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Javier E

Opinion | America Is Averting Its Eyes From Something Very, Very Wrong - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...social-media-inequality.html

social media psychology research effects blacks Hispanic teens

shared by Javier E on 22 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • social media use also differs by race and ethnicity — and there’s far less discussion of that. According to a new study by Pew, Black and Hispanic teenagers ages 13 to 17 spend far more time on most social media apps than their white peers
  • One-third of Hispanic teenagers, for example, say they are “almost constantly” on TikTok, compared with one-fifth of Black teenagers and one-tenth of white teenagers.
  • Higher percentages of Hispanic (27 percent) and Black teenagers (23 percent) are almost constantly on YouTube compared with white teenagers (9 percent); the same trend is true for Instagram.
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  • Overall, 55 percent of Hispanic teenagers and 54 percent of Black teenagers say they are online almost constantly, compared with 38 percent of white teenagers;
  • Black and Hispanic kids ages 8 to 12, another study found, also use social media more than their white counterparts.
  • we also have to ask,” she went on, “why they are so drawn to social media? Is it the messages on social media that’s exacerbating the depression and anxiety, or was the depression and anxiety already there to begin with and social media is a way to self-medicate?”
  • “It’s culturally more acceptable in youth of color households to use technology for social and academic reasons compared with white households,” Charmaraman said. “Parents don’t worry as much about it. There isn’t as much shame around it.”
  • “We know broadly that youth of minoritized communities have longer commutes, fewer opportunities to do after-school activities, fewer resources,” Magis-Weinberg told me. They may not have spaces to hang out safely with friends nearby; social media is a more accessible option. “But we have to ask,” Magis-Weinberg added, “what is social media use displacing?”
  • Largely because of lower income levels, Black and Hispanic teenagers are less likely to have broadband access or computers at home. This makes them disproportionately use their smartphones, where social media apps ping, whiz and notify
  • Lucia Magis-Weinberg, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Washington who studies teenagers and tech, compares internet use of the phone to snorkeling, whereas computers allow more of a scuba dive.
  • WhatsApp, hugely popular in Latin America, is used by Hispanic teenagers more than by other demographic groups of the same ages.
  • “The way social media use presents itself is as something that is actively harmful,” Marsh told me. Already kids from these communities have few advantages, he explained. They may not have access to after-school programs. They’re often in single-parent households. They lack support systems. “I think in the long term,” he said, “we’re going to see real differences in the impact.”
  • Let’s consider just reading, which also happens to be correlated with both mental well-being and school achievement
  • According to Scholastic’s most recent Kids and Family Reading Report, the percentage of kids ages 6 to 17 who read frequently for pleasure dropped to 28 percent in 2022 from 37 percent in 2010.
  • Those numbers fall precipitously as kids get older; 46 percent of 6- to 8-year-olds read frequently in 2022 compared with only 18 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds.
  • All this raises the possibility that disparities in internet use could in turn intensify overall declines and existing differences in reading across racial groups among adults.
  • The average daily time spent reading per capita by ethnicity in 2022 was 0.29 hours for white adults, 0.12 for Black adults and 0.10 for Hispanics.
  • In other words, one danger is that social media not only reflects real-world disparities, it could also exacerbate them.
  • Greater use of social media by Black and Hispanic young people “can help perpetuate inequality in society because higher levels of social media use among kids have been demonstrably linked to adverse effects such as depression and anxiety, inadequate sleep, eating disorders, poor self-esteem and greater exposure to online harassment,”
  • Akeem Marsh, medical director of the Home of Integrated Behavioral Health at the New York Foundling, a social services agency, said that among the hundreds of largely Black and Hispanic kids he sees from communities with fewer resources, social media use is often a primary concern or it comes up in treatment. Kids who use it frequently often respond with traumatized feelings and repeated anxiety.
  • The answer, according to experts, includes sports participation, in-person socializing, after-school clubs and activities, exploring the outdoors, reading and more.
  • We need greater awareness of the disparities as well, and most likely, immediate action. What we do not need is another “sudden” yet regrettably delayed realization that something has gone very, very wrong with America’s kids, but we were too busy looking the other way.
Javier E

What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind? - WSJ.com - 1 views

online.wsj.com/...3806504577181351486558984.html

adolescence teenage brain research development learning experience brain science psychology

shared by Javier E on 06 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. Fortunately, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists are starting to explain the foundations of that weirdness.
  • The crucial new idea is that there are two different neural and psychological systems that interact to turn children into adults. Over the past two centuries, and even more over the past generation, the developmental timing of these two systems has changed. That, in turn, has profoundly changed adolescence and produced new kinds of adolescent woe. The big question for anyone who deals with young people today is how we can go about bringing these cogs of the teenage mind into sync once again
  • The first of these systems has to do with emotion and motivation. It is very closely linked to the biological and chemical changes of puberty and involves the areas of the brain that respond to rewards. This is the system that turns placid 10-year-olds into restless, exuberant, emotionally intense teenagers, desperate to attain every goal, fulfill every desire and experience every sensation. Later, it turns them back into relatively placid adults.
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  • adolescents aren't reckless because they underestimate risks, but because they overestimate rewards—or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do. The reward centers of the adolescent brain are much more active than those of either children or adults.
  • What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers
  • In contemporary life, the relationship between these two systems has changed dramatically. Puberty arrives earlier, and the motivational system kicks in earlier too. At the same time, contemporary children have very little experience with the kinds of tasks that they'll have to perform as grown-ups.
  • The second crucial system in our brains has to do with control; it channels and harnesses all that seething energy. In particular, the prefrontal cortex reaches out to guide other parts of the brain, including the parts that govern motivation and emotion. This is the system that inhibits impulses and guides decision-making, that encourages long-term planning and delays gratification.
  • This control system depends much more on learning. It becomes increasingly effective throughout childhood and continues to develop during adolescence and adulthood, as we gain more experience.
  • Expertise comes with experience.
  • In gatherer-hunter and farming societies, childhood education involves formal and informal apprenticeship. Children have lots of chances to practice the skills that they need to accomplish their goals as adults, and so to become expert planners and actors.
  • In the past, to become a good gatherer or hunter, cook or caregiver, you would actually practice gathering, hunting, cooking and taking care of children all through middle childhood and early adolescence—tuning up just the prefrontal wiring you'd need as an adult. But you'd do all that under expert adult supervision and in the protected world of childhood
  • there is more and more evidence that genes are just the first step in complex developmental sequences, cascades of interactions between organism and environment, and that those developmental processes shape the adult brain. Even small changes in developmental timing can lead to big changes in who we become.
  • The experience of trying to achieve a real goal in real time in the real world is increasingly delayed, and the growth of the control system depends on just those experiences.
  • Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers. Puberty not only turns on the motivational and emotional system with new force, it also turns it away from the family and toward the world of equals.
  • An ever longer protected period of immaturity and dependence—a childhood that extends through college—means that young humans can learn more than ever before. There is strong evidence that IQ has increased dramatically as more children spend more time in school
  • children know more about more different subjects than they ever did in the days of apprenticeships.
  • Wide-ranging, flexible and broad learning, the kind we encourage in high-school and college, may actually be in tension with the ability to develop finely-honed, controlled, focused expertise in a particular skill, the kind of learning that once routinely took place in human societies.
  • this new explanation based on developmental timing elegantly accounts for the paradoxes of our particular crop of adolescents.
  • First, experience shapes the brain.
  • the brain is so powerful precisely because it is so sensitive to experience. It's as true to say that our experience of controlling our impulses make the prefrontal cortex develop as it is to say that prefrontal development makes us better at controlling our impulses
  • Second, development plays a crucial role in explaining human nature
  • Today's adolescents develop an accelerator a long time before they can steer and brake.
  • Brain research is often taken to mean that adolescents are really just defective adults—grown-ups with a missing part.
  • But the new view of the adolescent brain isn't that the prefrontal lobes just fail to show up; it's that they aren't properly instructed and exercised
  • Instead of simply giving adolescents more and more school experiences—those extra hours of after-school classes and homework—we could try to arrange more opportunities for apprenticeship
  • Summer enrichment activities like camp and travel, now so common for children whose parents have means, might be usefully alternated with summer jobs, with real responsibilities.
  • Javier E on 06 Feb 12
     
