There has been a change in social behaviour which I think is obviously linked to electronic media, and probably also the mental health issues. The % of American students who say they meet up physically with friends "almost every day": https://journals.sagepub.com/cms/10.1177/0265407519836170/as...
It declines slightly through the 70s, 80s, 90s from ~55% to 50% (almost statistically insignificant) and then, starting in the mid-late '00s starts dropping steadily, now down to less than 25%. Half as many teenagers socialize in person with their friends almost every day, as they did in my generation. (And going by the data on "how many parties" attended, my generation in the 90s/00s was still relatively introverted compared to my parents' generation, even though we saw our friends every day.)
I think with just the numbers presented it's hard to say if this is actually problematic. It's certainly a shift, but my teen half-sibling is hardly less social than I was at his age. He spends all of his time in discord with 'the boys', socializing on insta, or sending TikToks to girls he wants to flirt with from school. If anything I'd argue that style of teen life is hyper social compared to my time. And it's not like he can't meet physically with his friends or girls either, there's just not usually a reason to since with friends they have the most fun playing videogames and with girls there isn't much of a point unless it can be done outside parental supervision which happens but takes planning.
Thank you for this. That it corresponds almost exactly to the introduction date of the smartphone, then 4G, and then IG is telling. Maybe it's just correlation, but the feedback loop doesn't look like it.
It declines slightly through the 70s, 80s, 90s from ~55% to 50% (almost statistically insignificant) and then, starting in the mid-late '00s starts dropping steadily, now down to less than 25%. Half as many teenagers socialize in person with their friends almost every day, as they did in my generation. (And going by the data on "how many parties" attended, my generation in the 90s/00s was still relatively introverted compared to my parents' generation, even though we saw our friends every day.)
source: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02654075198361... ( https://sci-hub.ru/10.1177/0265407519836170 )