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Social Media, But Not Video Games, Linked To Depression In Teens, Says Study (www.cbc.ca) 147

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: Screen time -- and social media in particular -- is linked to an increase in depressive symptoms in teenagers, according to a new study by researchers at Montreal's Sainte-Justine Hospital. The researchers studied the behavior of over 3,800 young people from 2012 until 2018. They recruited adolescents from 31 Montreal schools and followed their behavior from Grade 7 until Grade 11. The teenagers self-reported the number of hours per week that they consumed social media (such as Facebook and Instagram), video games and television. Conrod and her team found an increase in depressive symptoms when the adolescents were consuming social media and television. The study was published on Monday in JAMA Pedatrics, a journal published by the American Medical Association. The researchers "found that the increased symptoms of depression are linked to being active on platforms such as Instagram, where teens are more likely to compare their lives to glitzy images in their feeds," the report says. "They also tested to see if the additional screen time was taking away from other activities that might decrease depressive symptoms, such as exercise, but found that was not the case."

Surprisingly, time spent playing video games was found to not be contributing to depressive symptoms. "The study suggests the average gamer is not socially isolated, with more than 70 percent of gamers playing with other people either online or in person," CBC.ca reports.
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Social Media, But Not Video Games, Linked To Depression In Teens, Says Study

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  • by SirAstral ( 1349985 ) on Monday July 15, 2019 @10:35PM (#58932132)

    Are you telling me that folks acting stupid on the internet getting called out for it along with everyone treating everyone like trash leads to depression? Stop the fucking presses!

    Something tells me the moment democrats learn that a republican committed suicide or vice versa either side will just say good riddance.

    It's almost like... there is not really any "meaningful" difference between them!

    • Re:Wait? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Monday July 15, 2019 @10:40PM (#58932148) Homepage

      In a Medium article last year, Keri Smith describes moving away from the social justice movement. Among the reasons for doing so, Smith writes: "I see seemingly reasonable people wishing death on others and laughing at escalating suicide and addiction rates of the white working class." This has been going on for a while. And indeed, as Smith writes: "When you believe you are morally superior, when you have dehumanized those you disagree with, you can justify almost anything."

      https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/on-leaving-the-sjw-cult-and-finding-myself-1a6769b2f1ff [medium.com]

      • Yes, this is a major component to building a tyrannical state. Every time a war starts there is at least 1 side dehumanizing the other to the point that taking the lives of humans because of their beliefs becomes acceptable or justifiable to them.

        There is a lot of dehumanizing going on from the SJW movements. Anyone not supporting their cause are dehumanized. It has been my experience that people are often the opposite of the goals they claim to represent. The people screaming racism seem to only talk a

        • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

          People are forgetting that social justice actuals forbids the actions of the social justice movements, the social justice warriors, it is almost like they behave like far right wingers whilst emptily claiming to be left wing and actually opposing core left wing values, like free speech, the liberal arts the original definition look it up . All bullshitting aside that ANTIFA and the SJWs are entirely a fabrication of the establishment, the deep state and shadow government, backed and propped up by corporate

          • by Mashiki ( 184564 ) <mashiki@gmail.cBALDWINom minus author> on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @08:30AM (#58933474) Homepage

            All bullshitting aside that ANTIFA and the SJWs are entirely a fabrication of the establishment

            lol

            Those are your communist foot soldiers guy. The same ones from 1923 that were beating people in the streets, claiming they were destroying the fascist systems of european countries for the working class. And were openly embraced by communist parties, just like they are today. Creating the same situation then, as they're trying to create today. The only difference is society in western countries aren't bowing to this shit like they did ~100 years ago, in turn it's only the most fringe members of left wing parties openly supporting them or only giving some form of vocal support.

            Didn't you notice the differences in media response between antifa attacking and assaulting people over the last ~5 years compared to say "unite the right"? No? Let me give you a picture, the media, left wing politicians, academia, pundits fell all over themselves screeching at Trump to 'disavow' them. And so he did, but he also stated that among both aggressive groups at UtR, there were "fine people" in otherwords people who thought they were doing good but ended up on the extremist book. Now, why don't we take a look at the multiple cases in portland, berlin, hamburg, toronto, london, vancouver, washington, paris, and so on with antifa and sjws, and the politicos, academia, and media's response.