    The two brain systems, the increasing gap between them, and the implications for adolescent education.
  • anonymous on 06 Feb 12
     
    "In gatherer-hunter and farming societies, childhood education involves formal and informal apprenticeship" (Gopnik). Similarly to the way that Marx pointed out the economic shift from hunter-gatherer to farmer to (eventually) capitalist societies, Gopnik underlines the societal shift- especially in teenagers. While I think that some of the changes in teenagers are due to evolution and development (as proven through some of the medical tests mentioned in the article), I think that this issue may relate back to parenting. As the article about French parenting pointed out, it has become a very obvious fact that many (specifically American) parents simply do not have good techniques, and this could effect the way that their child develops and behaves. I also think that another possible explanation to this issue is that there is more expected of teenagers, scholarly, then before; however, as the article mentioned, the real-world experience is lacking. By raising the academic bar higher and higher, it may actually cause more students to, essentially, "burn out" before everything that they have learned can be applied: "What happened to the gifted, imaginative child who excelled through high school but then dropped out of college, drifted from job to job and now lives in his parents' basement?" (Gopnik)
Javier E

I Was Wrong About Trigger Warnings - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...674759

trigger resilience social media psychology mental health culture history

shared by Javier E on 10 Aug 23 - No Cached
  • Trigger warnings migrated from feminist websites and blogs to college campuses and progressive groups. Often, they seemed more about emphasizing the upsetting nature of certain topics than about accommodating people who had experienced traumatic events. By 2013, they had become so pervasive—and so controversial—that Slate declared it “The Year of the Trigger Warning.”
  • he issue only got more complicated from there. Around 2016, Richard Friedman, who ran the student mental-health program at Cornell for 22 years, started seeing the number of people seeking help each year increase by 10 or 15 percent. “Not just that,” he told me, “but the way young people were talking about upsetting events changed.
  • He described “this sense of being harmed by things that were unfamiliar and uncomfortable. The language that was being used seemed inflated relative to the actual harm that could be done. I mean, I was surprised—people were very upset about things that we would never have thought would be dangerous.” Some students, for instance, complained about lecturers who’d made comments they disliked, or teachers whose beliefs contradicted their personal values.
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  • Friedman worried that students also saw themselves as fragile, and seemed to believe that coming into contact with offensive or challenging information was psychologically detrimental. In asking for more robust warnings about potentially upsetting classroom material, the students seemed to be saying: This could hurt us, and this institution owes us protection from distress.
  • My own doubts about all of this came, ironically, from reporting on trauma. I’ve interviewed women around the world about the worst things human beings do to one another. I started to notice a concerning dissonance between what researchers understand about trauma and resilience, and the ways in which the concepts were being wielded in progressive institutions. And I began to question my own role in all of it.
  • as the mental health of adolescent girls and college students crumbles, and as activist organizations, including feminist ones, find themselves repeatedly embroiled in internecine debates over power and language, a question nags: In giving greater weight to claims of individual hurt and victimization, have we inadvertently raised a generation that has fewer tools to manage hardship and transform adversity into agency?
  • Since my days as a feminist blogger, mental health among teenagers has plummeted. From 2007 to 2019, the suicide rate for children ages 10 to 14 tripled; for girls in that age group, it nearly quadrupled. A 2021 CDC report found that 57 percent of female high-school students reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” up from 36 percent in 2011. Though the pandemic undoubtedly contributed to a crash in adolescent mental health, the downturn began well before COVID hit.
  • Part of the issue may be a social-media ecosystem that lets teens live within a bubble of like-minded peers and tends to privilege the loudest, most aggrieved voices; this kind of insularity can encourage teenagers to understand distressing experiences as traumatizing. “I think it’s easier for them to artificially curate environments that are comfortable,” Shaili Jain, a physician and PTSD specialist, told me. “And I think that is backfiring. Because then when they’re in a situation where they’re not comfortable, it feels really alarming to them.”
  • The CDC study suggests that, over the past decade, bullying among high schoolers has actually decreased in certain respects. Today’s teenagers are also less likely to drink or use illicit drugs than they were 10 years ago. And even before pandemic-relief funds slashed the child-poverty rate, the percentage of children living in poverty fell precipitously after 2012. American public high schoolers are more likely to graduate than at any other time in our country’s history, and girls are significantly more likely to graduate than boys.
  • So what has changed for the worse for teenage girls since roughly 2010? The forces behind their deteriorating mental health are opaque and complex, but one big shift has been a decline in the time teenagers spend with their friends in person, dipping by 11 hours a week—a decline that began before the pandemic, but was badly exacerbated by it
  • Since 2014, the proportion of teens with smartphones has risen by 22 percent, and the proportion who say they use the internet “almost constantly” has doubled
  • this idea—that to develop resilience, we must tough out hard situations—places a heavier burden on some people than others.
  • Applying the language of trauma to an event changes the way we process it. That may be a good thing, allowing a person to face a moment that truly cleaved their life into a before and an after, and to seek help and begin healing. Or it may amplify feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, elevating those feelings above a sense of competence and control.
  • “We have this saying in the mental-health world: ‘Perception is reality,’ ” Jain said. “So if someone is adamant that they felt something was traumatizing, that is their reality, and there’s probably going to be mental-health consequences of that.”
  • Martin Seligman, the director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent the past 50 years researching resilience. One study he co-authored looked at the U.S. Army, to see if there was a way to predict PTSD. Unsurprisingly, he and his fellow researchers found a link to the severity of the combat to which soldiers were exposed
  • But the preexisting disposition that soldiers brought to their battlefield experiences also mattered. “If you’re a catastrophizer, in the worst 10 or 20 percent, you’re more than three times as likely to come down with PTSD if you face severe combat,” Seligman told me. “And this is true at every level of severity of combat—the percentage goes down, but it’s still about twice as high, even with mild combat or no obvious combat.”
  • In other words, a person’s sense of themselves as either capable of persevering through hardship or unable to manage it can be self-fulfilling. “To the extent we overcome and cope with the adversities and traumas in our life, we develop more mastery, more resilience, more ability to fend off bad events in the future,”
  • Teenage girls report troublingly high rates of sexual violence and bullying, as well as concern for their own physical safety at school. But it’s not clear that their material circumstances have taken a plunge steep enough to explain their mental-health decline
  • soldiers who experienced severe trauma could not only survive, but actually turn their suffering into a source of strength. “About as many people who showed PTSD showed something called post-traumatic growth, which means they have an awful time during the event, but a year later they’re stronger physically and psychologically than they were to begin with,” he said. But that empowering message has yet to take hold in society.
  • what would be a more productive way to approach adversity
  • physical exercise. “It’s like any form of strength training,” he told me. “People have no hesitation about going to the gym and suffering, you know, muscle pain in the service of being stronger and looking a way that they want to look. And they wake up the next day and they say, ‘Oh my God, that’s so painful. I’m so achy.’ That’s not traumatic. And yet when you bring that to the emotional world, it’s suddenly very adverse.”
  • “But conversely, to the extent that we have an ideology or a belief that when traumatic events occur, we are the helpless victims of them—that feeds on itself.”
  • he exercise metaphor rankled Michael Ungar, the director of the Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Canada. “Chronic exposure to a stressor like racism, misogyny, being constantly stigmatized or excluded, ableism—all of those factors do wear us down; they make us more susceptible to feelings that will be very overwhelming,” he told me. There are, after all, only so many times a person can convince themselves that they can persevere when it feels like everyone around them is telling them the opposite.
  • “the resiliency trap.” Black women in particular, she told me, have long been praised for their toughness and perseverance, but individual resiliency can’t solve structural problems
  • From Dent’s perspective, young people aren’t rejecting the concept of inner strength; they are rejecting the demand that they navigate systemic injustice with individual grit alone. When they talk about harm and trauma, they aren’t exhibiting weakness; they’re saying, Yes, I am vulnerable, and that’s human.
  • patients are being more “transparent about what they need to feel comfortable, to feel safe, to feel valued in this world,” she said. “Is that a bad thing?”
  • Most of the experts I spoke with were careful to distinguish between an individual student asking a professor for a specific accommodation to help them manage a past trauma, and a cultural inclination to avoid challenging or upsetting situations entirely
  • Thriving requires working through discomfort and hardship. But creating the conditions where that kind of resilience is possible is as much a collective responsibility as an individual one.
  • to replace our culture of trauma with a culture of resilience, we’ll have to relearn how to support one another—something we’ve lost as our society has moved toward viewing “wellness” as an individual pursuit, a state of mind accessed via self-work.
  • “If everything is traumatic and we have no capacity to cope with these moments, what does that say about our capacity to cope when something more extreme happens?”
  • “Resilience is partly about putting in place the resources for the next stressor.” Those resources have to be both internal and external
  • Social change is necessary if we want to improve well-being, but social change becomes possible only if our movements are made up of people who believe that the adversities they have faced are surmountable, that injustice does not have to be permanent, that the world can change for the better, and that they have the ability to make that change.
  • we need to provide material aid to meet basic needs. We need to repair broken community ties so fewer among us feel like they’re struggling alone. And we need to encourage the cultivation of a sense of purpose beyond the self. We also know what stands in the way of resilience: avoiding difficult ideas and imperfect people, catastrophizing, isolating ourselves inside our own heads.
  • In my interviews with women who have experienced sexual violence, I try not to put the traumatic event at the center of our conversations. My aim instead is to learn as much as I can about them as people—their families, their work, their interests, what makes them happy, and where they feel the most themselves. And I always end our conversations by asking them to reflect on how far they’ve come, and what they are proudest of.
Javier E

