Hank Green talks about the future of internet
Screen Time is Too Much for Children’s Health: Dr. Rich’s Case Study on a Case Study of a Student Lost in a Tik Tok Rabbit Hole
Do you ever feel like you or your kids are spending way too much time on your phones? Have you been scrolling for hours at a time? It is hard to know how much screen time is too much when so much of our lives are on our phones. For answers, Dr. Sanjay Gupta sits down with self-described “mediatrician”, Dr. Michael Rich, who co-directs the Clinic for Interactive Media Disorders at Boston Children’s Hospital. Dr. Rich talks about his treatment of patients with problematic media use. One student at a college got lost down a TikTok rabbit hole.
It just kind of started to really wear on me physically first, I think. That was when I was scrolling and I wasn’t going to sleep. It was taking hours out of my day.
A story about a college student cramming all nighters. It’s hard to stop, but it is hard to admit it
The story I’m about to tell you will be similar to others. It is about a college student. He was pulling a lot of all nighters, but he wasn’t cramming for exams. He wasn’t hanging out with friends.
It was hard to stop. It was as hard to say, okay, I’ve seen enough because there isn’t enough on TikTok. There is no winning on TikTok. There’s no end point. You just keep going.
Add it all up, half an hour to an hour when I wake up, you know, a little bit in the free time during the day, maybe during a meal, another 2 hours during the day, maybe averaging 5 to 6 hours a day, even more if I had more free time.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
How did I learn to stop being creative and to start interacting with TikTok? A story about the journey of saying hello to the account
That journey of saying hi to this account is the one that really stands out. I don’t have a lot of followers. The only people I know on here are my friends, and I’m going to post and someone might see it because there is a chance. That’s how the TikTok algorithm works.
Everything changed after that. One night, the sun came up and he saw it on his screen. He was behind in school and he didn’t have a good night’s sleep. He decided that he was going to end his relationship with TikTok.
I was just watching and just scrolling through the endless amounts of information. That’s when I started to become less of a creative and more of a cynic, you know? I would only be looking at the content. I would see it I would think, Oh, I could be funnier. Or, Oh, they’re not even that good.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
Jerome’s Story: How I Met Your Mother, My Son and My Daughter — A Family of Three Kids and a Father of Three?
Jerome says something deep inside of him stirred. Maybe it was an urge to simply look up from his phone and actually enjoy the real world around him. It looked like it came out of a fog.
I didn’t know that I wasn’t unattractive, unsuccessful or unpopular until I took a break from the app. It was just the fact that I was comparing myself to the super ideals of every form.
That. That is the thing that really stuck with me about Jerome’s story. How innocently it all started. I can’t help but think about how I can stop my daughters from going to that same place, as a dad of three teenage daughters. Look, I see how much they enjoy the app. I know of the appeal. We’ve made videos together. But here’s what worries me. As much as I work hard to protect them, in their real world, I worry about what will happen to my girls when they don’t have as many rules or supervision. My oldest, Sage, is about to head to college, which means soon she will be the same age Jerome was when this all happened to him. Is it possible that the same thing might happen to her? Thankfully, Jerome managed to figure it out on his own. But I know not everyone can do that. Sometimes it gets bad and people need medical help.
The resource is there for helping those children and families who have gone down the rabbit hole, if you will, of social media, gaming, and what’s called information bingeing.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
“What’s going on”: How Dr. Rich and his patients dealt with their interactive media use in a new world before the lockdown lockdown
We’re in a new world and we’ll have to figure it out. It’s not even a part of the past anymore. I mean, I have 17 year old patients who say, you know, I’m cool, but I really worry about my 14 year old sibling because this environment is morphing and evolving so rapidly.
We went to virtual visits before the lockdown. I had about a 30% no show rate on first visits for kids who are struggling with their interactive media use because the parents would wuss out and wait until the night before or the morning of and saying, we’re going to take you to a doctor, is going to take your video games away. The kids said, “I’m out of here.” As soon as we went virtual, our no show rate dropped to zero because they’re comfortable in this environment.
Dr. Rich is a mediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital. A mediatrician. That’s a fun way of saying that he treats young patients with what he calls problematic media use and what is problematic. These kids lives are being disrupted by the time they spend online. Now, in case you’re wondering, it is not lost on him that treating patients for problematic media use virtually via a screen is a little ironic. But this story has lots of twists and turns. Dr. Rich had a career in media before getting his start in medicine.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
What is the most painful point for parents? A simple explanation of why parents feel the most strongly about a screen, but what about how they can do about it
I was in the film industry at a young age. I am a fan of Screen Media but I also respect it. And I think that in any great love affair, there’s a deep respect as well.
When a parent brings a child to see you, they’re doing it because they’re worried. It’s because they’re worried, if a parent takes their child to see the doctor and leaves alone for something like this, it’s because they’re worried. They’ve been unable to keep food down because they’ve been having pain. They’re coming in with a worry. What is the worry? Exactly. I worry about how much time my kid is spending on a screen. Ergo, what?
Well, what the parents see is the young person essentially withdrawing from various aspects of her or his life. You know, they are not getting up for school. Sometimes they’re staying up all night gaming or on social media or whatever. So they see the young person withdrawing actually from them most acutely. The kid is in their room. The child is on a screen. Instead of eating out with your family, they should spend more time with each other. I think that’s the most painful point for parents.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
What is Too Much, What is Abnormal? What is The Limit? What do I Need to Know to Help Patients and Families in the Emergence of Addiction?
Do you define for the patient and or the family what is too much, what is abnormal in this world? And we have to define within normal limits in medicine. That is how you get lab results. What is the limit here?
Where the problem comes in is when their day to day functions are impaired in some way. They aren’t getting enough sleep. They are overeating. They are not in school. They are leaving their friends. When I meet these young people in their first visit, I try to identify the pains they are going through and try to make them feel better, whether that is school or not. I wish I had more friends and not an ideal that says a certain number of hours is problematic. I would like to know what their lives are like at the time they wake and go to sleep. So I think that it really has been about how are you feeling in your life? How are you doing? Do you get the grades in school that reflect your capabilities? Almost invariably, they will say no. And then we’ll explore why that might be.