            Did you hear that? Except for the center-lefties in those groups. There is no condemnation. In the US you can't even get democrats to say that the leftwing commie nutjob that attacked the ice detention center to say that "it's bad, and people shouldn't do that." Just like there was damn little of a peep out of the media, academia, politicos on the left when Andy Ngo was violently assaulted...again by antifa. No, look up those long term social media accounts, those havens on reddit, what shit are they saying? "The first martyr of the cause" and things like "andy ngo deserved it for filming them."

            • their ruling class did, they were just reacting to it, poorly. People do _not_ make good decisions when under pressure, and these were people who didn't have food security. It's been decades since we had famine in the civilized world so we've forgotten what it's like.

              Pressure does not make diamonds, it makes garbage more compact.

              As for "Antifa" they're just the American equivalent to soccer hooligans. Relatively harmless punks. Up the police presence around protesters, watch out for right wing prote
              • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

                their ruling class did, they were just reacting to it, poorly. People do _not_ make good decisions when under pressure, and these were people who didn't have food security. It's been decades since we had famine in the civilized world so we've forgotten what it's like.

                And now you know why populism is on the rise, because much like then it's people telling those elites to piss off. But you sure do seem to be standing for the status quo and defending the people who are assaulting others. Boy just look at the left. 15 years ago, they were anti-corporatism, and anti-war. Today they can't suck corp dick hard enough, and cheering on the neocons that were flushed out from the right.

                As for "Antifa" they're just the American equivalent to soccer hooligans. Relatively harmless punks. Up the police presence around protesters, watch out for right wing protesters spoiling for a fight (that Ngo guy made $250k for his little face bunch and that's before getting paid for TV spots) and give those cops a bit of training (go watch some videos about how much of a cluster fuck Charlottesville was, I really do think the cops were trying to start trouble) and the problem goes away.

                Harmless punks...who trash and destroy property, attack people if they're the wrong type of p

          • Maybe they haven't made it to your remote nazi enclave yet, but where I live antifa are real, and when they punch nazis, their noses bleed real blood.

      • Re:Wait? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by bobstreo ( 1320787 ) on Monday July 15, 2019 @10:55PM (#58932190)

        In a Medium article last year, Keri Smith describes moving away from the social justice movement. Among the reasons for doing so, Smith writes: "I see seemingly reasonable people wishing death on others and laughing at escalating suicide and addiction rates of the white working class." This has been going on for a while. And indeed, as Smith writes: "When you believe you are morally superior, when you have dehumanized those you disagree with, you can justify almost anything."

        What she really meant was:

          None of Us is as Dumb as All of Us

        • by DanDD ( 1857066 )

          I wish I had a mod point for you, sir.

        • Re:Wait? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by SirAstral ( 1349985 ) on Monday July 15, 2019 @11:07PM (#58932220)

          no, that is not the take away.

          She is making it clear that all the SJW types have become exactly what they are accusing everyone else of being and it has caused her to leave the SJW scene and stop being a hypocrite.

          • Re:Wait? (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @09:11AM (#58933618)

            no, that is not the take away.

            She is making it clear that all the SJW types have become exactly what they are accusing everyone else of being and it has caused her to leave the SJW scene and stop being a hypocrite.

            The Social Justice Warriors have made the leap from being concerned about Justice, and into permanent victimhood, and demand for purity that is impossible and self destructive. A movement that is as pernicious as what they are trying to replace.

            And they never sleep. As soon as they find someone saying something "wrong", they hop on them like crocodiles on a wildebeest, demanding they be removed from society, or at least lose their means of suppport.

            The dehumanizing of "the enemy" shows up in people like Emily Linden (founder of UnSlut) who writes for teen vogue about how it is okay for innocent men to lose their careers because it serves the goal of destroying the patriarchy.

            People who practice idealogical purity and permanent victimhood won't stop until... well they just won't stop.

            So society at large must decide - do we participate in our own destruction? Or do we simply stop paying attention to these people?

            They only have power that we give them. And its pretty obvious that justice should be stripped from their Initialization.