Most American teens are frightened by climate change, poll finds, and about 1 in 4 are ... - 0 views

beta.washingtonpost.com/...9-9610-fb56c5522e1c_story.html

climate change teens youth survey 2019

shared by Javier E on 16 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • In a coastal town in Washington, climate change has a high school junior worried about the floods that keep deluging his school. A 17-year-old from Texas says global warming scares him so much he can’t even think about it.
  • But across the country, teens are channeling their anxieties into activism. “Fear,” says Maryland 16-year-old Madeline Graham, an organizer of a student protest planned for this week, “is a commodity we don’t have time for if we’re going to win the fight.”
  • Roughly 1 in 4 have participated in a walkout, attended a rally or written to a public official to express their views on global warming — remarkable levels of activism for a group that has not yet reached voting age.
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  • The poll by The Post and Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) is the first major survey of teenagers’ views since the explosion of the youth climate movement last year.
  • This week, in the run-up to a major United Nations summit, hundreds of thousands of school kids plan to abandon their classrooms to demand more aggressive measures to protect the planet.
  • “People feel very guilty when a child says, ‘You are stealing my future.’ That has impact,” Thunberg told The Post. “We have definitely made people open their eyes.”
  • More than 7 in 10 teenagers and young adults say climate change will cause a moderate or great deal of harm to people in their generation,
  • Both Lopez and Graham said thinking about climate change makes them afraid, an emotion they share with 57 percent of teens nationwide. Fewer than a third of teens say they are optimistic.
  • most say they rarely or never discuss the issue with family and friends.
  • Adults “think: ‘Oh you’re so young, you don’t know what you’re talking about,’” he said. “But I know the facts, and I know what the most drastic consequences will be. I know that people aren’t doing what needs to be done.”
  • Roughly a third of both teenagers and adults say the issue is “extremely important” to them personally
  • Just under half believe the United States must drastically reduce its fossil fuel use in the next few years to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
  • Adults, he said, don’t seem to take the issue as seriously, or as personally, as people his age
  • Teenagers also share adults’ questions and misconceptions about the ways the world is warming. In both age groups, no more than 2 in 10 say they know “a lot” about the causes of climate change and ways to reduce it
  • fewer than half say they’ve taken action to reduce their own carbon footprints
  • nd roughly 4 in 10 say mitigating the effects of warming will require major sacrifices from ordinary Americans.
  • the number of teenagers who say they’re being taught in school how to mitigate climate change appears to be on the decline
  • Fourteen percent say they have learned “a lot” about the subject, down from 25 percent in 2010
  • “It’s terrible,” said Sam Riley, 17, of Boston. “It’s hardly ever brought up at my school.”
  • The high school junior said he learned nearly everything he knows about climate change from reading the news and searching the Internet
  • Riley, who is black, believes that minorities and people in low income communities will be most severely impacted by warming, because they are more likely to live in vulnerable areas and less likely to be able to insulate themselves.“The wealthier you are, the more protection you have,”
  • black and Hispanic teens express a greater sense of urgency around climate change; 37 percent and 41 percent, respectively, say people need to act in the next year or two, compared with 24 percent of white teens.
  • About 4 in 10 of those under 18 call climate change a “crisis.” But unlike adults, most teenagers say they don’t feel helpless. More than half — 54 percent — say they feel motivated.
  • But,” she said, “this generation — we’re fighters. And we’re going to win.”
Javier E

Seeking Academic Edge, Teenagers Abuse Stimulants - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...eenagers-abuse-stimulants.html

