My explanation is that they are fighting against a team of PhDs optimizing everything to make them addicted.
Luckily they all do a lot of sport and have this way disconnected time everyday.
Thanks to the screen time stats from their mobile, they can reflect on the time wasted per week. This works great for the oldest ones, but not for our youngest.
My impression is that getting older is enough for them to start reflecting as we are as adults also struggling. Screentime hygiene is for us a tooic we try to address like mouth hygiene, think about it every day, but do not make a big fuss about it.
happened, past tense. That cultural layer, to a large extent enforced by various religious traditions both in the literal and civic sense, sometimes for better or worse is pretty much gone. Nowadays it largely is a binary question of legal action on the one hand or individual choice on the other.
If you tell people they need to make change within their community 90% are going to ask you, what community? Community with a capital C where people collectively enforce binding rules, rather than occasionally go bowling isn't much of a thing.
Collective change is required and that could include the help of Government, but currently the Government isn’t doing anything, which is the premise of this post. Should they step in and if so, to what degree and how much can they really do.
I don't disagree with your answer but... Kids cannot buy alcohol and kids cannot buy cigarettes. It's kinda the whole point of TFA.
The conclusion of TFA aren't to outlaw social media: it's preventing kids from accessing these mediocre piece of shit websites/apps before 16.
As a result governments have stepped in and now there are age restrictions on both smoking and alcohol, blood alcohol limits for driving, lockout laws, no advertisement of cigarettes in supermarkets, additional taxes on cigarettes, plain packaging on cigarettes.
Making something immediately completely illegal isn’t necessarily the correct course of action. But governments have stepped in to try and help people exercise personal accountability.
Disclaimer: the examples are from within Australia
Laws are lagging indicators but they also last a long time. the CFAA was passed before the advent of the WWW and it took until 2021 to even set a basic check on the part of the Supreme Court that effective set the ground rule that to access what amounts to a computer linked to some network beyond authorization, an authorization scheme needs to exist in the first place. Before that, one can easily be charged and even sent to prison or be assessed massive fines when there's no meaningful distinction between what is authorized and unauthorized space. These were not problems in the early to mid 80s but when problems did arise, it still took a quarter century to resolve. To have one future-proof goldilocks solution is already next to impossible, but you're asking for five or six stringed together in order to have a sensible law that is well tailored enough so that it is effective without being oppressive. Not to mention that unless the behavior is generally abandoned by users, it creates black markets that are simply illegible to the state. The government then effectively loses control over what it purports to control to those with means, leaving only those without subject to the full force of the legislation.
That of course all predicates on the premise that there can be commonly agreed and sensible ways to define all those, and it is in the best interest of the government to do so and passes Constitutional muster not just on speech grounds but a host of other potential issues, like, is this a purely civil matter or a purely criminal matter or both? The federal government can treat this explicitly, or kick it off to an agency as part of its mandate, but which one? Do we need a new one? Are there checks and balances that would provide some sort of agility that keeps up with the times? What if new research comes out that shows the lack of a link, but by legislating it, you've effectively frozen the relevant conclusion in time. Enforcement creates constituencies who do not care about science or potential upsides. The DEA is on the record in the federal register that patient access to legitimate medication is secondary and effectively an afterthought to enforcement of supply, because the agency's mandate presupposes that substances need controls and are presumed harmful and that enforcement, with the teeth provided for by the DOJ, will trump any study the FDA or our academic institutions can ever show. By the time that particular moral panic was given a name, the US government had been attempting repeatedly to use prohibition as a way of imposing a specific set of social mores that at first was a pretext to target specific racial minorities and when that became socially unacceptable (legally it was unacceptable under the 14th Amendment anyway, but they effectively smuggled the laws in through the Treasury Department and protectionist regimes by taxing the goods into oblivion, and avoiding the tax obviously is also a violation of the law).
In that sense, the government operates very much like a machine, whereas given a concrete goal to achieve and it can likely achieve it, but the manner by which it achieves it may create additional problems and convoluted interpretations that ripples through history in ways unimaginable. The loudest voices in the room, or those with existing financial resources or interests, can use the rent-seeking system known as lobbying to shape the laws to begin with. And where does the fines end up? Certainly in most cases they are not given back to the community, but end up enriching the enforcement agencies. Go to a police auction and see how much they're raising from the sale of "proceeds of crime", except not all of it are crimes that are proven in court, and much of it are crimes without specific victims and so, it becomes a regime of appropriation of private property to enrich a few in the public sector.
There's usually an annoying gap between concept and reality. In isolation you want a policy that can solve problems in a targeted and fair way. In reality it almost never happens.
Wikipedia has a better definition right at the top than I can offer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction
The crucial point is it is characterised by neurological changes that lead to short circuited reward pathways. The idea of addiction to social media a perfectly consistent with its action and moreover, consistent with the notion that its effect can be enhanced by design.
Everything that's enjoyable in life can meet that definition. For practical purposes, we only consider severe cases to be addiction, but it's not well-defined. The article you linked says:
> However, there is no agreement on the exact definition of addiction in medicine. Indeed, Volkow et al. (2016) report that the DSM-5 defines addictions as the most severe degree of the addictive disorders, due to pervasive/excessive substance-use or behavioural compulsions/impulses. It is a definition that many scientific papers and reports use.
> The DSM-5 and ICD-10 only recognize gambling addictions as behavioral addictions
I don't think the DSM-5 has any principled reason for recognizing gambling addictions but not video game addiction or shopping addiction, other than gambling addiction being particularly harmful.
Whether social media is beneficial or causing substantial harm is not well defined or easily measured. It's a subjective thing that will be debated and rely on judgement.
That's part of why it can be contentious; people can declare themselves addicted but one suspects they sometimes do it to avert blame for some related action.
And whilst many things in life can have this property and need to such that we get enjoyment out of particular aspects of life.
There are particular things which short circuit reward pathways to a greater degree. Such as drugs, alcohol, gambling, video games, smartphone addiction.
Smart phone/video games are designed to constantly reward us as much as possible
Then the government should step in, either should forceful action or through promoting healthier alternatives or shining a light on its damaging effects.