Yes, it would be TV watching or things like eating disorders, substance use disorders of various kinds. And what it has in common with those is that these are behaviors that are trying to make them feel better or feel more in control of things. I don’t think that the Internet and social media can cause anxiety or depression in this stage of life, as it has been framed by some as a way to increase depression, which may not have actually happened. What the interactive media environment does for them is it provides them a place where those anxieties, depression, etc. can kind of manifest themselves even more, even if they were not noticed otherwise.
If you were seeing a patient in a world that didn’t have as much screen time or social media, who would you prefer? 15 years ago. Did you know what it was 20 years ago? Would that child still be with you? TV viewing or some sort of binge activity would be the thing, instead of social media.
And that’s why I sort of move away from addiction as a model, because we as a society use the term addiction as pejorative. We look at addiction as something to be punished rather than healed, and we think of people who become addicted as weak people with weak character. These kids do have certainly short term problems withdrawing from these behaviors. But when one understands that it is not the behavior doing something to the young person, but the young person seeking out and pursuing this behavior because it makes her or him feel better because it is alleviating their anxiety or it is helping them who have ADHD and have spent the entire school day feeling behind Clueless, you know, like they’re dumb. Including their social interactions where they can’t keep on top of a conversation. They come home and they sit down in front of a screen and play a first person shooter. They are in control of that universe and are better off than typical kids who play a game that encourages distraction, hyper vigilance and all the other symptoms of ADHD that are problematic in a classroom setting.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
What do you do, when do you feel the need to go out and do something? “I’m sorry, but I can’t do that,” (Richard Rich, MD, M.D.)
That’s fascinating. That’s a really, especially that idea of how you might have a day like you described, where you’re feeling behind all day and then you come home and you can regain some sense of control. Yeah, that sounds familiar to me. It seems like it’s very similar to what I can see with my kids, but I will find myself playing that silly game on planes, and things because I’m. I have to get some sense of control. I might need a few wins. I need a few wins because I’ve had a bunch of losses today, but I can beat this computer at this.
Dr. Rich’s last point stopped me in my tracks and stuck with me. When you treat someone who is addicted to alcohol or cigarets, what you are really asking is for them to give up those things. Abstinence makes sense. That is not realistic with technology, for the most part. So Dr. Rich’s approach is let’s learn to live with it and along the way, respect it. Look, I know that’s a huge shift from the doom and gloom warnings. It’s often said that social media hurts us like a bad drug. It needs to be cut out of our lives.
Yeah, I mean, I this might be a little bit can I can I really believe this about myself, But I feel like they’re like you can develop expertise in how to use a tool well. And so the question that that comes up in my mind is like, is my son worse off because his dad is a Internet guy and he’s going to be on the Internet the whole time, all the time? And like and there’s no way I could be like, you can’t use social media. He’s going to be like, What do you do all day, every day? So what I would like is, and what I would hope, is that as sort of more people who were who had social media as part of their lives when they were younger have children that we’re at least able to have these conversations better or or talk about like, you know, any any new thing that enters into a society is very easy to abuse until you sort of develop norms and taboos about how to use it more well. But I think also just like any other sort of thing that can feel really good without a lot of, it’s a little like candy, you know. It tastes good, but it doesn’t have a lot of substance. And and so I my hope is that we can get to a place where where we know how to use it. You know, it’s okay to have some, but you’re going to have to have some real food to.
Thinking about it as a power tool, more like an automobile maybe, you know, sort of framing. I think it’s really interesting as my children are starting to drive. I think about it all the time. Like if you said, what is my biggest concern about screens with my teenagers? You know what I would say far and away, my biggest concern is they use it when they’re behind the wheel of a car far away, because that can be catastrophic in a millisecond. Is it a concern if I worry about how much they use it overall? Yes. I worry a lot about when they use it and what they use it for.
What really matters here is content that we are both consuming and creating in this space and the context in which we are using it. It would be fine if it was done in the middle of the day between things you don’t want your child doing at three in the morning, or sleeping in in bed at night. We need to concentrate on the content. And is this healthy content? Is this helpful? What is the situation that they are in? I think that the only thing that screen time brings in is what I could be doing. Yeah. Could I be having a conversation at the kitchen table with mom or dad? I wonder if I could be playing with my friends. And that is where the kind of seductiveness of the online space can get in the way of the rich and diverse menu of experience that is so helpful to growing up.
Baptism by Fire: Dr. Rich’s First Obstacle During the First Year of Chasing Life (with the help of a friend of mine)
And I’m going to get his advice for improving my own family’s relationship with technology. Stay up to date. It is back to Chasing Life. I’m going to introduce you to one of his patients first.
Allison visited Dr. Rich for the first time as a preventive measure. There wasn’t yet a problem, but her mom, Amy, says that she was struggling to raise Allison and her siblings in a world that was so different from the one that she grew up in.
The tv in my father’s closet was broken, and it got fixed after I had my tonsils out. And we didn’t have a TV in our house until I was about 16. So coming at that, you know, with screens everywhere, raising kids, it was definitely baptism by fire.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
How to Use the Phone Until 715 and After 830 in the Morning: Checking Your Smartphone’s Usage for Upcoming Appointments
I implemented downtime where I can’t use my phone until 715 in the morning and I can’t use it after 830 at night so I can wind down for bed and have my morning routine. But I also made app limits so I can only spend a certain amount of time on YouTube. I can only play a certain amount of games. I can only spend a certain amount of time on other apps. So that means that I don’t spend countless hours mindlessly scrolling.
It’s pretty impressive. Keep in mind she’s only 13 years old. Allison, I am able to relate to your parents. When we think of going to the doctor for a checkup, we think about the future. And in many ways, that is what your parents did for you here as well. And for all your listeners. This is what the conversation with Dr. Rich on the podcast is supposed to do for you. It is a check for the usage of the phone.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
How do you get the patients to trust you? An old man in a new world: how do you understand your age? How can you get that trust?
How do you get the patients to trust you? I am not saying that they’re looking at you and saying this guy is an old man. We’re both the same age. I’m just telling you that. How can they comprehend my world? How do you gain that trust?