adolescent abuse stimulants academic competition drugs

shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 12 - Cached
  • Adderall, an amphetamine prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder that the boy said he and his friends routinely shared to study late into the night, focus during tests and ultimately get the grades worthy of their prestigious high school in an affluent suburb of New York City. The drug did more than just jolt them awake for the 8 a.m. SAT; it gave them a tunnel focus tailor-made for the marathon of tests long known to make or break college applications.
  • “Everyone in school either has a prescription or has a friend who does,” the boy said.
  • Pills that have been a staple in some college and graduate school circles are going from rare to routine in many academically competitive high schools, where teenagers say they get them from friends, buy them from student dealers or fake symptoms to their parents and doctors to get prescriptions.
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  • “It’s throughout all the private schools here,” said DeAnsin Parker, a New York psychologist who treats many adolescents from affluent neighborhoods like the Upper East Side. “It’s not as if there is one school where this is the culture. This is the culture.”
  • The D.E.A. lists prescription stimulants like Adderall and Vyvanse (amphetamines) and Ritalin and Focalin (methylphenidates) as Class 2 controlled substances — the same as cocaine and morphine — because they rank among the most addictive substances that have a medical use.
  • merely giving a friend an Adderall or Vyvanse pill is the same as selling it and can be prosecuted as a felony.
  • While these medicines tend to calm people with A.D.H.D., those without the disorder find that just one pill can jolt them with the energy and focus to push through all-night homework binges and stay awake during exams afterward. “It’s like it does your work for you,”
  • But abuse of prescription stimulants can lead to depression and mood swings (from sleep deprivation), heart irregularities and acute exhaustion or psychosis during withdrawal, doctors say. Little is known about the long-term effects of abuse of stimulants among the young
  • the pills eventually become an entry to the abuse of painkillers and sleep aids.
  • “Once you break the seal on using pills, or any of that stuff, it’s not scary anymore — especially when you’re getting A’s,” said the boy who snorted Adderall in the parking lot. He spoke from the couch of his drug counselor, detailing how he later became addicted to the painkiller Percocet and eventually heroin.
  • “Children have prefrontal cortexes that are not fully developed, and we’re changing the chemistry of the brain. That’s what these drugs do
  • The number of prescriptions for A.D.H.D. medications dispensed for young people ages 10 to 19 has risen 26 percent since 2007, to almost 21 million yearly, according to IMS Health, a health care information company — a number that experts estimate corresponds to more than two million individuals.
  • Doctors and teenagers from more than 15 schools across the nation with high academic standards estimated that the portion of students who do so ranges from 15 percent to 40 percent.
  • “They’re the A students, sometimes the B students, who are trying to get good grades,”
  • “They’re the quote-unquote good kids, basically.”
  • After 30 minutes, the buzz began, she said: laser focus, instant recall and the fortitude to crush any test in her path.
  • “It wasn’t that hard of a decision. Do I want only four hours of sleep and be a mess, and then underperform on the test and then in field hockey? Or make the teachers happy and the coach happy and get good grades, get into a good college and make my parents happy?”
  • Madeleine estimated that one-third of her classmates at her small school, most of whom she knew well, used stimulants without a prescription to boost their scholastic performance. Many students across the United States made similar estimates for their schools, all of them emphasizing that the drugs were used not to get high, but mostly by conscientious students to work harder and meet ever-rising academic expectations.
  • Every school identified in this article was contacted regarding statements by its students and stimulant abuse in general. Those that responded generally said that they were concerned about some teenagers turning to these drugs, but that their numbers were far smaller than the students said.
  • This is one of the more vexing problems with stimulants in high schools, experts said — the drugs enter the schools via students who get them legally, if not legitimately.
  • Newer long-lasting versions like Adderall XR and Vyvanse allow parents to give children a single dose in the morning, often unaware that the pills can go down a pants pocket as easily as the throat. Some students said they took their pills only during the week and gave their weekend pills to friends.
  • She said many parents could push as hard for prescriptions as their children did, telling her: “My child is not doing well in school. I understand there are meds he can take to make him smarter.”
  • “These are academic steroids. But usually, parents don’t get the steroids for you.”
  • Asked if the improper use of stimulants was cheating, students were split. Some considered that the extra studying hours and the heightened focus during exams amounted to an unfair advantage. Many countered that the drugs “don’t give you the answers” and defended their use as a personal choice for test preparation, akin to tutoring.
  • One consensus was clear: users were becoming more common, they said, and some students who would rather not take the drugs would be compelled to join them because of the competition over class rank and colleges’ interest.
  • “Junior and senior year is a whole new ballgame,” the boy said. “I promised myself I wouldn’t take it, but that can easily, easily change. I can be convinced.”
Javier E

Chicago gave hundreds of high-risk kids a summer job. Violent crime arrests plummeted. ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...iolent-crime-arrests-plummeted

chicago prevention crime youth employment jobs at-risk policy

shared by Javier E on 29 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • A couple of years ago, the city of Chicago started a summer jobs program for teenagers attending high schools in some of the city's high-crime, low-income neighborhoods.
  • Students who were randomly assigned to participate in the program had 43 percent fewer violent-crime arrests over 16 months, compared to students in a control group.
  • Researcher Sara Heller conducted a randomized control trial with the program, in partnership with the city. The study included 1,634 teens at 13 high schools. They were, on average, C students, almost all of them eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Twenty percent of the group had already been arrested, and 20 percent had already been victims of crime.
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  • The teenagers in the control group participated in neither part of the program.
  • There was a big difference, though, in the violent crime arrest data between the teenagers who got jobs and those who did not:
  • Heller, in fact, found that most of the decline came a few months later:
  • A lot of things could be going on here. Teenagers who might have committed crime to get money would no longer need to when they have a job.
  • If their added income allowed parents to work less, they may also have gotten more adult supervision.
  • It's also possible that students who were busy working simply didn't have idle time over the summer to commit crime — but that theory doesn't explain the long-term declines in violent arrests that occurred well after the summer program was over.
  • Some of the students were given part-time jobs through the program, working 25 hours a week at minimum wage ($8.25 in Illinois) with government or non-profit employers
  • That long-term benefit suggests that students who had access to jobs may have then found crime a less attractive alternative to work. Or perhaps their time on the job taught them how the labor market values education. Or maybe the work experience may have given them skills that enabled them to be more successful — and less prone to getting in trouble — back in school.
  • The results echo a common conclusion in education and health research: that public programs might do more with less by shifting from remediation to prevention.
  • The findings make clear that such programs need not be hugely costly to improve outcomes for disadvantaged youth; well-targeted, low-cost employment policies can make a substantial difference, even for a problem as destructive and complex as youth violence.
Javier E

Why Teenagers Today May Grow Up Conservative - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...getting-more-conservative.html

politics generation obama historical

shared by Javier E on 09 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Academic research has found that generations do indeed have ideological identities. People are particularly shaped by events as they first become aware of the world, starting as young as 10 years old
  • The generation that came of age during the five presidential terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman leaned Democratic for its entire life. So have those young liberals of the 1960s, who learned American politics through the glamour of John F. Kennedy. The babies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, who entered political consciousness during the Reagan years, lean Republican.
  • These identities are a more useful guide to American politics than the largely useless cliché about adults starting off liberal and slowly becoming more conservative. Like a broken clock, that cliché can seem accurate at times, mostly thanks to luck.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Among today’s teenagers, Democrats do start with some big advantages. For one thing, the next generation of voters is an ethnically diverse group: About 45 percent of American citizens in their teenage years are either Latino or a member of a racial minority, compared with only 29 percent of citizens 20 and older.
  • Even as Hispanics — and Asian-Americans — are assimilating, they are remaining Democratic. Many still seem decidedly turned off by the attitudes of today’s aging, white Republican party. If those groups remain liberal, as African-Americans and Jews have, demographic arithmetic dictates that Democrats will be favored to win presidential elections for the foreseeable future.
  • With that advantage, however, comes a funny kind of problem. The Democrats are the majority party when the country is in a bit of a funk.President Obama and many other Democrats argue that they could help lift this funk if congressional Republicans weren’t blocking nearly every Democratic proposal. The Democrats essentially won that debate in 2012 and will probably be favored to win it again in 2016. But the case will become harder to make with each passing year if living standards do not start to rise at a healthy clip for most households — which has not happened since the 1990s.
  • the generational nature of politics means that the second Obama term still has enormous political import.If he can execute his basic goals — if the economy improves and his health care, education and climate policies all seem to be basically working — it will pay political dividends for decades to come. We may not yet know who will be running for president in, say, 2024. We do know that Mr. Obama, like his predecessors, will still cast a shadow over the campaign.
Grace Gannon

The Teenage Fans of ISIS - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...381736

ISIS US teenage fans youth fear

shared by Grace Gannon on 23 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Grace Gannon on 23 Oct 14
     
    Three teenage girls from America recently attempted to travel galway across the world and join the efforts of Isis. These young girls were picked up in Germany, midway through their travels, and brought home to the U.S. last week. They stole $2000 in cash from their parents, who contacted the FBI when they discovered their disappearance. ISIS has allegedly recruited over 100 Americans, even after posting videos of an American journalist's murder in August. It is unclear what draws Americans to join this terrorist group, but many suggest that the terrorist group attempts to brainwash youth through social media and videos posted.
Javier E