            Bringing this back into social media, we have now seen what happens when the village idiot and the sociopaths are given the same weight as the great thinkers and the adroit. When people who do not believe in the rule of law, or due process but #metoo type accusation = conviction. This.

            How's that working out for you SJW's? When most male supervisors don't want to work with women any more. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/1... [cnbc.com]

            How could a male mentor a woman anyhow? The SJW's call that mansplaining, and that is a microagression form of sexual harassment.

            • I think the best part of your post is where you suggested that we stop paying attention to these people. Unfortunately, you don't seem to be taking your own advice.

              My problem with these squeaky wheels is that they've been portrayed to represent the majority of the political left, which is far from true. But social media is a place where squeaky wheels are able to inflate their presence and people seem to be unable to distinguish between the world of social media and the real world.

              Nevertheless, social justi

              • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

                Please point to the people on the Left who make it a habit not just to criticize SJWs, but deplatform, demonetize, and cancel them. Twitter, Facebook and Google love them. The rare leftist who does criticize them, like Tim Pool or Jimmy Dore, gets called an alt-right entryist, pro-racism, pro-hate, and anti-woman. Just look at what a comic book writer said a few days ago:

                When vetting potential collaborators for creative projects, frank conversations about political leanings is now routine. At first, the

              • I think the best part of your post is where you suggested that we stop paying attention to these people. Unfortunately, you don't seem to be taking your own advice.

                When I say stop paying attention, it doesn't mean I pay serious attention, like in acquiescing to their demands. I read and digest what both the right and left nuts write and say.

                My problem with these squeaky wheels is that they've been portrayed to represent the majority of the political left, which is far from true. But social media is a place where squeaky wheels are able to inflate their presence and people seem to be unable to distinguish between the world of social media and the real world.

                Oh - very true. We have people on both sides of the aisle - some trying to say if you vote Democrat you support Antifa, and it you vote republican you support the Ku Klux Klan.

                Nevertheless, social justice should be a priority for citizens considering we have a president who is demonstratively racist in both his rhetoric and policy. Of course, pointing that out problem makes me a "SJW extremist."

                The problem of course, is that the SJW moniker covers a lot of territory, from Evergreen College, to third wave feminism (elevating the woman to superior

          • She is making it clear that all the SJW types have become exactly what they are accusing everyone else of being and it has caused her to leave the SJW scene and stop being a hypocrite.

            Emphasis added for your consideration.

          • all the SJW types have become

            Come on, don't be blindingly fucking stupid, man.

            All Blorgs are green. Some Wozzles are Blorgs. All Woozles are green. T/F?

            You're contradicting yourself by using words that describe groups of humans, and then using absolute language. Did you not know that groups of humans have traits distributed according to a standard distribution? Are you a fucking moron?

            It is bad enough you're a *ist neckbeard, but do you have to be so fucking stupid and self-inconsistent?

            • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

              Come on, don't be blindingly fucking stupid, man.

              By all means. Show people where SJW's haven't been causing problems for general society.

              It is bad enough you're a *ist neckbeard, but do you have to be so fucking stupid and self-inconsistent?

              Did you read your previous 3 sentences? Then read this sentence before you decided to spout off or not? For anyone who's dealt with various people in social justice circles for any length of time your response isn't even shocking anymore, rather it's the goto response. Attack the person, insult the person, label the person to ostracize them. And you wonder why people have such an intense dislike of SJW's and their a

              • What sort of idiot asks me to prove negatives for them?

                Oh, a neckbeard ranting.

                You shouting about "SJWs" and then you're whining about being called names.

                Man up, big boy, you can do it. Shave that fucking thing for once.

                • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

                  That's not a negative. You made a claim, defend your claim. The fact that you're going and crying 'neckbeard' says far more about you then it does about me. Time for you to put on the big boy pants, and realize Trump is president, SJW's have caused harm to society, and you're not on the winning team.

          • by geek ( 5680 )

            She is making it clear that all the SJW types have become exactly what they are accusing everyone else of .

            They didn't become that. They always were that from the very beginning. It's called projection.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • Oh my. While I agree with much of your comment—justice certainly isn't administered equally or fairly in the U.S.—I think you underestimate the power of bread and circuses. I also believe that the U.S. Constitution is an antiquated document that should be completely rewritten (and also have a provision that requires it to be redrafted from scratch every 100 years), I'm confident that any major political reorganization in this country will be the result of elections.