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/f2b7f7a5-ae60-4b5a-a795-afac01011dd1
Top Ten Tips for Children in an Increasingly Digital World: How to Take a Child to the Next Level and Play Grand Theft Auto
I ask them what games they play, or what socia-, seriously. You know, and I show them that I am knowledgeable about it in ways that are not pejorative, that are not saying it’s a bad place. I’m approaching it like the world in which they live. And I think that’s a mistake that a lot of parents make, which is they’re sort of dealing with it as something else. They’re standing at the top of the basement stairs saying, turn off Grand Theft Auto. I hate that. What I encourage the parents to do is sit down next to their child and play Grand Theft Auto with them, because there’s some really interesting things that happen then. Number one is, instead of saying, I hate that, get rid of it, it’s bad for you, you’re saying, I love you, I care about you. I want to understand what engages you. I want to know why you’re here. When you figure out the 47 actions with your thumbs, it takes you to steal a car and you ask your kid how to do it. Let’s talk about why we might want to do that and rehearse it over and over and over again. Right. You are coming from a different place. You are that child’s student and you are learning that from them. The power differential is being changed in ways that are meaningful to the kid, which is something that I care about. I care about you, and you’re not wagging a finger at them so much as you’re saying, Let’s understand this together and you’re giving them a way of moving on. That is not a punishment, but the next step.
When you distill it down, are there a best way or not to, but what is the best way for kids in an increasingly digital world? Do you give any other top tips?
My biggest question at the end of the day was not about the data. I wanted to know as a fellow dad, fellow doctor, when he looks at where this is all headed. Does he have faith in the future?
I think I am a little hopeful. I will acknowledge the fact that as a pediatrician that’s kind of a occupational hazard is optimism. I hear from the kids that I am hopeful. And so I think that we will get better. We will face problems we don’t know how to anticipate. So I think that, yes, things are going to get better. There will be some roads with some problems. The real question comes down to will we be able to spot those potholes and steer around them? Are we going to hit them and then deal with the problem? But either way, I’m confident that we can do this. We need to be ready for problems to happen and know how to solve them without guilt, so we can attitude toward this.
I love that. I really do. It’s a big reason why I want to do this season. I wanted to look at the impact that social media and technology was having on all of us. But I also wanted to make sure that the tone of our conversations were right. It’s not about being a bad parent. It’s not about being a bad kid. It is not about right or wrong. I might be making the wrong decisions as a parent all the time. I know that. It’s okay because it is about doing the best you can, with the best intentions in mind. There’s no question that we are in the Wild West when it comes to these technologies. We are trying to get to know what path is best for you, but it’s all about figuring out what works for you. Allison and her mother, Amy, did believe it was wise to tackle these issues early on. Others, like Jerome were able to self-identify, they have a problem, and then one day just decide to stop cold turkey. And I do realize that for some of you listening, you may be still worried about your habits and still not clear what exactly you need to do to change. That’s why in our next episode, science journalist Catherine Price is going to teach us how to break up with our phones.
Get in the habit of taking a break, so that you can both better understand the effect that your relationship with technology is having on you, and then also appreciate its benefits more.
Yeah, I think I could quit Tik Tok and Instagram. Snapchat would be a little bit harder to give up because that’s my probably my main source of communication.
Chasing Life with CNN Audio: Producing a Program with Dan Rind, Haley Thomas, and Sanjay Gupta
Chasing Life is a production of CNN Audio. The people behind our show are Grace Walker, Eryn Mathewson, and David Rind. Our senior producer is Haley Thomas. Andrea Kane is our medical writer and Tommy Bazarian is our engineer. Dan is the technical director. Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. And a special thanks to Ben Tinker, Amanda Sealy and Nadia Kounang of CNN Health and Katie Hinman.
In this season, we have discussed the dangers of social media and the amount of time we spend online. But what about the positive, educational sides of the internet? On this episode, Dr. Sanjay Gupta talks to one of the YouTube’s earliest content creators, Hank Green . They discuss the current state of the internet, how to handle online comments, and the responsibility of having a platform. Plus, they ask is the future of the internet utopian? Do you feel like a Dystopian? Or maybe both?
I’m on the Internet to help people learn and get curious and do well in school and understand more of the knowable things of their universe and know more about the unknowable things. That’s lovely and it’s fun. And like, I get so much joy from that.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/6c51819a-d613-4cff-9637-afbb0016bec8
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing and A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor: Two Books of Hank Green that Touch on Internet Fame and the Digital World
Hank Green. He’s an author, a scientist and a fan of Vlogbrothers. He got his start on YouTube back in 2007. Think about it. Content creator was a thing before that. He has watched the digital evolution unfold in real time.
You know, I remember sort of it kind of happened for me back in like 2012, 2013 when the stuff that I started to see getting made on YouTube was a lot of sort of cruel pranks or like manipulative guys trying to get-
You know, Hank started posting videos at a time before YouTube stars were much of a thing. This was 2007, and since he struck gold and gained internet fame, he’s got a very unique perspective as a person that many young people really aspire to be. After spending so much of his career online, Hank decided to write about these experiences. Sort of. Hank published two books that touch on Internet fame and the digital world. They are both called An Absolutely Remarkable Thing and A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor. I love their titles. Hank says he draws inspiration from his real life when he reads these books.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/6c51819a-d613-4cff-9637-afbb0016bec8
What’s Happening on the Screen? – Hank Green: Chasing Life with CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent, Keane Green
Is my son worse off because his dad is an Internet guy and he’s going to be on the Internet the whole time. It’s all the time and like. And there’s no way I can be like, you can’t use social media. He’s going to be like, what do you do?
I’ve been asking professors and doctors tough questions about screen time and social media during the season so far. I wanted to hear from someone who makes the content that we see when we scroll.
I think now, we are all comfortable with the idea that the Internet is good and bad, and that it’s a tool, and that you can hit someone with it, if you want to.
