Anything that encourages people, particularly the young, to be liked and to seek social acceptance should be greeted with a great deal of skepticism and suspicion. From Thaddeus G. McCotter at amgreatness.com:
The societal dimension of hardwiring youth to become hypersensitive to “social feedback”—i.e., “peer pressure”—within their network will have an immense and deleterious impact upon a free society.
As the New Year commences, I peeked into the rearview mirror and rediscovered an article that appeared in Lisa DePasquale’s diurnal newsletter, Bright. Published on January 3, 2023, by StudyFinds [one word], the headline was a terse red flag for the future of our free republic: “The Social Disaster: Children Who Frequently Check Social Media Face Significant Brain Changes.”
Based upon a then recent study from the University of North Carolina, the gist of the article is in equal parts instructive and alarming:
‘The findings suggest that children who grow up checking social media more often are becoming hypersensitive to feedback from their peers,’ says Eva Telzer, a professor in UNC-Chapel Hill’s psychology and neuroscience department and a corresponding author, in a statement.
‘Social media platforms provide adolescents with unprecedented opportunities for social interactions during a critical developmental period when the brain is especially sensitive to social feedback,’ the study concludes. This longitudinal cohort study suggests that social media behaviors in early adolescence may be associated with changes in adolescents’ neural development, specifically neural sensitivity to potential social feedback.
It is not difficult to understand Big Tech’s venal motives for catering to customers’ psychology to increase their use of social media: the corporations’ already humongous profits. But the societal dimension of hardwiring youth to become hypersensitive to “social feedback”—i.e., “peer pressure”—within their network will have an immense and deleterious impact upon a free society.