      • So she lost me right then and there. For those wondering why, go watch this [youtube.com].

        And yes, there are cranks and asshats in any movement. There are very few of what the right calls "SJWs", but they're easy to find since they're mostly in women's studies and they're dumb as potatoes since if they weren't they'd be in STEM. So they make for good TV and great boogiemen (boogiewomen?).

        The only power SJWs have is the power you give them by being afraid of them. And that power is uniformly exercised by the right
    • by Barny ( 103770 )

      No, actually. What they're saying leads to depression is teens seeing fake lives shown through high-profile filtered content of stars and celebs (internet famous ones) leads to them feeling worse about themselves as a result.

      • lol wut?

        There has always been high-profile celebrities and long before social media. Why doesn't the UK have a lot more suicides if you are right?

        • by Barny ( 103770 )

          Me? I was just saying what TFA said.

          Conrod and her colleague, Elroy Boers, found that the increased symptoms of depression are linked to being active on platforms such as Instagram, where teens are more likely to compare their lives to glitzy images in their feeds.

        • Re:Wait? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Kokuyo ( 549451 ) on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @01:34AM (#58932474) Journal

          There were... do you not remember the absolute tragedy of Take That breaking up?

          Back then, it was kinda harder to keep in touch with your stars. TV wasn't full of any one star. TV tried to provide something for everybody. That left buying teen magazines if you wanted to keep up with what [Robbie|Dylan|Johnny|Marc] was up to these days. And we're talking these days, not this very second.

          It is now possible to glue your brain to a search term and come up with some new crap every few hours. That probably makes it harder to pull your head into the real world from time to time.

          It's also much easier to build yourself a veritable echo chamber on social media. Hell, it's probably inevitable. It makes cliques not just something you're attached to in some settings where you have a lot of relationships and relations outside of and learn to have more diverse anchor points. If you're basically living in your clique then being an outcast becomes that much more of a danger to your lizard brain.

          Social Media has some very interesting pitfalls.

        • lol wut?

          There has always been high-profile celebrities and long before social media. Why doesn't the UK have a lot more suicides if you are right?

          You seem a bit confused here.

          Nobody is saying this is an effect that never existed before. Rather, this is a well-known effect that is simply being studied here in a new context.

          And you having negative stereotypes about British people only would correlate with your own depression, it wouldn't be expected to tell us anything at all about British people.

    • It's telling you that there is a correlation between the use of social media and depression. Not a causal relationship.

      E.g. Instead of your "diagnosis" that it's a case of "everyone treating everyone like trash" - it might be that people with depression are reaching out for social contact the best way they can without having to deal with the consequences of social anxiety.

      Incidentally, you might want to review your own use of social media. Or your medication.
      You are clearly unable to focus even for such a s

      • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        Okay but that still does not excuse social media from culpability in making things worse. A lot of people try to treat a lot of conditions with alcohol for example and with a few exceedingly rare exceptions like preventing the absorption of more toxic substances in the case of poisoning rarely does it lead to better long term outcomes.

        Social media might feel like social interaction the same way alcohol triggers some of the metabolic pathways normal associated with consumption of sugars and some of the rece

      • You are clearly unable to focus even for such a short post, without ranting about current US politics.

        Freeze Peach!!@!

  • by Anonymous Coward

    They are designed to be entertainment, fun, uplifting. It seems like people who have fun in their lives tend to not be depressed.

  • Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DanDD ( 1857066 ) on Monday July 15, 2019 @11:33PM (#58932260)

    I call bullshit:

    ...with more than 70 percent of gamers playing with other people either online or in person," CBC.ca reports.

    This hand-waive summary equates interacting with other people online and in person, yet it doesn't take a sociologist to know that communicating with another human in-person is much, much different than any online interaction.

    I think it far more likely that:

        1. This study didn't properly examine the effects of online gaming as a primary form of human interaction in the role of depression
    or
        2. This study was funded by those tied to the video gaming industry.

    I've lived through parenting children through various stages of life. When the kids and their friends played video games for extended periods - even when all the computers were in the same room, they became aggressive, sleep deprived, and more socially isolated. Fast forward a couple of years - when they played board games in person, they destroyed my kitchen, ate all my food, and spent hours laughing, joking, taunting, and being overall pleasant and excellent humans.

