Drowning in the Flickering Stream of Diversions

Sometime around 2012, Jean M. Twenge, PhD, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, started noticing a disturbing trend: Not only were young people reporting they were becoming unhappier, but they were also reporting increases in feelings of depression and anxiety.

“I really was very confused about what was going on at first,” Dr. Twenge said during her talk on March 12 as part of President Eduardo Peñalver’s Presidential Speaker Series.

As Dr. Twenge probed for answers, one day she stumbled across a statistic and the pieces started to fall into place.

At the end of that year the smartphone marked an important and historic milestone on its way to ubiquity, finding itself in possession of a majority of Americans. And with the smartphone came the flickering stream of diversions that is social media, which has come to dominate the time of people, especially teens.

In keeping with Seattle University’s commitment to Jesuit virtues like curiosity and fostering an understanding of conflicting viewpoints, President Peñalver created the quarterly speaker series last year with speakers from across disciplines and leaders in their chosen fields.

“It's never been more difficult to explore the contours of discourse, but never more important that we do it,” President Peñalver said in introducing Dr. Twenge and highlighting this year’s intertwined topics of public discourse and the impacts of social media.

Over recent decades, President Peñalver said, no other single force has had a more dramatic impact than social media on the way that we interact with one another, the way we understand ourselves and our personal lives and our politics.

Its anonymity, its instantaneous, emotionally charged engagement has given rise to new and frequently toxic forms of human interaction, he said, adding: “The results for our political conversations, for our mental health, for the mental health of our young people has been dramatic and, in many cases, disastrous.”

One Gallup poll survey from 2023, cited by Dr. Twenge, found that the average American teen was spending 4.8 hours a day using one of seven social media apps.

“That’s a lot of time,” she said, connecting the dots between spiraling responses young people were giving to questions about their mental health and the overnight adoption of smartphone technology and its uses. “What is it replacing?”

Turns out, Dr. Twenge said, surveys showed social media use and other forms of solitary pastimes like video games and texting were replacing the types of activities that people report make them happy such as meeting friends in person, reading books, going to parties, playing sports and exercising, attending religious services and sleeping about seven hours a night.

So, why not just delete the app?

“The companies have poured billions into those algorithms and those push notifications and all of those things light up that dopamine pathway and we pick it up again and get sucked in again,” Dr. Twenge said. “So, a lot of people of all ages tell me, it's just so hard. It's so hard to delete the app. It's so hard to give it up.”

Though Dr. Twenge’s speech drew a large audience, conspicuously absent from the crowd were young people, those whose brains are still developing and who are bearing the brunt of social media use.

Lily Barton, a junior accounting major, was meeting friends at the Student Center following Dr. Twenge’s talk and said on average she spends five to six hours a day on her favorite app, TikTok, though she was bashful to admit it.

Despite that, Barton isn’t interested in cutting down her usage, even though she understands how social media usage has been linked to decreased happiness and increased depression and anxiety.

“I don’t think that it’s great, but I don’t want to change,” she said. She has been feeling overwhelmed with news about the federal government and politics and social media offers her a respite from the world. “It’s also a mindless way to get a break.”

Dr. Twenge said research shows that limiting use of social media—either when a social group commits to turning off their phones or when an individual student hides them in their dorm room—can help reverse some of the ill effects.

However, Dr. Twenge noted that social media companies have billions of dollars to spend on lobbyists and attorneys. She noted that the TikTok ban, approved by Congress, signed by former President Joe Biden and OK’d by the U.S. Supreme Court, was effectively quashed by President Trump without any great outcry. Even at the individual family level the resilience of widespread social media use has left her mystified.

She proposed an analogy of eating apples rather than hours of social media usage. If studies found the risk of depression was increasing in children who ate five apples a day versus zero, “Parents wouldn't even let their kid eat half an apple. And yet with social media it's like, ‘Oh, I'm sure it's fine.’ There's just some kind of blind spot there that I haven't really completely figured out yet.”

Next in the Presidential Speaker Series is Columbia Law School Professor Jamal Greene, an expert on constitutional law and author who served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice. Professor Greene will speak on campus 5–6 p.m., Wednesday, May 21 in Oberto Commons. The talks are free and open to the Seattle University community.