Opinion | The High School We Can't Log Off From - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hool-we-cant-log-off-from.html

high school twitter social media adolescence

shared by Javier E on 07 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • It appears we’re in the midst of yet another Twitter backlash. Marquee users have been slowly backing away from their feeds (or slipping off the grid entirely)
  • last week, Twitter’s stock plunged by more than 20 percent after the company reported a decline in monthly users
  • The arguments for defection are at this point familiar: Twitter is a dark reservoir of hatred, home to the diseased national id. It turns us into our worst selves — dehumanizing us, deranging us, keying us up, beating us down, turning us into shrieking outrage monkeys
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • It uncomplicates complicated discussion; stealth-curates our news; hijacks our dopamine systems, carrying us off on a devil’s quest for ever more dime bags of retweets and likes.
  • Twitter is changing us — regressing us — in ways developmental psychologists would find weirdly recognizable.
  • the “imaginary audience” phenomenon in adolescents — the idea that teenagers somehow see themselves as stars of their own productions, believing themselves to be watched by an eager, if sometimes judgmental, public.
  • On Twitter, you actually are living your life on a stage. “It’s the imaginary audience come to life,
  • political and opinion Twitter has made many otherwise well-adjusted people a bit obsessed with their new publics, checking just a bit too frequently whether that brilliant aperçu they just typed has begun its viral zoom
  • Whenever anyone proposes boycotting social media altogether, Mr. Shirky always answers: Fine. Got a way to do that while protecting #blacklivesmatter and #metoo?
  • The same can be said of Twitter. It’s the ultimate large box of strangers. As in high school, Twitter denizens divide into tribes and bully to gain status; as in high school, too-confessional musings and dumb mistakes turn up in the wrong hands and end in humiliation.
  • the faster the medium is, the more emotional it gets. Twitter, as we know, is pretty fast, and therefore runs pretty hot.
  • Our self-regulation deserts us (been there); our prefrontal cortex, responsible for executive function and impulse control, goes offline; we become reward-seeking Scud missiles, addicts in search of a fix.
  • We become, in other words, teenagers, who are notoriously poor models of self-regulation — in large part because their prefrontal cortices are still developing and their dopamine circuits are pretty busy seeking stimulation
  • The psychologist Laurence Steinberg describes adolescents as “cars with powerful accelerators and weak brakes
  • Do we really want something so important, so vital, as our political conversation to be conducted in a teenage register and defined by teenage behaviors? Do we really want to have this discussion on a medium that makes us lose sight of our adult selves?
  • described high school to me as “a large box of strangers.” The kids don’t necessarily share much in common, after all; they just happen to be the same age and live in the same place. So what do they do in this giant box to give it order, structure? They divide into tribes and resort to aggression to determine status.
  • But something is wrong with this ecosystem. Too often, as Jaron Lanier notes in his recent jeremiad on social media, we think we’re controlling it when it’s controlling us.
  • the best response to adolescent deviltry, tough as it is, is to let kids make their own mistakes and hope that one day they realize they’re inflicting harm.
  • The problem is, Twitter rewards us for our mistakes. It isn’t designed to let us grow up.
kaylynfreeman

The Coronavirus Mostly Spares Younger Children. Teens Aren't So Lucky. - The New York T... - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-children.html

pandemic crisis coronavirus

shared by kaylynfreeman on 29 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Teenagers are about twice as likely to become infected with the coronavirus as younger children,
    • kaylynfreeman
      kaylynfreeman on 29 Sep 20
       
      sucks for me
  • The report is based on a review of 277,285 cases among children aged 5 to 17 whose illness was diagnosed from March to September.
  • that older teenagers, in high school and college, are more likely to be infected and more likely to transmit the coronavirus than are children under age 10
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Less emphasis had been put forward on high schools or universities, compared to younger classes, but I think that may be much more of a problem
  • If adolescents are more likely to have symptomatic disease, then they will be more likely to get tested,”
  • half of children infected with the coronavirus have no symptoms.
  • “young persons might be playing an increasingly important role in community transmission,”
    • kaylynfreeman
      kaylynfreeman on 29 Sep 20
       
      yea teenagers hang out in punlic places while kids have playdates at home
  • Children who had pre-existing medical problems were more likely to become severely ill,
  • By comparison, about half of children who die after getting the flu have an underlying condition.
    • kaylynfreeman
      kaylynfreeman on 29 Sep 20
       
      seems like the virus and the flu are extremely similar
  • Of 161,387 infected children whose race and ethnicity were known, 42 percent were Hispanic, 32 percent were white and 17 percent were Black, the C.D.C. researchers reported. Deaths among children were rare over all, but Hispanic and Black children were more likely to be hospitalized or admitted to an I.C.U.
    • kaylynfreeman
      kaylynfreeman on 29 Sep 20
       
      difference between priveleged and non priveleged
  • but older teenagers — those aged 15 and older — are roughly at the same risk as adults
peterconnelly

Opinion | Gen Z Is Cynical. They've Earned It. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...en-z-uvalde-covid-climate.html

opinion new york times

shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • As Kasky put it, you open up the door on any day, and either there is an invisible virus that could make you incredibly sick, or the threat of gun violence. “Parkland was a formative shock for my generation. And then Covid comes and completely pulls the curtain aside and shows us there have been no inner machinations to help us if everything comes to a boiling point.” Our conversation reinforced what I already hear from Gen Z — that it’s clear to many of our younger citizens that our institutions, and the older adults who run them, aren’t going to save them.
  • There is evidence, too, that Covid’s emotional toll has been particularly hard for young adults. The American Psychological Association does a regular survey called Stress in America, and in October 2020, the APA was already sounding the alarm:
  • “I think I’ve watched teens become more cynical, and raise more pointed questions than ever about the decisions adults make, which of course plays to one of the true strengths of adolescents. They are designed to question authority, and they are built to point out painful realities.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • this group of teens is extremely politically aware and active around issues ranging from racial injustice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder to climate change to LGBTQ+ rights. “If you want to have a more hopeful angle,” Damour said, “teenagers are incredibly skilled at organizing, incredibly skilled at using media networks to communicate with one another and to develop arguments and messaging. The teenagers I talk to are very clear about the sense that it will fall to them to try to make things better.”
  • By contrast, when I was in my teens, I was politically disengaged, and barely any national events broke through my adolescent myopia. I was cynical, sure — lots of teenagers are mini Holden Caulfields. But I didn’t do anything about it. We had the luxury back then of being cynical and doing nothing to improve things, or at least we thought we did. I think fewer teenagers subscribe to that cynical-and-also-apathetic model now.
Javier E

Opinion | The Bad News About Helicopter Parenting: It Works - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...elicopter-parents-economy.html

parenting helicopter

shared by Javier E on 07 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • new research shows that in our unequal era, this kind of parenting brings life-changing benefits. That’s the message of the book “Love, Money and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids,” by the economists Matthias Doepke of Northwestern University and Fabrizio Zilibotti of Yale.
  • done right, it works for kids, not just in the United States but in rich countries around the world.
  • when inequality hit a low in the 1970s, there wasn’t that much of a gap between what someone earned with or without a college degree. Strict parenting gave way to an era of “permissive parenting” — giving children lots of freedom with little oversight. Why spend 18 years nagging kids to succeed if the rewards weren’t worth it?
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • when they analyzed the 2012 PISA, an academic test of 15-year-olds around the world, along with reports from the teenagers and their parents about how they interact, they found that an “intensive parenting style” correlated with higher scores on the test. This was true even among teenagers whose parents had similar levels of education.
  • for the most part, the new parenting efforts seemed effective
  • In the 1980s, however, inequality increased sharply in Western countries, especially the United States, and the gap between white- and blue-collar pay widened. Permissive parenting was replaced by helicopter parenting
  • If you do it as an “authoritarian” parent — defined as someone who issues directives, expects children to obey and sometimes hits those who don’t — you won’t get the full benefits.
  • The most effective parents, according to the authors, are “authoritative.” They use reasoning to persuade kids to do things that are good for them. Instead of strict obedience, they emphasize adaptability, problem-solving and independence — skills that will help their offspring in future workplaces that we can’t even imagine yet.
  • Using data from a national study that followed thousands of American teenagers for years, the authors found that the offspring of “authoritative” parents were more likely to graduate from college and graduate school, especially compared with those with authoritarian parents.
  • So why wouldn’t everyone just become an authoritative parent? Religious people, regardless of their income, are more likely to be authoritarian parents who expect obedience and believe in corporal punishment
  • Working-class and poor parents might not have the leisure time to hover or the budget to pay for activities and expensive schools.
Javier E