    Maybe well-adjusted humans choose to interact in person. Or, maybe encouraging humans to interact in person leads them to be well-adjusted. Regardless, a house full of sleep-deprived video-game addicted teenagers creates curmudgeons like me :-p

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I have an anecdote to counter yours. I'm 42 with 3 kids spread out from under 2 to almost 17. I built my first computer in the early 90s and have been gaming online since around 95. I have tens of thousands of hours gaming online with other people as well as attending hundreds of LAN events where we gamed in person. Along with that I have spent a lot of time playing D&D and games like it with other people sitting at a table.

      So I think I have enough experience to speak on the aggression and other maladie

      • by DanDD ( 1857066 )

        Awesome anecdotal counter, thank you for sharing your experiences as a gamer and parent!

        I cut my teeth with online gaming in 1986 with Xtrek, so I may be a wee bit older than you :) I learned a lot from the client-server code from Xtrek and Netrek. Fun games, fun code.

        I would love to see some type of study that correlates Myers-Briggs personality types and the effects of various types of activities, like online gaming and extended social interactions. One of my kids could play games and seem to have no

    • Social engagements are fun, but mentally taxing. How long can you maintain pleasant conversation with a group of people? Couple of hours? Eventually the conversation wears thin, the entertainments get played out, the beer is getting people a bit fighty... The evening breaks up naturally and you go your separate ways.

      And would you repeat it the next night? The one after that? Every day of the week?

      Hell no.

      On the other hand kids will play video games every night for as long as they can stay awake. I think we

      • by DanDD ( 1857066 )

        My very lightweight anecdotal observations are that kids that tend to be extroverts are more harmed by online interactions than kids who tend to be introverts.

        I very firmly assert that extroverts tend to enjoy social interactions almost indefinitely and do not find them taxing. I lightly assert that introverts go to great lengths to avoid social interactions and enjoy and thrive on the very limited interactions of online gaming and social media. I'm not an introvert, so i can only surmise how those with s

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Regardless, a house full of sleep-deprived video-game addicted teenagers creates curmudgeons like me :-p

      That's just you blaming it on video games because that's what kids do these days. Teenagers have always been annoying little turds.

      Before video games it was those damn motion pictures, the devil's music, books or when you were young those obscene drawings all over the cave walls.

    • I call bullshit:

      So do I. Your post stinks of it.

      I've lived through parenting children through various stages of life. When the kids and their friends played video games for extended periods - even when all the computers were in the same room, they became aggressive, sleep deprived, and more socially isolated. Fast forward a couple of years - when they played board games in person, they destroyed my kitchen, ate all my food, and spent hours laughing, joking, taunting, and being overall pleasant and excellent humans.

      Maybe well-adjusted humans choose to interact in person. Or, maybe encouraging humans to interact in person leads them to be well-adjusted. Regardless, a house full of sleep-deprived video-game addicted teenagers creates curmudgeons like me :-p

      The reality our society has no use for kids that aren't very good at academics and don't fit the always on the go workaholic profile. Sorry to tell you. But for those of us who are widely read. A man named oswald spengler who studied many past civilizations noted western culture's zeitgeist is the urge to achieve, aka to engage in aimless productive activity just for the sake of doing something. He said this was one of our most self destructive traits because it never ta

      • by DanDD ( 1857066 )

        Awesome counter, and thank you for the Oswald Spengler reference! I've heard of this man's work, but lost the reference long ago and it just dropped off my radar.

        I agree with your sentiment entirely. I do think that it is important for people to pursue some activity that is simply fun (but not destructive). If video games can fill that niche, then fine.

        What I observed with my kids video game craze was the incessant drive to win, to kill, and to 'level up' - which is painfully close to your 'workaholic' p

  • I do understand the hardship and uncertainty that teens have to go through with all these rolemodels and idols.
    • You can always try to follow a man that is the pure representation of success. After all, he is sitting in the oval office.
  • Conformity culture (Score:5, Informative)

    by mrwireless ( 1056688 ) on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @12:04AM (#58932296)

    This is because our social capital has become much more measurable, and especially children are creating even more ways to do this on top of the social platforms.

