[bel8]

I'll bite. Maybe it's not the iPhone itself, but social media.

I have seen studies about damages that social media can cause in behaviours. This might be one of them.

Smartphones are the catalyst to social media consumption as we know. Like people contantly on their phones everywhere instead of interacting with other people, for example.

[browningstreet]

Social media wasn't the thing it is today during the AT&T exclusive period.

[macNchz]

That's the thing that jumped out to me here—iPhones themselves and everything you could actually do with one during that period were way different from today. There were effectively no endless feeds of content to consume, the phone screens were way smaller and less vibrant, push notifications only came out about halfway through.

I was age 19-23 during that period (in the "highest impact" age group from the article), and I think I used my phone more for coordinating in-person social activity than anything else at the time. Additionally on that—iPhones were not widespread in my cohort at the time, even at an expensive private college with many students from upper income families.

[tgv]

It really did start in the time frame. Facebook opened in 2006. Twitter already existed and grew rapidly in that period. There were messengers. And because everything was slow, I suppose it could even take an hour to doom scroll Slashdot.

Mobile gaming might be another reason.

[sph]

Why not go further? It's the Internet as a whole. People socialising online, and online becoming an actual place people spend their entire lives within, free from the hard constraints of the real world, was the natural evolution of the Internet.

Plenty has been written about how any technological innovation leads to massive societal changes no one could foresee, and no one could avoid, but only analyze in retrospect.

[bel8]

Yep. Even many of our jobs became remote and less social.

[FabHK]

Indeed. When Germany unified, the birth rate in the formerly socialist East dropped by half. Certainly increasing uncertainty played a role, but there was also speculation that there wasn't much to do in the East except read, drink, and procreate, while the West had plenty of diversions.

[trollbridge]

I don't remember social media really being that significant from 2007-2011.

[wmichelin]

Well, it was for many. MySpace, and then BBM, Facebook, and Twitter were absolutely huge at that time for the folks using them.