The vaping ban is here, and it's already out of date - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-b4d9-29cc419287eb_story.html

vaping culture politics crisis

shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • teenagers could drive a truck full of Juul cartridges through the exceptions and limitations in the FDA’s “guidance.”
  • Mr. Trump’s initial proposal to permit the sale only of tobacco-flavored products, which would repel teenage palates but be acceptable to adult smokers trying to quit, was a suitably aggressive move to keep some e-cigarette options open to quitters without attracting millions of curious children.
  • The FDA revealed last month that it would continue to allow tobacco- and menthol-flavored pods to be sold. More concerning, whole classes of vaping products would be exempt. Vape shops could continue to sell e-liquids for refillable e-cigarettes in any flavor. Disposable e-cigarette manufacturers, too, would have wide latitude.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • preferences can change quickly. The New York Times reported in January anecdotal accounts of teenagers ditching Juul devices and moving en masse to disposable devices packed with e-liquids in flavors such as banana ice, sour gummy and cool mint. The question is whether federal regulators will keep up with changing preferences.
  • The FDA should not have allowed disposable, candy-flavored e-cigarettes to continue to be sold. Regulators should not wait until there is enough youth survey data telling them what should have been obvious in the first place: Easy-to-use, easy-to-conceal products such as disposable vapes in candy flavorings will attract children — and create new addicts.
  • Waiting for more evidence that these products are hooking children would imply that it is acceptable for public health officials to sit back and watch while new addictions multiply.
aidenborst

Opinion | I Hate the Mom That Covid Has Made Me - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-parenting.html

US history crisis pandemic relationships empathy pandemic-recovery covid-19 mental-health Politics

shared by aidenborst on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • I gave them a warning that still feels foreign, even eight months into this pandemic. “Leave your masks on!” They both gave a nod of agreement and were off.
  • In the beforetime, rather than a mask reminder, I would have told them when I expected them home, and after that I would not have given the matter a thought until they walked back in the house minutes before dinner, sweaty and tired, but happy.
  • But in Covid times, the longer they are gone the more a nag begins to build in my mind. Are they really leaving those masks on? They are the only kids I’ve ever seen wearing them at that park. Are they going to be responsible, or will they bend to social pressure? Am I doing the right thing letting them go? Is this really safe? Am I going to catch Covid because I let them go skating?
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • The details may be different for each family, but these are the kinds of questions parents of teens are asking themselves right now. As a psychotherapist, I’m concerned. The most important task facing teenagers is to detach from their parents and become their own, separate beings.
  • I know that the mind of a teenager is wired to pay greater respect to their peers than to their parents at this age, and my strategy has been, “If I can’t beat them, join them.” I tried to orient my home to be one where kids would feel welcome.
  • When schools shut down in the spring and I began to make my children follow social distancing guidelines, I saw the toll it took. They were lonely. They missed their friends. They were grieving missed school dances and birthday parties and sporting events. They were growing irritable with me, and with each other.
  • Initially, they were FaceTiming and texting furiously with friends. But as time wore on, I noticed even that fell off. I think my kids, like many others, were experiencing a collective despair, and the lack of real face-time interaction was causing feelings of isolation and sadness, even while they were surrounded by family all day.
  • My children are sure that I am making a bigger deal of Covid-19 than any other parent. I’m sure that I am not, but I’m also sure it feels as if I am to them.
  • They are watching sleepovers, birthday parties and indoor movie nights happening on Instagram.
  • They are aware that some of their peers have not experienced a drastic change in their social life or safety rules. Kids are congregating, just not at our house anymore
  • Which is how I found myself a couple of Thursdays ago, stealthily driving to the skatepark to see if my boys were, in fact, wearing their masks … and then screaming at them in front of their friends because they weren’t. I don’t want to be a mom who spies on her kids. I don’t want to be a mom who yells in public. And yet, here I am.
  • I don’t like the mom that Covid has made me. I don’t want to run my house like a police state, or control my kids’ every movement, or discourage them from spending time with friends. But as an asthmatic with a wonky immune system, I don’t want to catch Covid, and I’d never want my family to be responsible for infecting anyone else in our community.
  • In the midst of my growing unease about how all of this is affecting my kids’ mental health, though, I continue to fall back on the other tenets I know to be true about what teenagers need. Empathy. Unconditional love. A need to be known and heard and seen as their own person.
  • I commiserate with how hard life is right now. I grieve their losses and disappointments with them and take care not to minimize their frustrations with this season. I let them rant and complain, and I try to listen without handing out quick fixes.
  • I admit to them that I’m not liking how I’m parenting, and I apologize; not because I’ve done something wrong, but because even if I feel that I’m doing the right thing to protect them and our community, I can acknowledge that this year has been extremely hard for them.
  • I make promises about the things we will do and the parties we will throw when all of this is over, willing myself to believe that we will get there eventually, and return to a life where I am once again the mom encouraging their social life instead of hindering it.
tsainten

How to Do School When Motivation Has Gone Missing - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...enagers-motivation-school.html

School education science studies covid

shared by tsainten on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Educational psychologists recognize two main kinds of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation takes over when we have a deep and genuine interest in a task or topic and derive satisfaction from the work or learning itself. Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, gets us to work by putting the outcome — like a paycheck or a good grade — in mind.
  • young people should be given as much say over their learning as possible, such as giving them options for how to solve problems, approach unfamiliar topics or practice new skills.
  • Rather than privileging one form of motivation above the other, it’s better to treat them as different gears, each of which helps young people down the academic road.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Intrinsic motivation is extremely useful, giving even serious work a sense of effortlessness.
  • often fails to take hold when they feel controlled, pressured or unsure.
  • Intrinsic motivation is the one that tends to be prized in educational circles, and with good reason. It is linked to higher levels of academic achievement and greater psychological well-being.
  • etting tweens and teenagers decide the order in which they tackle their assignments, how they want to prepare for tests or where they feel they study most effectively, even if that means that their papers carpet their bedroom floors.
  • the utility of praise depends on how it’s done.
  • This is such a hard year. So long as we do it right, there’s no reason for adults to be stingy with praise.
  • Teachers and parents should keep a close eye for students who are checking out because they feel lost and work to recalibrate the material or the expectations.
  • This year, even more than usual, adults are asking so much of adolescents. One way to help is by talking openly about strategies that help muster motivation. These conversations will help teenagers now, and also long after the virus is gone.
anonymous

Auschwitz survivors: First Jews sent to the Nazi concentration camp were teenage girls ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...997-teenage-girls-few-survived

history

shared by anonymous on 22 May 20 - No Cached
  • Even amid the Jewish crackdown, it was still a surprise when the town crier announced a new order — all unmarried women 15 and older were to report to the school gymnasium in two weeks.They were told they would be registering for three months of work in a shoe factory, and that it was their patriotic duty to help in the war effort. But when they showed up to “register,” they were strip-searched, loaded into trucks and taken away. Most were teenagers, some were in their twenties, and a handful of mothers in their forties boarded in place of their daughters. None of those mothers would survive.
  • Over the next few days, Jewish girls were swept up from all the surrounding villages. By the end of the week, Friedman Grosman, then 17, and her sister Lea, 19, were on the first official transport of Jews to Auschwitz, arriving by train on March 27, 1942.But who ordered that first transport? And why take girls?
  • Himmler had ordered 999 German women from the Ravensbrück prison to be transferred to Auschwitz to serve as prison guards ahead of the Slovak girls’ arrival, she said. And that number — 999 — which may have been an occult obsession of Himmler’s, matched the number of girls who were supposed to be on that first Jewish transport. (Macadam found that authorities miscounted; in reality, there were 997.)
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • “The parents, of course, [were] duped,” Macadam said. But “this was a patriarchal society, and you’re more likely to give up your daughter than your son.”
  • At first, it had been a Nazi prison for Poles of every ethnicity, then for Soviet POWs. By 1942, the Nazis were focusing on gathering up Jews, though they had not yet started their “Final Solution” — mass extermination.
  • In fact, the girls’ real job wasn’t to make shoes, but to build the very infrastructure that would convert the camp into a death machine.
  • Most of them died that first year — of starvation, disease, beatings, medical experiments and suicide.
  • Though Auschwitz was liberated on Jan. 27, 1945, most of the surviving girls weren’t there to see it. As Soviet troops approached, they were forced to go on death marches through feet of snow, then were moved to other concentration camps deep in Germany.
  • Many female survivors struggled to have children because of the cruelties they were subjected to; plus, other survivors sometimes treated people with “low numbers” tattooed on their arms with suspicion, as though they couldn’t have survived that long without doing something unforgivable.
hannahcarter11