Today, I had a conversation with Hank Green about what it is like to be a father on that side of the screen. I am CNN’s chief medical correspondent. This is Chasing Life.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/6c51819a-d613-4cff-9637-afbb0016bec8
Teaching people science through the lens of a parent’s social media experience — a student’s experience in science and a lot of fear
I do. I think that teaching people science is important and is something I have taken pride in. And I also have three teenagers and their videos have actually been shown in their classrooms. I think they knew you when I told them I was interviewing you. So you’re cross-generational, which is pretty cool.
We had balance, which probably made our childhoods the best. There was a time when you were not connected and there was a time when you were. And I was like, okay, that’s a kid who knows what she’s talking about because that’s my main mission is to talk to people about balance. There’s a lot of fear when we’re talking about social media. It’s not realistic that people want to take away, take away, restrict, ban and like that. adolescents don’t respond well to that
How can I find the balance there? And what do I need to do about it? When I’m sure I can’t do anything, but I know what I can do
But I guess the flip side of that is that she’s very aware of of what it’s done for her, done to her. You know, I mean, and she would she’d dial some of that back, which I think in some ways made me a little bit optimistic. I feel a lot of times that way. and we see this in medicine all the time, is to assume the worst case scenario. We have to hope for the best but we have to assume the worst. And everything that we do in terms of our how we respond is, is that that worst case scenario. Most people don’t think that is the case. How can I find the balance there? And I don’t know the answer, and I don’t know that you know the answer, but I’m just curious how you think about it.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/6c51819a-d613-4cff-9637-afbb0016bec8
The Metaphor of Food versus Real Food: What Happens when I See It’s Real? How I Get It and What I Don’t
You know, this idea of the metaphor of junk food versus real food. I think that really resonates with me. I think that’s an interesting way of framing this, because, yes, there is content like Hank’s, which is educational and scientific and well thought out, but there’s also a lot of junk. And therein lies the problem. You know, recently I was having a conversation about this with my youngest daughter, Soleil, and she had shown me this meme on Instagram. It was funny. We laughed, but it also wasn’t true. And I asked her, I said, Soleil, you know, this isn’t true, right? And she kind of laughed and showed me her phone again. Yeah, it’s on Instagram. And I said, Right, right. It’s not true. She said something that kind of stopped me in my tracks. What she said is, Dad, to be honest, I really don’t think that anything that I see anymore online is true. Think about that. So much of what comes across her feed is garbage. The result is that it all becomes garbage. It becomes suspicious. It is all lumped together and suddenly you find yourself in a really kind of scary place where nothing, nothing at all can be trusted. They don’t care about social media as much because it’s a playground for them to not be taken seriously. Everyone is dragged down by that. Everything is dragged down by it. Even for someone like Hank, who by all accounts makes good, credible, fact checked, vetted content.
We’re talking about like sense making at this point. Like there’s always been structures of credibility. You know, if you go to the beginning of newspapers, everyone knew that every newspaper had a perspective, like there was a communist newspaper and there was a Republican newspaper, and there was sort of business news like, we have that to some extent now, and we have to sort of learn the shape of the information landscape. When I was young in the 80s and 90’s, that was much more clear. It’s not clear now. One thing that I try to do very hard is to make sure that the content I’m making is right and to talk about why I got it wrong. And, and and that’s almost too for a lot of people like more instructive to be like, oh, so like not only is everyone fallible, but also you can sort of walk down the path of how you, what you a what what assumption you made that led to your wrong content in some way. But I worry about it being so person focused because a person almost is like has to be less credible than a really good organization because a person can only do so much and a person you can’t scale them the same way and you can’t you can’t build in fact checking the same way as you as you can with like a strong, robust news organization. And so if we end up in a situation where we only believe individuals, I think that’s a worse world.
This is obviously something that you’re quite good at. Even though I’m not saying this to flatter you, a lot of people pay attention to you and your work is shown in schools, and they want to obviously educate their kids in a good way. One thing you said was how to admit when you’ve got something wrong. How much time do you spend thinking about the institution of trust with your own content? You want to get it accurate, but just the idea of trust, everything from word choice to, I don’t know your background to your your presentation, how much do you think about that in this digital world?
I think about it all the time. It’s one of the things I worry about it and on a lot for a lot of different good reasons. I worry about it on my own. I think a lot of people would be pretty devastated if, like, I didn’t live up to the, uh, the sort of, you know, what I, what I’ve been trying to portray publicly as, you know, the parts of me that are me. I like to say that it’s similar to all of the content you see on the internet, that is me. You can’t see all of me. And I worry a lot about, you know, I’ve seen people both in just mistakes and in like really intentional ways to do things that have really destroyed a lot of their credibility. They are destroying something bigger than their own and it is inside of other people. And that’s the thing that I want to be most careful with.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/6c51819a-d613-4cff-9637-afbb0016bec8
Online and Off-line Fighting: Hank’s Legacy and his Journey Through the Dark Side of the Internet – The Case of “The Real” Hank
Hank interacts more online than I do and that can take a toll on him. When we come back, avoiding that urge to get into it for your own good.
I’ve learned over time that if you want to argue with a professional arguer, you have to become a professional arguer. That isn’t what I do for a living.
I mean, I was working through it. It’s a strange job and not many people have done it. And I was 27 when I uploaded my first YouTube video. So I was married an adult. I had a set of situation that were stable. That is not the truth for most people. We were similar to many of the other people in that era who were even younger than that. It was much easier for them to make worse decisions. And because, you know, for all the reasons and and I kind of wanted to walk through like just sort of let let a character make some mistakes for me I wouldn’t make that. Explore a lot of how I see the Internet now, how I think it’s going to become in the future, as well as how good it is at turning things into fights.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/6c51819a-d613-4cff-9637-afbb0016bec8
How much time do you spend online? A question I have had to answer several times before I left the gym and I’m afraid it wouldn’t work
How much time do you spend online? You’re using online tools to make your content. As someone who uses multiple platforms, how would you describe your use?
Um, the parts where it would be tricky to call it work, I could probably make the case just to justify to myself. It’s probably on the order of 2 to 3 hours per day. Is that like what is online? Everything is online. I’m not sure if I should count that as online. But in terms of like using Twitter and TikTok and YouTube. Consuming content, doing social media, social stuff, it’s hours per day, probably two or 3 hours per day.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/6c51819a-d613-4cff-9637-afbb0016bec8
Why do some old videos or content that you rile up about science in the way that you’re consuming now are coming out of that space? How do you feel?
