fresh, new content regularly.

3. Keep it varied. Try not to stick to just one type of content or format; mix things up to keep things interesting for both you and your viewers/readers.

How can you make sure your digital content is effective?

1. Make sure your digital content is effective by using a digital content creation service. This will ensure that your content is well-written, engaging, and informative.

2. Use a variety of methods to promote your content, including social media, email marketing, and paid advertising.

3. Measure the results of your efforts and make adjustments as needed to ensure that your digital content is having the desired effect.

Why use a professional digital content creation service?

There are a few key reasons to use a professional digital content creation service:

1. Services like these have the experience and expertise to produce high-quality content. This is important because, in today’s online landscape, users are bombarded with an overwhelming amount of content. In order to stand out, your content needs to be well-written and engaging.

2. A good digital content creation service will also help you save time. Creating compelling content takes a lot of effort and can be quite time-consuming. If you don’t have the bandwidth to produce all the content yourself, it makes sense to hire someone else to do it for you.

3. Working with a professional service will also ensure that your content is SEO-optimized from the start. This is important because it ensures that your target audience will actually see your content when they are searching online for related topics.

Overall, using a professional digital content creation service is a smart move if you want to produce high-quality, engagingcontent that will reach your target audience./n/nServices like Content Creation UK can help take your business tousers who might not otherwise find you through organic search traffic alone

Conclusion

There are a variety of digital content creation services available on the market today. The top five providers of these services are Outbrain, ContentGather, eZanga, Contently, and Skyword. Each service provides a different set of features and benefits that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of your business. When selecting a provider, it is important to consider your specific needs and objectives.

The post Digital Content Creation Services: The Top 5 Providers appeared first on SwiftCreator.com.

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#experience supplying #administrative support #complex schedules #budgeting #multiple projects #Excel

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christophermraerdon · 2 years

Text

Digital Content Creation Services: The Top 5 Providers

youtube

What is a digital content creation service?

What are the benefits of using a digital content creation service?

Here are just a few of the benefits of using a digital content creation service:

5 Generate leads – In additionto increasing trafficand enhancing credibility , regularly publishing greatcontentcan also help generate

How can you use a digital content creation service to improve your online presence?

What are some tips for creating great digital content?

Assuming you want tips for creating digital content:

1. Get to know your audience and what they want to see from you. This will help guide the type of content you create and how you format it to be most effective.

2. Plan ahead! Having a editorial calendar can help keep you organized and on track with producing fresh, new content regularly.

3. Keep it varied. Try not to stick to just one type of content or format; mix things up to keep things interesting for both you and your viewers/readers.

How can you make sure your digital content is effective?

1. Make sure your digital content is effective by using a digital content creation service. This will ensure that your content is well-written, engaging, and informative.

2. Use a variety of methods to promote your content, including social media, email marketing, and paid advertising.

3. Measure the results of your efforts and make adjustments as needed to ensure that your digital content is having the desired effect.

Why use a professional digital content creation service?

There are a few key reasons to use a professional digital content creation service:

Conclusion

The post Digital Content Creation Services: The Top 5 Providers appeared first on SwiftCreator.com.

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#computer scientist #experimental roboticist #university of denver #assistant professor #computer sci

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drunkonaboat · 2 years

Text

So, does anyone se find that incremental reductions are a significant issue?

I see this at levels of life. Politically we see marginal interests take priority over valid spending due to niche but relatable concerns.

At work I recieve constant feedback from my team that they feel that their lives are being made more difficult and more eresponsibiltiies put on them where the only benefit is to the senior managers demanding more.

I know this sounds like a generic worker rights post but it isn't. It has direct implications to the business. My team used to have to enter their timesheets weekly, describing what they worked on by the end of Monday for the previous week. Now they have been informed that they have to do so by the end of Friday for that week, and not only that, all managers will be informed of anyone who hasn't entered the full week at 4pm on the Friday for that week.

This means that managers now have to chase individuals even if they are booking their time within the specified deadline just because they didn't predict the future and preemptively book their final couple of hours of the week before actually doing them.

Now broadly speaking this could be okay. Managers should understand what they are seeing and what their team are likelyto do. "Yeah I know that guy Duncan hasn't entered his time yet but he normally does so at 6pm firday because it suits his schedule" etc.

Most if the time this is fine, some workers are mild annoyed but get over it and others complain but jt probably isn't the difference between staying and leaving the company.

What senior management don't see is the subtleties involved. This might not be the only reason someone leaves, but it could easily be the tipping point, but the review won't show that, it will pick up on many different issues leading to a resignation.

They also won't see the degradation on quality of reporting caused by and questions that arise due to tight deadlines "should I book to code x or y?" Or what happens if the timecode owner disputes any bookings?

All around what it means is that the people in charge who like to look at numbers and make broad sweeping decisons/statements will benefit as they get their reports a day or so earlier. But everyone else in the chain suffers as the information is rushed, less accurate and causes stress.

But no I dividual reason is ever able to stem the progress. When I started at this company timesheets were deliverable monthly and prone to error and well understood. Now they are highly inaccurate and taken as gospel truth. This is because none of the individual infringements amounted to enough to justify the prevention of "progress" for the sake of "progress". But together they represent the destruction of meaningful data and a significant cost associated with increased staff attrition.

This whole post may not mean anything to anyone outside the it professional services industry. But personally I see it as a microcosm of bad decision making that mirrors the wider world; just because something seems like a no loss win, doesn't mean that it is actually free from broader costs. Nothing happens in isolation and there are always impacts to the wider ecosystem. Every decision made, no matter how apparently "free" it is has consequences that have most likely not been considered.

#capitalism #it #work #sysadmin #socialism #evolution #politics #thepainandsufferingoflivinglifeingeneral #iamdrunkafasitypethis #ohgodthepainofexistenceisrwal andiwantittostop

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realitybleeds-a · 4 years

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casper was well used to getting stared at. certainly not as often before the incident on the boardwalk, but now the mark made him stand out. the wine red blotch of skin underneath his eye, the burn that wasn’t a burn. whatever it was, it was never going to heal. whatever was hiding in amongst those flames had claimed him.

still, he scowled at the woman staring at him from the other end of the tube platform. she was giving him that kind of look, the mix of disgust and almost... horror. the surprising thing is that she was close to his age. usually the looks came from mothers or the elderly, surprised at his apparently indignity to show his face in public. casper is usually willing to dismiss it as mere curiosity but the longer she fuckin’ stares, that urge of violence ingrained in him festers more. when the platform appears mostly empty apart from the two of them, he stands from the metal seat and storms over to her. ❝ is there something you want to say to me, hm? ❞ casper tilts his head to the side as he queries her, hands shoved into jean pockets.

@praemetuere liked for a starter from casper! (for melanie)

#praemetuere #behind my eyes is rage alone — ( ic : casper sterling. )#hope this works for ya!!#figured since we have a thread with martin already and melanie seems the most likelyto uh #get along with casper

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