Aidan Ellison: Oregon man arrested in fatal shooting of Black teenager - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...6474024002

shooting Black Lives Matter oregon

shared by hannahcarter11 on 02 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • An Oregon community group is calling for change to address racism after the fatal shooting of a Black teenager by a white man in an incident that police said began as an argument over loud music. 
  • Aidan Ellison, 19, was found dead with a single gunshot wound to the chest early Nov. 23 after officers responded to reports of a shooting in the parking lot of a hotel, according to police in Ashland, a predominantly white community near the state's California border.
  • Robert Paul Keegan, 47, was arrested on a murder charge, though he said he was in fear for his physical safety
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • At about 4 a.m. on the day of the shooting, Keegan was awakened by "loud music" in the parking lot of the Stratford Inn, where he was staying. He asked Ellison to turn the music down and Ellison refused
  • Keegan got dressed, grabbed a semiautomatic handgun and went to the hotel’s front desk to complain to a clerk
  • Ellison and Keegan argued, and Keegan said Ellison punched him in the face several times, according to the report. Keegan shot Ellison once, striking him in the chest, the affidavit said.
  • An autopsy revealed no injuries to Ellison’s hands that would be indicative of him punching Keegan
  • A local community organization condemned the shooting as an act of racism. Southern Oregon Black Leaders, Activists, and Community Coalition released a statement expressing outrage and saying “racism continues to endanger Black bodies and Black lives.”
  • The case has also drawn the attention of civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who raised the prospect of hate crime charges against Keegan on Twitter.
  • In a Facebook post, O'Meara said Ellison was killed "because the suspect chose to bring a gun with him and chose to use it, 100% on him, not the poor young man that was murdered."
  • According to the Oregon Department of Justice, “A hate crime happens when somebody intentionally uses offensive physical contact, threatens physical injury or threatens to cause damage to the property of another person because of their actual or perceived race, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or national origin.” 
  • Keegan is also charged with first-degree manslaughter, reckless endangering and unlawful carrying or concealment of a firearm and is being held without bond.
  • Ashland is a city of about 21,000. Its population is 92.5% white and 1.4% Black, according to the U.S. Census.
  • Julie Akins, the city’s newly elected mayor, called on residents to “take stock of systemic racism which continues to cause the death of our brothers and sisters of color” in a statement posted to Facebook. 
  • “There is no other way of speaking about this but bluntly: white supremacy and racism is embedded in language, culture, and the zeitgeist of the United States and every community therein. Until we face this reality, apologize for it and make amends – these acts of violence will continue to bind us to our historic and continued oppression.”
Javier E

Opinion | Social Media Makes Teens Unhappy. It's Time to Stop the Algorithm. - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...algorithms-kids-discovery.html

social media teens children algorithm culture policy US

shared by Javier E on 18 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • As our children’s free time and imaginations become more and more tightly fused to the social media they consume, we need to understand that unregulated access to the internet comes at a cost. Something similar is happening for adults, too. With the advent of A.I., a spiritual loss awaits us as we outsource countless human rituals — exploration and trial and error — to machines. But it isn’t too late to change this story.
  • There are numerous problems with children and adolescents using social media, from mental health deterioration to dangerous and age-inappropriate content
  • the high schoolers with whom I met alerted me to an even more insidious result of minors’ growing addiction to social media: the death of exploration, trial and error and discovery. Algorithmic recommendations now do the work of discovering and pursuing interests, finding community and learning about the world
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Kids today are, simply put, not learning how to be curious, critical adults — and they don’t seem to know what they’ve lost.
  • These high school students had become reliant, maybe even dependent, on social media companies’ algorithms.
  • Their dependence on technology sounds familiar to most of us. So many of us can barely remember when we didn’t have Amazon to fall back on when we needed a last-minute gift or when we waited by the radio for our favorite songs to play. Today, information, entertainment and connection are delivered to us on a conveyor belt, with less effort and exploration required of us than ever before.
  • What the kids I spoke to did not know is that these algorithms have been designed in a way that inevitably makes — and keeps — users unhappy.
  • A report by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate found that users could be served content related to suicide less than three minutes after downloading TikTok. Five minutes after that, they could come across a community promoting eating disorder content. Instagram is awash with soft-core pornography, offering a gateway to hard-core material on other sites (which are often equally lax about age verification). And all over social media are highly curated and filtered fake lives, breeding a sense of envy and inadequacy inside the developing brains of teenagers.
  • Social media companies know that content that generates negative feelings holds our attention longer than that which makes us feel good.
  • If you are a teenager feeling bad about yourself, your social media feed will typically keep delivering you videos and pictures that are likely to exacerbate negative feelings.
  • It is not a coincidence that teenage rates of sadness and suicide increased just as algorithmically driven social media content took over children’s and adolescents’ lives.
  • The role that social media has played in the declining mental health of teens also gives us a preview of what is coming for adults, with the quickening deployment of artificial intelligence and machine learning in our own lives. The psychological impact of the coming transition of thousands of everyday basic human tasks to machines will make the effect of social media look like child’s play.
Javier E

You Have Permission to Be a Smartphone Skeptic - The Bulwark - 0 views

www.thebulwark.com/ion-to-be-a-smartphone-skeptic

smartphone weaponisation tech psychology manipulation internet social media education