I feel like it is a thing that you need to learn how to do. The times when it’s been destructive for me are when I have been using it like it’s. I’m almost looking for a reason to be upset. And I’m. When content creators are taking a certain kind of scientific truth, which is usually biological, and I have stumbled across a piece of the internet, I find that most of the time it is not something that bugs me. They wanted a perspective that they could understand and it’s sort of backpedaling to that. So just like grabbing some sciencey thing and telling a, like doing unscientific things with it where I’m like, I want to- just, I’m so mad. You can’t just say things! You know? And but of course you can just say things, and like I can get tied up in in being sort of angry that the world is not the way that I wish it were. My wife can quickly identify when I’m in that space. She’s like, there’s something that you’re mad about that has nothing to do with what you do. You also have to recognize that like the present, like you can’t fix everything. It’s hard to be a good father and a good partner and a good leader when you focus on what you are good at instead of what you actually like. The Internet is designed to keep us on the platforms if I catch up in something like that, because it is a good way to catch us in conflict and keep us on the platforms.
Your your wife sounds very wise. Obviously. I am curious like these these videos or content that you’re consuming that do rile you up in the way that you described. How does it get to you? Is it is it part of your feed? Is it being fed to you by one of these algorithms you’re describing?
Part of my like, the fun part of my job is that people will ask me questions. And so one that I saw just this week, it came to me because several people on TikTok had seen this video, which got millions of viewers, and it was talking about some things in a scientific frame. And a bunch of people had tagged me and they said, Hank Green, is this true? It was not. Like you’re just trying to take something that sounds, sciencey to lend credibility to your argument. I get into that, you know what I mean. and I like it gets my blood pressure going. Over the years, I have gotten better at realizing that. One of the things is true. I realized this, that you can’t really argue with a professional arguer without becoming a professional arguer. And that’s not what I do for a living. I don’t argue with people for a living. I’m not on the Internet to yell at people. I help people learn and get curious by helping them find out more about their universe and about the unknown things. And that that’s beautiful and it’s fun. And like, I get so much joy from that. I think that it does better than being in a fight. You know.
It’s easy to fire people up, you know, to appeal to their their amygdala. They are emotional centers of the brain. And that will get a lot of provocation and probably a lot of views. Do you resist the urge to just do something? That would probably get a lot more people to watch and share your videos.
Yeah, I’m lucky to be in a situation where I don’t have my goal right now isn’t to get more attention or even money or whatever it is. According to research, yelling at people is not good for your cause as it creates a dichotomy of the conflict. Like it does not convince people of things. It pushes people to sides. That’s all it does.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/6c51819a-d613-4cff-9637-afbb0016bec8
Is There The Power That You Have? And What Do You Do When You Come Up to People? How Do You Think You Derive More Power Than You Think?
I mean, people when they come up to you in real life IRL, it’s probably very complimentary and thankful and grateful for, you know things that you’ve taught them and taught their kids. I think that it is the same way online in terms of comments and stuff like that. Do you think that the response to comments in the digital world resembles the response in the real world?
Yeah. Yeah. For the, for the most part. There are comments that I find very cruel, as well as people who disagree with things I have done in the past, because I am not shy about my feelings on some controversial topics. And the and so I’m like, you know, I’m kind of fine with that? I’m kind of not a person to some people because it has taken so long to get there and understand what I’m like. They don’t see me. They think I’m a sort of shell that contains a brand or something. I am comfortable with both the idea that I have more power than those people, and the reality that I do. They feel like they have the power to throw a punch. and I won’t feel it. And and also, if I throw a punch at that, they will feel like I just like stepped on them with a transformer robot foot like the that that you know you kind of when you when you’re on the Internet You have a following and you also have one. You have, you know, status for lack of a better term. You need to know that you wield a lot more power than you think. And I watch people all the time, and I, it really bugs me to be like, I’m not going to censor myself just because I have an army of angry people who will attack anyone I attack, and that we will come into their lives and make themselves absolutely miserable to the point where they have to delete their Internet history. I’m not going to censor myself just because of that. And I’m like, Well, it’s not really censoring yourself to not to to, like, recognize that you have more power than you once had.
But that’s great self awareness. To know that you’d be punching down and that you’d get a pretty big blow if you engaged in that way. Whereas the flipside is that people may not recognize that they can leave a mark on you, you know, just because you are-
They don’t have an idea. And people have been you know, John and I, my brother, have made this content together. And we have been through times where there’s been pretty large groups of people who, you know, just kind of for fun, don’t like us. They think it’s fun, and we are having a good time too. And we don’t. We can’t say anything. We just have to, like, live through it. It is a bad part of a good thing.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/6c51819a-d613-4cff-9637-afbb0016bec8
The Future of Social Media and What It Would Take to Compete With Your Father’s Words: A Conversation I’d Like to Share
Absolutely. I don’t know how it gets better. I think that it will require a lot of individual people having a lot of good and thoughtful thoughts and a lot of good conversations, and that’s what I think. I think a lot about the printing press. There was a time when it was possible for people who disagreed with the church to have their concerns looked into by the Catholic Church. and we’re going to share that information. We’re better than you at that, and we’re going to be quicker than you. It has many parallels to that conflicts we have now. It was a very messy time. It was very bad. And lots of people died. And it was it was a book like nobody thinks we shouldn’t have books. We figured out how to have books and have them not be societally destructive. We were able to figure out how to keep moving through that time if it was for the best and that we shouldn’t have lived in a world where the church had that much power. We needed to move into a world where there was more individual agency. I believe we’re having that now. The conversation is not about young people and screentime. That’s a conversation that every single one of us in the society we exist in right now.
I’m curious about this because I think it’s ideal for you to get your thoughts out through the novels and fictional scenarios that are written for them. Do you have an idea or did you go through the thinking of what a healthy, idealized version of social media could look like?
