[dns_snek]

> then why bother taking away the coping mechanisms people have available?

Firstly, I use TikTok myself so this isn't coming from a place of "old man yells at clouds", but why does it have to be smartphones and addictive algorithms? There's a practically unlimited number of ways to cope, they can daydream about their interests, draw and sketch things, read, interact with others, at least that's what we used to do, but just about anything that doesn't involve algorithmic content is practically harmless in comparison.

When overused, streams of dopamine such as TikTok can completely drain your desire to do anything creative, productive, to learn things, to experiment, to be curious, to do anything that delivers less than immediate, consistent reward (even video games can be low-reward in comparison).

I've been on both sides of this. I've gone years without engaging with these algorithms at all while harnessing my creative energy, and I've gotten stuck in the depths of these algorithms for weeks at a time.

It's questionable whether they're going to be able to get out of it, much like kids who start doing drugs in their tween years. It may be a coping mechanism, but in kids and teenagers it's probably about as healthy as daily cannabis consumption.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

I appreciate the thoughtful reply, and I more or less completely agree with you about the harms. Regarding your weed comparison, I knew kids in middle school smoking tons of pot to get through the day; no doubt they were messing themselves up for life (at least a bit) with that habit. I hope social media isn’t quite so harmful, but I bet it’s not a ton better.

The weed example is a good comparison though. I view kids smoking lots of weed as a failure of a system. Knowing some of them, we’re usually talking about shitty family situations on top of a shitty school they’re made to attend for a solid amount of their waking life. The school should take their pot, of course it should, but it’s a marker far down a road that shouldn’t have been started along to begin with. There’s an enormously complicated set of social reasons that those kids’ schools, and their families, are messed up, but it’s as though there’s no will to tackle these issues. It’s much easier to attack the simple things you can see, the smoking and the phone use, with bandaid solutions that ignore the underlying causes. I almost see it as a distraction from really fixing anything. That’s where my frustration comes from, I really have no problem with the banning of the phones itself.

[mike_hearn]

Daydreaming is what they're doing and it's what the teachers are complaining about: "When you are standing in front of them trying to teach, they’re vacant. They have no ability to tune in… They’re not there."

It's a bit hard to notice because Gioia is a polemicist trying to whip up a crowd, but what he brings up isn't actually complaints about kids using smartphones in the classroom. Rather they're about students being uninterested in the material (or less charitably, perhaps in the teacher's presentation of it), and then he implies very strongly that this must be due to smartphones but doesn't try to argue that case. Instead he gets mad at people who point out that correlation is not causation, claims they're engaging in "sophistry and spin", that's he's "dumbfounded" anyone could possibly disagree with this amazing argument, then immediately goes off on a tangent about AI cheating (a form of sophistry).

Actually, at no point in this article is smartphone usage in the classroom ever brought up as an actual problem. The link is implied to be causal whenever children have any access to "tech" in general, anywhere at all.