    Example 1: Instagram tagging. Where in a photo you are tagged is used to indicate the friendship level. If you are tagged near the center of the photo, you are a closer friend.

    Example 2: Snap streaks. If you send at least one message to a connection on Snapchat, and they reply the same say, you get a point. The more days you keep this up, the higher your snap streak number. It becomes a metric for the intensity of your friendship. There are reports of kids handing over their passwords to other friends while they go on holiday to places devoid of internet, just so they can keep their Snap streaks alive. There is tons of meme content made specifically just to send to your friends in the morning. I've read that kids even get up early to do this, which should clue anyone in to the power of this.
    https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]

    The 60's were a libration from crippling social pressure. The 80's was peak-freedom in this sense: we got the punk movement, drag queens, the lot. Now, social pressure is back, amplified by technology.

    I'd recommend reading the 3 page text "post script on societies of control" by French philosopher Baudrillard.
    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=post... [duckduckgo.com]

    He explains that social pressure was always extremely potent -more potent than institutionalised power in a lot of ways. For example, it works 24/7, and there is no presumption of innocence. But social pressure was also very informal. You could escape it by moving to a new town, for example. Now, as our social lives are digitally mediated, social pressure has become more difficult to escape or ignore. Our social interactions were digitised they have become a material. This is especially visible in China, where they took Baudrilliards warning and seem to have used it as a blueprint for their Social Credit system instead. They are crowdsourcing control.

    Here in the west we can frame the increase in social pressure as an 'unintended side effect'. For us, dealing with the resulting data-driven chilling effects might be possible if we spread awareness. Shoshana Zuboff's new book on Surveillance Capitalism coins a lot of useful new terms in this regard. Personally I think it could also be useful to talk about "social cooling" to describe the compound chilling effects and how they might harm democratic societies in the long run.
    https://www.socialcooling.com/ [socialcooling.com]

    • Social pressure only works if you let it. I raise my middle finger to that and live how I want.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Good for you. However, most people, especially teenagers, aren't like you.

        The main problem isn't these idiotic challenges, it's really a lifestyle thing. You see your friends on social media going off to fancy places taking photos in exotic locations, or having a new car, or buying expensive clothes and other things. And you look down your "feed" and constantly see people bragging like this, it actually wears you down. You start comparing yourself and your life to them, why you can't have the fancy new gadg

    • Lol. The eighties may have had punks and drag, but both predate the eighties (especially drag, it existed on the stage, and in burlesque... Remember, men used to act out women's parts, and the theater was a magnet for homosexuals and other "deviants". But the eighties also had Reagan, and synth pop and eurotrash and also spiraling homelessness, and of course the death of the sexual revolution with the discovery of AIDS.

      The eighties were dark as fuck.

  • just let them know that, and to take what other teens say with a grain of salt. :)
  • by johnsie ( 1158363 ) on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @03:15AM (#58932702)
    Social media is the toilet of the Internet, where brains of low intelligence go to take a shit. I stick with Slashdot and Reddit because at least most of the bullshit people post are related in some way to things that interest me. I don't care if your bratty little kid is dressed up for their first day of school, I don't care if your cat did something cute, I don't care if Donald Trump did something to offend you or if you went to the gym or a restaurant.
    • That's not true at all. A lot of Twitter are highly intelligent professional journalists, intellectuals, university professors, government officials, software developers, and the like.
    • Slashdot IS a social network. The only typical characteristic it's missing is private messages.

  • Proof: Everywhere the popular kids go first, that's where they later end up finding depression linked to teens.

  • "found that the increased symptoms of depression are linked to being active on platforms such as Instagram, where teens are more likely to compare their lives to glitzy images in their feeds,"
    From what I can tell, the paper takes a hypothesis that seeing "glitzy" imagery in media leads to depression because of comparing it to themselves, then says it's confirmed, because there's an increase in depression connected with social media, where there's a lot "glitzy" imagery.
    However, that doesn't in any way confi

    • It may draw the wrong conclusion, but it's not fake. Fake is making things up to fit your hypothesis. Your use of this fad word is ludicrous.