The future. A little dystopian, a little utopian, all of it at the same time. It’s an authentic way to look at it. It’s true. We never know which way things are going to unfold. If the impact of these technologies gets better, you will be surprised. Will they get worse over time? Maybe it’s going to be both. All that we can really try and do is understand them, these tools, at the time we are using them. We can develop an expertise in how to use them well, like Hank said, and at the same time we can sharpen our awareness of how they can be detrimental to us. Hank mentioned that even for him, someone with years now of experience, the pressures of being online can take a toll. And he’s probably got thicker skin than most. And frankly, that troubled me because Hank is Hank. But I worry about regular people. I worry about young people. I’m hearing about it from my kids.
You want to make it seem like you’re in a good mood with your photos on social media. It’s like your life is perfect. Even though not everyone’s lives is perfect.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/6c51819a-d613-4cff-9637-afbb0016bec8
From the internet to the brain: The pressure of being a teenager girl on the internet and the impact on our brains and our bodies. What I’m going to tell Sky
A conversation with my daughter Sky next week. The pressure of being a teenage girl on the internet. This is a conversation I will never forget. I’m going to sit down with the child psychologist and discuss how this pressure on young people can affect them.
We are all in a feedback loop of looking at perfect pictures and perfect photos even though that isn’t reality. So we’re just comparing our worst days. Our worst moments are worse angles to other people’s best. And of course, you’re going to not feel great when you do that.
You know, from a brain perspective, a neurological perspective, teenagers brains are still growing and developing, probably even up until their mid-twenties. So it makes sense that they may be more at risk for stress or anxiety from using social media. And that helped me put the CDC report we talked about earlier into a bit more context. And if there’s one thing that I’ve also learned on this journey, it’s that many experts agree abstinence is not the answer. It is not realistic to give up our phones completely.
Sky Is Your Voice: A Family Voice About Technology and Its Impact on Me, My Daughters, and Myself – Part 1 of the Conversation
Sky is a special member of my family and she is the voice that you just heard. I love all of my daughters equally, but that doesn’t mean I love them all the same. Sky though, is unique in her own way. Every parent in the neighborhood goes to her for advice. She is the one who knows how to resuscitate a person. She is the absolute top choice for babysitter for everybody. She is really something else.
She even makes jokes. I have taken my three daughters along for the ride this season if you’ve been with me since episode one. That’s something I’ve really never done before in more than 20 years of being a medical journalist. I’ve kept my children away from the television part of my world. I wanted honest conversations about how technology has changed their childhoods. Obviously, they’ve grown up in a digital world for better and for worse.
Yes, I have friends. More of them deal with anxiety than depression, and I don’t think all of them are phone, like caused by the like, phone. I definitely see that concern.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/279fb31f-f176-4d8c-af8b-afc401155ab0
What Was The Inspiration For The Season? “I Know What I Saw Last Night,” a Physicist’s Report on the Lambda Kondo Effect”
So you asked me like what was the the inspiration for the season? That was probably the most important thing. That’s what you’re talking about. We don’t have a good handle on it.
Yeah, I think it’s different for everyone. You can never really know exactly what’s going on in someone’s head. Like, even like my best friends, I like, we talk all the time. We like that I can tell them what’s going on. I’m not sure exactly what’s happening in their head.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/279fb31f-f176-4d8c-af8b-afc401155ab0
What do you wear in a day-night? How do you look good in your outfits and how much do you care about what you’re wearing?
Sky’s correct. No surprise. I mean, no matter how close we are to our friends, even our family, we don’t, maybe we can’t always really know exactly how they’re feeling. One of the most important things in the world to me is my daughter’s mental health. And throughout the season it’s been at the top of my mind.
Yeah. I want to put a good photo of myself out on social media. And so, like, I have had like, something’s wrong just like, like, like, oh, no, like kind of just like, thinking about it.
The funny thing is you are pretty much the same person. I don’t say this lightly, but you look great in every item of clothing that you’ve ever worn. You are good with every color. I mean, it’s kind of crazy.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/279fb31f-f176-4d8c-af8b-afc401155ab0
Chasing Life: What I Can Do As a Dad to Support Sky and the Rest of the Girls in a Superfluid World?
Sky’s correct. It’s important to be perfect online. That’s no secret. Like phones and social media. Filters and Photoshop probably are not going away. But as we’ve learned today, they can go too far. You can affect your mental health if you fall down this rabbit hole. Those CDC numbers, they’re still on my mind. So what can I do as a dad? What can any of us do as parents to support our children, to help them navigate this virtual world? Telling Sky, for example, she is beautiful, is absolutely sincere. It’s honest, she knows that. It doesn’t feel like it’s enough sometimes. So I decided to get a little vulnerable myself with Professor Sinclair-McBride and asked her for advice.
We are looking at a lot of depression. We are seeing a lot of anxiety. A lot of trauma has been seen by us. There are some main reasons that young people end up with me.
I would like to know what I can do as a dad to support Sky and the rest of the girls in this new world. I’m Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent. And this is Chasing Life.
Some new data from the CDC came out just a few weeks after I recorded the conversation with Sky and it confirmed some of our worst fears as parents. I’m not going to recommend you read this, but a few of the statistics are pretty disturbing. A few mentioned suicide.
Let me be more specific. What they found was that 57% of teen girls reported feeling sad or hopeless. And that was nearly double the rate for teen boys. And this next one will probably shock you as it did me. 26% of teen girls made a suicide plan. There are four girls. It was difficult for me as a parent to hear that. Hearing about young people in such distress, feeling alone in the worst case, feeling hopeless, like they had nothing more to live for. That is a gut punch. We cannot turn our attention away from this. What exactly is driving it?
Every year my girls have been alive, the numbers have worsened. And that does coincide with the birth and the growth of the digital world. After looking over the report, thinking back to my conversation with Sky and my other daughters, I couldn’t help but wonder what role is social media playing in all this? What can we say for sure?
That is Professor Keneisha Sinclair-McBride. Her entire job is treating adolescents’ mental health. She’s a licensed clinical psychologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School. She actually works alongside Dr. Michael Rich, the “Mediatrition” who we heard from earlier this season. And I learned a lot from Dr. Rich. I’ve thought about that conversation a lot. After reading the report I had a lot of questions, and that’s why I called Professor Sinclair-McBride. I asked her to give a response to the one piece of information from the report that she felt was the most important. 40% of students in high school report feeling sad or depressed. That’s keeping some of them from living their lives. 40%. I was wondering if she was hearing these things from the young people she treats.
