Nguyet Tran
I'm struck dumb that this book has so many good reviews because there are so many inherent issues with it.
First, I must acknowledge that there are some interesting takes. For example, I enjoyed the first part in which he discussed the benefits of free play to children. However, Haidt became over-ambitious and destroyed the book with his groundless overgeneralizations, flawed rationale, and deliberate cherry-picking.
1. His logic was fundamentally flawed when he tried to blame social media/phones for the sudden rise in mental illness among teenagers globally. His logic was (1) the rise of phone usage and the rise of mental health happened at the same time, and (2) the cause was not failing economy, climate change, etc., so it must be social media that caused mental illness. Hadt is so eager to point the finger at social media/phones that (1) he just used this weak reasoning to publish the book instead of trying to find the causation, and (2) he totally neglected the possibility of another factor existing that could cause the issue.
2. So many discussions are merely speculations rather than actual research. He often cherry-picks the research results that suit his agenda. For example, he simply quoted the survey result from Monitoring the Future to show that US students increasingly find life meaningless, which he then blamed on social media while the study never mentioned the correlation to social media. What he should have done was to find a study that can prove the causation or at least correlation between them rather than just quoting an irrelevant survey result to push for his agenda.
3. The book itself is quite repetitive. It could be 30% shorter.
4. Haidt wrote a book about the negative impact of phones/social media on teenagers, but I don't think he's putting the effort into understanding how teenagers use phones/social media at all; he merely wants to paint social media in a bad light. For example, throughout the book, he talks as if the only use of social media is dumb scrolling, while in fact, teenagers can also use social media as a texting app or learning resource. He also mentions frequently that social media reduces teenagers' sense of community and meaningful connections. At the same time, he fails to realize that social media can bring people with niche hobbies together and even foster real-life connections. If he truly wanted to understand the impact of social media on teenagers, he would have approached this very differently and tried to understand it through the lens of teenagers. Instead, he simply pushed for his boomer outdated view.
Overall, it feels like Haidt already had a hypothesis in his head, and he just wanted to write a book to satisfy it rather than put effort into finding the truth. What a waste of time for me.
I'm struck dumb that this book has so many good reviews because there are so many inherent issues with it.
First, I must acknowledge that there are some interesting takes. For example, I enjoyed the first part in which he discussed the benefits of free play to children. However, Haidt became over-ambitious and destroyed the book with his groundless overgeneralizations, flawed rationale, and deliberate cherry-picking.
1. His logic was fundamentally flawed when he tried to blame social media/phones for the sudden rise in mental illness among teenagers globally. His logic was (1) the rise of phone usage and the rise of mental health happened at the same time, and (2) the cause was not failing economy, climate change, etc., so it must be social media that caused mental illness. Hadt is so eager to point the finger at social media/phones that (1) he just used this weak reasoning to publish the book instead of trying to find the causation, and (2) he totally neglected the possibility of another factor existing that could cause the issue.
2. So many discussions are merely speculations rather than actual research. He often cherry-picks the research results that suit his agenda. For example, he simply quoted the survey result from Monitoring the Future to show that US students increasingly find life meaningless, which he then blamed on social media while the study never mentioned the correlation to social media. What he should have done was to find a study that can prove the causation or at least correlation between them rather than just quoting an irrelevant survey result to push for his agenda.
3. The book itself is quite repetitive. It could be 30% shorter.
4. Haidt wrote a book about the negative impact of phones/social media on teenagers, but I don't think he's putting the effort into understanding how teenagers use phones/social media at all; he merely wants to paint social media in a bad light. For example, throughout the book, he talks as if the only use of social media is dumb scrolling, while in fact, teenagers can also use social media as a texting app or learning resource. He also mentions frequently that social media reduces teenagers' sense of community and meaningful connections. At the same time, he fails to realize that social media can bring people with niche hobbies together and even foster real-life connections. If he truly wanted to understand the impact of social media on teenagers, he would have approached this very differently and tried to understand it through the lens of teenagers. Instead, he simply pushed for his boomer outdated view.
Overall, it feels like Haidt already had a hypothesis in his head, and he just wanted to write a book to satisfy it rather than put effort into finding the truth. What a waste of time for me.