      If one constantly measures oneself against the pretty or popular, I can see that eventually being a point of depression.
      • Semantics.
        Saying something confirms your hypothesis, when it doesn't even really address it, is pretty fake in my opinion.
        Sure, they showed a correlation between social media and depression, but the fake bit is where they assumed the reason it causes the depression, which was not in any way addressed by their research.

    • It's soft science, not fake science. It is harder to get tight conclusions about this sort of thing versus calculating how long it'll take for a pencil to hit the ground. It doesn't mean they aren't following scientific principles of investigation.
    • Although you have undoubtedly been taught about the "scientific method" in various science classes, there actually is no single method of obtaining knowledge in the various disciplines described as "science." About the only thing that makes these various disciplines cohesive is a commitment to empiricism. In the "hard sciences," such as chemistry, this usually implies controlled settings to account for every possible factor and then contrasting a control and test group. However, many sciences that you would

      • About the only thing that makes these various disciplines cohesive is a commitment to empiricism.

        No, deduction is more important than empiricism. You only need a few empiricists to run the experiments, the vast majority of important science is deduction.

        If it was all empiricism you wouldn't even have math. You'd only have tables of measured results. There would be no formulas.

        • "as far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."

          Mathematics is usually not considered a field of science. If we do consider a field of science, we further broaden the definition of science, thus making it more problematic. If we place deduction as the defining trait of science, then chess becomes one of the most scientific exercise one can engage in. Furthermore, even with a full commitment to Popper's falsification mod

      • The bit I'm calling fake here is where they assumed that the correlation they showed between A and B reinforced their rationale as to WHY that correlation existed. It did no such thing.
        This isn't a "difference in methodology" issue, this is a simple leap to unsupported conclusions.
        Had they stopped at "this supports a correlation, possibly causal, existing" then I'd not have a problem. Had their research better demonstrated the reason that correlation existed, I'd not have a problem.
        My problem is them claimi

        • I skimmed through the paper I agree with your criticisms. I merely thought it would be better to characterize it as "bad science" rather than "fake science." This may seem pedantic, but your description of the study as "fake science" (along with your cheap shot at the humanities) led me to believe you were discounting all science that wasn't conducted in a rigid laboratory setting with control and test groups.

          However, I too am highly skeptical of most studies conducted by social scientists. A prevalent misu

  • We had separate studies before which concluded:
    - social networks make people depressed (for various reasons)
    - gaming has no direct negative effect on people

    however, what i just started to wonder about is what will happen when these two merge. there's been an article on /. before that claimed fortnite was basically a social network with a gaming frontend. how this will turn out might be more interesting.

    • Easy to see how it'd induce depression social media style; isn't that the one where people are shamed for not buying the outfits with RL money? That's very different than just playing Quake3 where everyone has the same skins to choose from.
    • by jaseuk ( 217780 )

      I wonder if social media itself is really the cause rather than as a symptom. People who are lacking motivation can just endless scroll fairly mindless stuff to keep themselves seemingly occupied. I'm pretty sure the amount of posting / interacting with other people is fairly minimal and it's just consumption. I'd be amazed if this heavy "social media" use was actually communicating in any meaningful way with other people.

      This has been obvious enough in the workplace, demotivated staff fill a whole day j

      • Any truth in your statement hinges entirely on the word "meaningful," which is totally subjective and opaque.

        This should be obvious.

  • Turns out it's other people that are horrible shits.

    Not the computer game characters we know and love.

    Whodvethunk?

  • Super Mario Maker 2 is a great game. One big aspect of it, though, is very much like social media. Likes and comments on levels you make. The problem is when you get vile comments, I don't think there is a way to delete them. If you've got kids, you can "turn off" all comments, but I think that just hides them till they find the setting.

    Anyway, point being, video games can be good for creativity, especially SMM2, and they can be good for hand eye coordination, and they can be good for learning how to logica

    • Social media invading games sounds like the hot new thing. Like Fahrenheit 451 hot.

      That pun didn't work out as I'd hoped, but I stand by the point.

  • Social media are more a tool for business than an amusing thingy to be excited for. I've read an article recently about social media publishing (visit website [promorepublic.com] by the link) and wanted to say here that this gives a lot more opportunities for a business than any other type of advertising.

Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man -- who has no gills. -- Ambrose Bierce

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