We’re discussing symptoms of depression when you hear that. Many kids are facing an epidemic of loneliness and overwhelm. If you’re still learning, or if you’re not yet discouraged by everything that is happening in the world, there is a lot to be proud of. People are upset about something. Bad things are happening every now and then. The CDC’s report states that a young person is trying to figure out this as their brain is developing in the shadow of a world altering event. Maybe the numbers are surprising people, but the actual diagnostic elements of it in terms of like these are the symptoms that kids are reporting, don’t feel surprising.
Body image issues and eating disorders are part of what you specialize in. Do you think that this is all related when we, when we’re talking about what we’re seeing with mental health overall, body image issues, eating disorders and the impact of social media devices, content being fed to people on a regular basis, is it too flimsy to draw a connection between all these things, or do you think it exists?
I don’t think it’s too flimsy at all. I think that might start out innocently, like I’m going to follow the influencer’s fitness routine or they’re eating healthy. Some of her recipes can be super innocuous and simple to make, so maybe I’m going to copy them. But you know, you can easily fall down a rabbit hole of more and more and more and more depending on your particular makeup. There’s something about the appearance of people in the digital world that is not real. Right. The filters, Photoshop, cosmetic enhancements that people have, and a lot of teenagers who are still getting used to their growing bodies are comparing themselves. I don’t look like her. It’s like she doesn’t look like her either. You don’t know that, right? She has a social media feed. You feel inadequate because of what you’re seeing on your screen.
Professor Sinclair McBride calls this the “Selfie Effect.” What the studies have shown is that scrolling through an unlimited supply of picture perfect images and then comparing them real time to your selfies – bam! That can affect people’s moods. And while the trend does mostly impact young girls, they are not the only ones affected. People of all ages and genders have experienced this.
They understand that these filters exist. They know that there’s Photoshopping and all that. Even though they know it isn’t real, they still think it’s an ideal. It is a way of being kept in check. It’s still it changes what they want to aspire to be or look like.
Right. Like if you think about the trend lately now I think it was a couple of years ago now, like the idea of someone being goals, your goals, that person is goals. You do not know what is happening behind the scenes to make them look like that, right? You do not know how realistic this is. Or maybe that’s just, that’s not your body type or that, you know, like there’s just so much more variety in life than just a few set ways of being. But those are the things that get the most views and the most attention. You can see how that would affect people’s perception.
Have that sort of things been around much longer than social media? I mean, you know, when I was growing up again, it was magazines and pictures of just inexplicable models. You know, they couldn’t possibly have that skin or that body type. Isn’t it the same thing?
But it’s just so much bigger. Like, you know, there’s only there were only so many fashion magazines. And once you read that issue, you could keep it. That’s the end of that, right? You read the whole thing, you looked at the images. That’s what it is. Now you have the stuff on your phone, it’s always there. It’s always available to you. There are hundreds of pictures of the people you want to look at. It just it never, never really ends. I think that accessibility is what makes it different. We have always been comparing ourselves. None of these things are new, but there’s the accessibility of it all feels very different.
I guess the persistence you are talking about is that you always carry something in your hands. Do you think that a younger person, a person whose brain is not yet fully developed, who’s continuously exposed to these types of images, what does it mean for them long term? Does it affect their brain in a way that changes their expectations?
If that’s what you’re seeing, it’s got to do something to your expectations of what people look like, which I think is why that like kind of tuning your feed, deciding where you’re going to put your attention, kind of creating that balance becomes super important because you don’t just have to look at one type of body on your social media. But I think that that involves having a conversation with young people to really like kind of see where their heads are around this stuff, right? Because there’s a lot that can be really affirming. But we have to like we have to look for it. We are supposed to pay attention to it. Everybody on the internet is trying to buy your time. I talk to young people about that a lot because they don’t like to be played. So it’s important to like to like so this is this is a business, right? She’s doing a workout but she’s also trying to get more sponsors. If you want to get my time, I’m going to give my time to people who are standing for what I believe in, and that’s a step back for kids.
You know, you’re absolutely right about that. It was the thing that seemed to get to my girls the most, when I was talking to them. The idea of being played, like you mentioned, someone is trying to take something from them and it did seem to get their attention. I wonder you run a practice where you’re caring for these children, these young people, adolescents. How big a problem is this? Is there a way to understand this?
You should be able to say it if they roll their eyes. Like, as much as teenagers are like, of course you have to say that, you’re my dad. Or like, of course my parents think that, they always say I look great. This little smile is what they say it was with like an eye roll. People need to know they’re valued, right? People need to, need to hear that, to know that no matter what, there’s a safe space to come home to. And they’re going to give you that eye roll because they’re supposed to. But I think it really does matter the amount of kids who will tell me things their parents say and not like, oh, my God, you won’t believe this Dr. Sinclair. But like, they’re like, happy or proud or pleased. They might want their parents not to know that. But the stuff that you guys say really does matter.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/279fb31f-f176-4d8c-af8b-afc401155ab0
The Balance Between Social Media and Mental Health: A Proposal for the Season XXVII PBS Podcast “What Happens When I Get Closer to Home”
That’s coming up in just a moment. But before we go to break, you know, I’ve been the one asking a lot of questions this season, but I also do want to hear from you. I know this is deeply personal for a lot of people. What do you want to know when it comes to mental health and social media? Have you made any changes to your own digital diet since listening to this season of the podcast? Just give me a call at 470-396-0832. Leave a message. It would mean a lot if we could hear your voice in the upcoming episode of the show.
What do you think the balance looks like? Professor Sinclair-McBride says it’s different for everyone she treats and usually starts with a few questions.
What are their goals? Are they in the play? Are they doing community service? Like whatever it is, they have something. I’m more worried about you lying in your bed staring at the phone if you don’t have that.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/279fb31f-f176-4d8c-af8b-afc401155ab0
What I’ve Learned from Living in the Early Stages of My Childhood and How I’m Going With My High School: When I Learn to Walk with Them
I realize that this is interfering with my real life if somebody says that they are listening and that they are checking out the boxes that they are talking about. I don’t want to do things that I would like to do. But what do you tell somebody then who says, yes, that’s me. These are the issues I’m experiencing.
