Once upon a time, America’s children were very naughty. They drank and smoked and took all kinds of drugs more than any children had ever done in the history of the world. Kids, you see, had almost no technology worth speaking of in the 1970s and early ’80s, and it was hell.
But slowly, things changed. Television got grittier right at the point when parents began allowing kids to have TVs in their own rooms. Then cable arrived with a bang, in multiple senses of the word. The VCR revolution brought afternoons of illicit hardcore porn to the after-school set. Pop music promoted anarchy, alternative lifestyles, and, allegedly, Satanism (but only if you played certain albums backwards). MTV gave youth a new pantheon of role models to follow: Madonna, Prince, Poison (okay, maybe not Poison). But this was only a warm up for the crock of degradation awaiting youth over the Internet rainbow, a kaleidoscope of weird sex, violent video games and social networking.
And lo, after this three-decade long journey into a virtual Babylon, America’s children drank less, smoked less, toked less, and snorted less than they did starting out. Had technology delivered them from the sins of the ’70s by satiating their every virtual desire and acting like soma on their worst instincts? Why not? It’s a more plausible claim than that made by a recent study from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University, which claimed that 12 to 17-year-olds who spend time on social networking sites are at an increased risk of smoking, drinking and drug use.
The problem with CASA’s argument is that the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future Survey (funded by the National Institutes of Health) shows that kids are doing all of these things much less than they did before there was social networking, or the Internet, or even personal computers for the masses. The trends for alcohol use and binge drinking (along with attitudes about whether both are good or bad, and perceptions of how easy it is to procure alcohol) all show that kids are in a much better place today than in the ’70s and early ’80s. It’s not a perfect place – but if the correlation between the rise of social networking over the past decade and substance abuse was causal surely the trends would be getting worse rather than better?
As for marijuana use, there has been an uptick, but one not nearly high enough to bring us back to the stoned age of the 1970s. Marijuana also no longer carries the cultural stigma it once did, but it’s important to remember that this coincides with significant social and political agitation for both legalized medical and private use, which has possibly changed the overall climate of social acceptability. Perhaps we can “blame” our changes in social attitudes, rather than our technology, for this small surge of pot smoking.
There’s also the availability factor. Marijuana is seen as especially easy to get for most kids. As for cocaine, use among 12th graders has plummeted since the late ’80s, as has the perception that it is relatively easy to procure. Cigarette smoking is also in long-term decline, with sharp increases in perceptions of risk and disapproval.
CASA’s founder Joseph Califano tries to explain this unhelpful correlation away in an interview with the Chicago Tribune: “We’re not saying [social media] causes it,” he said. “But we are saying that this is a characteristic that should signal to [parents] that, well, you ought to be watching.”
Yeah, but given the percentage of kids engaged in social networking, you might as well tell parents to watch out for eating meat as a “signal” for pot smoking. Social networking is such a widespread practice that it can easily mask other, more critical factors, such as the possibility that kids who are interested in drinking or drugs are more likely to engage in social networking, or that kids who suffer parental neglect may turn to substance abuse and spend more time online.
The problem is that CASA has a history of serial exaggeration, driven by its unrelenting devotion to the idea that kids can be socially engineered to abstain from alcohol, tobacco and narcotics forever. As Califano puts it in a statement accompanying the report, “Perhaps our most important finding from so many years of surveying teens and other research is this: A child who gets through age 21 without smoking, using illegal drugs or abusing alcohol is virtually certain never to do so.”
This fusion of religiosity (Califano has said in the past that he is doing the “Lord’s work”) with social science is a disaster for real scientific inquiry in an area of legitimate concern. We need to understand the impact of the media environment on cognition and behavior — but the only way to do this is with unrelenting scientific rigor. As it stands, CASA’s claim that it has uncovered evidence to “strike Facebook fear into the hearts of parents” is nothing but a technological fairy tale.
But slowly, things changed. Television got grittier right at the point when parents began allowing kids to have TVs in their own rooms. Then cable arrived with a bang, in multiple senses of the word. The VCR revolution brought afternoons of illicit hardcore porn to the after-school set. Pop music promoted anarchy, alternative lifestyles, and, allegedly, Satanism (but only if you played certain albums backwards). MTV gave youth a new pantheon of role models to follow: Madonna, Prince, Poison (okay, maybe not Poison). But this was only a warm up for the crock of degradation awaiting youth over the Internet rainbow, a kaleidoscope of weird sex, violent video games and social networking.
And lo, after this three-decade long journey into a virtual Babylon, America’s children drank less, smoked less, toked less, and snorted less than they did starting out. Had technology delivered them from the sins of the ’70s by satiating their every virtual desire and acting like soma on their worst instincts? Why not? It’s a more plausible claim than that made by a recent study from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University, which claimed that 12 to 17-year-olds who spend time on social networking sites are at an increased risk of smoking, drinking and drug use.
The problem with CASA’s argument is that the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future Survey (funded by the National Institutes of Health) shows that kids are doing all of these things much less than they did before there was social networking, or the Internet, or even personal computers for the masses. The trends for alcohol use and binge drinking (along with attitudes about whether both are good or bad, and perceptions of how easy it is to procure alcohol) all show that kids are in a much better place today than in the ’70s and early ’80s. It’s not a perfect place – but if the correlation between the rise of social networking over the past decade and substance abuse was causal surely the trends would be getting worse rather than better?
As for marijuana use, there has been an uptick, but one not nearly high enough to bring us back to the stoned age of the 1970s. Marijuana also no longer carries the cultural stigma it once did, but it’s important to remember that this coincides with significant social and political agitation for both legalized medical and private use, which has possibly changed the overall climate of social acceptability. Perhaps we can “blame” our changes in social attitudes, rather than our technology, for this small surge of pot smoking.
There’s also the availability factor. Marijuana is seen as especially easy to get for most kids. As for cocaine, use among 12th graders has plummeted since the late ’80s, as has the perception that it is relatively easy to procure. Cigarette smoking is also in long-term decline, with sharp increases in perceptions of risk and disapproval.
CASA’s founder Joseph Califano tries to explain this unhelpful correlation away in an interview with the Chicago Tribune: “We’re not saying [social media] causes it,” he said. “But we are saying that this is a characteristic that should signal to [parents] that, well, you ought to be watching.”
Yeah, but given the percentage of kids engaged in social networking, you might as well tell parents to watch out for eating meat as a “signal” for pot smoking. Social networking is such a widespread practice that it can easily mask other, more critical factors, such as the possibility that kids who are interested in drinking or drugs are more likely to engage in social networking, or that kids who suffer parental neglect may turn to substance abuse and spend more time online.
The problem is that CASA has a history of serial exaggeration, driven by its unrelenting devotion to the idea that kids can be socially engineered to abstain from alcohol, tobacco and narcotics forever. As Califano puts it in a statement accompanying the report, “Perhaps our most important finding from so many years of surveying teens and other research is this: A child who gets through age 21 without smoking, using illegal drugs or abusing alcohol is virtually certain never to do so.”
This fusion of religiosity (Califano has said in the past that he is doing the “Lord’s work”) with social science is a disaster for real scientific inquiry in an area of legitimate concern. We need to understand the impact of the media environment on cognition and behavior — but the only way to do this is with unrelenting scientific rigor. As it stands, CASA’s claim that it has uncovered evidence to “strike Facebook fear into the hearts of parents” is nothing but a technological fairy tale.