shared by Javier E on 28 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • the brief return of one of my favorite discursive topics—are the kids all right?—in one of my least-favorite variations: why shouldn’t each of them have a smartphone and tablet?
  • Smartphones offer a tactile portal to a novel digital environment, and this environment is not the kind of space you enter and leave
  • complaints about screen time merely conceal a desire to punish hard-working parents for marginally benefiting from climbing luxury standards, provide examples of the moral panic occasioned by all new technologies, or mistakenly blame screens for ill effects caused by the general political situation.
  • ...38 more annotations...
  • No, says the other camp, led by Jonathan Haidt; the kids are not all right, their devices are partly to blame, and here are the studies showing why.
  • we should not wait for the replication crisis in the social sciences to resolve itself before we consider the question of whether the naysayers are on to something. And normal powers of observation and imagination should be sufficient to make us at least wary of smartphones.
  • These powerful instruments represent a technological advance on par with that of the power loom or the automobile
  • The achievement can be difficult to properly appreciate because instead of exerting power over physical processes and raw materials, they operate on social processes and the human psyche: They are designed to maximize attention, to make it as difficult as possible to look away.
  • they have transformed the qualitative experience of existing in the world. They give a person’s sociality the appearance and feeling of a theoretically endless open network, while in reality, algorithms quietly sort users into ideological, aesthetic, memetic cattle chutes of content.
  • Importantly, the process by which smartphones change us requires no agency or judgment on the part of a teen user, and yet that process is designed to provide what feels like a perfectly natural, inevitable, and complete experience of the world.
  • The expectation that children and adolescents will navigate new technologies with fully formed and muscular capacities for reason and responsibility often seems to go along with a larger abdication of responsibility on the part of the adults involved.
  • It is not a particular activity that you start and stop and resume, and it is not a social scene that you might abandon when it suits you.
  • It is instead a complete shadow world of endless images; disembodied, manipulable personas; and the ever-present gaze of others. It lives in your pocket and in your mind.
  • The price you pay for its availability—and the engine of its functioning—is that you are always available to it, as well. Unless you have a strength of will that eludes most adults, its emissaries can find you at any hour and in any place to issue your summons to the grim pleasure palace.
  • the self-restraint and self-discipline required to use a smartphone well—that is, to treat it purely as an occasional tool rather than as a totalizing way of life—are unreasonable things to demand of teenagers
  • these are unreasonable things to demand of me, a fully adult woman
  • To enjoy the conveniences that a smartphone offers, I must struggle against the lure of the permanent scroll, the notification, the urge to fix my eyes on the circle of light and keep them fixed. I must resist the default pseudo-activity the smartphone always calls its user back to, if I want to have any hope of filling the moments of my day with the real activity I believe is actually valuable.
  • for a child or teen still learning the rudiments of self-control, still learning what is valuable and fulfilling, still learning how to prioritize what is good over the impulse of the moment, it is an absurd bar to be asked to clear
  • One camp says yes, the kids are fine
  • adults have frequently given in to a Faustian temptation: offering up their children’s generation to be used as guinea pigs in a mass longitudinal study in exchange for a bit more room to breathe in their own undeniably difficult roles as educators, caretakers, and parents.
  • One reason commonly offered for maintaining our socio-technological status quo is that nothing really has changed with the advent of the internet, of Instagram, of Tiktok and Youtube and 4Chan
  • But the environments in which humans find themselves vary significantly, and in ways that have equally significant downstream effects on the particular expression of human nature in that context.
  • The pre-internet advertising world was vicious, to be sure, but when the “pre-” came off, its vices were moved into a compound interest account. In the world of online advertising, at any moment, in any place, a user engaged in an infinite scroll might be presented with native content about how one Instagram model learned to accept her chunky (size 4) thighs, while in the next clip, another model relates how a local dermatologist saved her from becoming an unlovable crone at the age of 25
  • developing pathological interests and capacities used to take a lot more work than it does now
  • You had to seek it out, as you once had to seek out pornography and look someone in the eye while paying for it. You were not funneled into it by an omnipresent stream of algorithmically curated content—the ambience of digital life, so easily mistaken by the person experiencing it as fundamentally similar to the non-purposive ambience of the natural world.
  • And when interpersonal relations between teens become sour, nasty, or abusive, as they often do and always have, the unbalancing effects of transposing social life to the internet become quite clear
  • No one wants to come down on the side of tamping off pleasures and suppressing teen activity.
  • This is not a world I want to live in. I think it hurts everyone; but I especially think it hurts those young enough to receive it as a natural state of affairs rather than as a profound innovation.
  • so I am baffled by the most routine objection to any blaming of smartphones for our society-wide implosion of teenagers’ mental health,
  • In short, and inevitably, today’s teenagers are suffering from capitalism—specifically “late capitalism,
  • what shocks me about this rhetorical approach is the rush to play defense for Apple and its peers, the impulse to wield the abstract concept of capitalism as a shield for actually existing, extremely powerful, demonstrably ruthless capitalist actors.
  • This motley alliance of left-coded theory about the evils of business and right-coded praxis in defense of a particular evil business can be explained, I think, by a deeper desire than overthrowing capitalism. It is the desire not to be a prude or hysteric of bumpkin
  • For both young men and young women, the pornographic scenario—dominance and degradation, exposure and monetization—creates an experiential framework for desires that they are barely experienced enough to understand.
  • No one wants to be the shrill or leaden antagonist of a thousand beloved movies, inciting moral panics, scheming about how to stop the youths from dancing on Sunday.
  • But commercial pioneers are only just beginning to explore new frontiers in the profit-driven, smartphone-enabled weaponization of our own pleasures against us
  • To limit your moral imagination to the archetypes of the fun-loving rebel versus the stodgy enforcers in response to this emerging reality is to choose to navigate it with blinders on, to be a useful idiot for the robber barons of online life rather than a challenger to the corrupt order they maintain.
  • The very basic question that needs to be asked with every product rollout and implementation is what technologies enable a good human life?
  • this question is not, ultimately, the province of social scientists, notwithstanding how useful their work may be on the narrower questions involved. It is the free privilege, it is the heavy burden, for all of us, to think—to deliberate and make judgments about human good, about what kind of world we want to live in, and to take action according to that thought.
  • I am not sure how to build a world in which childrens and adolescents, at least, do not feel they need to live their whole lives online.
  • whatever particular solutions emerge from our negotiations with each other and our reckonings with the force of cultural momentum, they will remain unavailable until we give ourselves permission to set the terms of our common life.
  • And this we must do without waiting for social science to hand us a comprehensive mandate it is fundamentally unable to provide; without cowering in panic over moral panics
  • most of all, without affording Apple, Facebook, Google, and their ilk the defensive allegiance we should reserve for each other.
Javier E

I Was a Useful Idiot for Capitalism - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...615031

capitalism rich complicity educated class conflict income politics US history

shared by Javier E on 21 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • From my parents’ teenage years in the 1930s and ’40s through my teenage years in the 1970s, American economic life became a lot more fair and democratic and secure than it had been when my grandparents were teenagers. But then all of a sudden, around 1980, that progress slowed, stopped, and in many ways reversed.
  • I read an article about that year’s record-setting bonuses on Wall Street. The annual revenues of Goldman Sachs were greater than the annual economic output of two-thirds of the countries on Earth—a treasure chest from which the firm was disbursing the equivalent of $69 million to its CEO and an average of $800,000 each to everybody else at the place.
  • “This is not the America in which we grew up,” I wrote in a magazine column at the time, by which I meant America of the several very prosperous decades after World War II, when the income share of the super-rich was not yet insanely high. Since the 1980s, the portion of income taken each year by the rich had become as hugely disproportionate as it had been in the 1920s, with CEOs paid several hundred times more than the average worker, whose average income had barely budged for decades. “We’ve not only let economic uncertainty and unfairness grow to grotesque extremes,” I wrote, but “also inured ourselves to the spectacle.”
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  • Mea culpa. For those past two decades, I’d prospered and thrived in the new political economy. And unharmed by automation or globalization or the new social contract, I’d effectively ignored the fact that the majority of my fellow Americans weren’t prospering or thriving.
  • And I and my cohort of hippie-to-yuppie liberal Baby Boomers were complicit in that.
  • Economic inequality has reverted to the levels of a century ago and earlier, and so has economic insecurity, while economic immobility is almost certainly worse than it’s ever been.
  • What’s happened since the 1970s and ’80s didn’t just happen. It looks more like arson than a purely accidental fire, more like poisoning than a completely natural illness, more like a cheating of the many by the few—and although I’ve always been predisposed to disbelieve conspiracy theories, this amounts to a long-standing and well-executed conspiracy, not especially secret, by the leaders of the capitalist class, at the expense of everyone else.
  • In 40 years, the share of wealth owned by our richest 1 percent has doubled, the collective net worth of the bottom half has dropped to almost zero, the median weekly pay for a full-time worker has increased by just 0.1 percent a year, only the incomes of the top 10 percent have grown in sync with the economy, and so on
  • A union? Sure, fine. But I was talent. I was creative. I was an individual. College graduates tend to think of themselves that way, younger ones all the more, younger Baby Boomers at the time probably the most ever. And the intensified, all-encompassing individualism that blew up during the 1960s—I do my thing, and you do your thing—was not a mindset or temperament that necessarily reinforced feelings of solidarity with fellow workers or romantic feelings about unions.
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