First, I give a lot of praise and affirmation because it takes a lot to be able to say, hey, I’m having a problem with something. There is a vulnerability to that and a humility that needs to be honored. Because there’s a lot of shame in realizing that you’re not kind of living your life the way you want to be living it, right? This is the first step for me. I like to know the kind of things you would do if this were not a problem. What were you like? What did you do with your time? What were you interested in? What were you doing with your friends? And then so that’s like going in the past and then going in the future, what do you want for the future? When you grow up, what kind of things do you want to do? Like, you know, what do you want to do after high school? What are what are your goals like? What’s fun for you? What is your dream vacation? Where are you trying to go with things? Because that gives me hints into what we can spend time on now, that’s not just the device.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/279fb31f-f176-4d8c-af8b-afc401155ab0
Putting a “Selfie” on the TV: What can we do about the selfie effect and what kind of filters do we need?
Transparency. You know how your daughters like when you say that its a business because they realized it was a business. People trying to buy your time, all that kind of stuff. I wish that that information was constantly available to them. If you were watching a TikTok and you see that this person is sponsored by a corporation, it should just be like that, like just in big letters. They work out five hours a day and this person is selling you a supplement that you can avoid, but they really work out five hours a day. It’s just to make it clear what’s going on.
I don’t want to, but I was interested in her comments about the “Selfie Effect” and the filters that she made. I guess they’re going to exist. We talk about the things as being either good or bad, according to one of my daughters. Sometimes they are just a thing. They’re there. And, you know, people like to look at beautiful pictures of sunrises and sunsets and mountains and nature. But when it comes to filtering the human, you know, our own bodies and stuff. If you were to wave a magic wand or the tech companies came to you and said, with all your expertise, how should we handle the idea of people modifying, altering their appearance in ways that make it less authentic?
I think I have a kind of an intersectional response to that in the sense that, like a lot of the filters kind of have a very Eurocentric lens. So it would be great if they did not make people’s skin colors lighter or change the shape of their noses or change how big their eyes are, or do things that make them more towards a certain.
Standard of beauty that may not be from the cultural background that they’re from, right? Like, I think that would be really clutch. If you put a filter on it will show you are beautiful but you can still play with it, right? It’s just a tool, that’s what it is. But also this picture of you without the filter is also really cool. Some kids are into sending silly pictures to each other, which leads to a sense of vulnerability or connection that they are really close to, because they sent you this.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/279fb31f-f176-4d8c-af8b-afc401155ab0
Where do we go from here? How do we live in the 21st century? What do we really want to see in our lives?
Right. I’m curious if we can use this technology to predict where this goes based on how people are using it the most. If you had to look a decade or two decades in the future, do you think my adolescents are teenagers, I know this is a completely hypothetical question, but do you think so? Is it something you believe to be more of a period of adolescence?
I think the period of adolescence is where the majority of time is spent. I am very influenced by how much this generation of kids is willing to take no prisoners about things that can hurt or need fixing in the world. Maybe they’ll figure out how to make that happen. I can’t imagine everyone who’s like 14 now is going to be sitting at 30 looking at the same Snapchat filters that they are right now. I’m sure there will be doing something completely different, but I also think that they may be a part of the change of how to make this feel more balanced and empowering.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/279fb31f-f176-4d8c-af8b-afc401155ab0
Do you look great? Look at me, Dad, and I’ll look at you, Dad — I’m sorry, but I can’t look back
I keep saying I don’t want to be naive here, and I really don’t. Sky said that she looked at the pictures of my family and I was surprised. I think you’re all perfect no matter what. You look great, you know what I mean. But it is, I don’t know, it kind of gets to me a little bit. I’m starting to get emotional thinking about her saying that, because I like that it’s not that big of a deal. The picture. It’s not. I think she would agree with that. And yet the motivation for her to have said that must come from a deeper place where something has, it’s not that it’s harmed her, but it’s made her feel that way. I want my kids to be protected from that feeling. That’s not going to work if I just say hey, you always look great. That doesn’t mean that don’t get through, Dad, I’m going to say that, you know.
I think it comes from a fear of being imperfect. Like if I if I make a mistake, if I’m not always presenting my best, the bottom is going to fall out and I’m, people are going to reject me or I’m not going to get the things that I dream of getting. And like it’s not necessarily that any, you know, set of bad circumstances or good circumstances makes someone feel like that. If you get a lot of positive feedback, you want to get more of it. And so being being able to feel comfortable in your mistakes and in your imperfection is like a continuous lifelong process. I think that the sense of ownership that she has is going to kind of solidify as she gets older, as she sees that I am all the bad and the good.
If it means my daughters know that I care, then I will take the eye rolls. The words you say to your kids don’t mean a lot when you think about it. They do. They are playing a role that has been given to them. To be nonplused, that role is to roll their eyes. I can’t be bothered, Dad. But they are hearing you. They are processing what you’re saying. They are storing it so they can feel good about all of it as well. I am more inspired now that I’m talking to Professor Sinclair-McBride, because I want my daughters to know how much I love them. It’s important. I hope that you and your loved ones follow in my footsteps, and do the same with your kids. In a world surrounded by screens, real life conversations make even more of a difference.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/chasing-life/episodes/279fb31f-f176-4d8c-af8b-afc401155ab0
Should Social Media Companies be More Transparent? A Reply to Sinclair-McBride’s Comments on “Rethinking Social Media Company Transparency”
She told Professor Sinclair-McBride that social media companies should be more transparent, and that part of the conversation stuck out to me. It’s an interesting idea. Throughout the season, I’ve asked different experts their opinions and takes on what we can do to make social media a better place. There was a push to ask that same question to the social media companies. And the professor isn’t the only one calling for change.
The safety and privacy of American youth is jeopardized by unregulated social media, a weapon of mass destruction. It’s time to act, and I urge you Senators, to make meaningful steps to regulate these companies.
