How Do I Convince My Students to Limit Social Media?

00:00:00.000 | [Music]

00:00:04.720 | Hello Carl, this is Isabel from Spain and I have a question about teenagers and phone use.

00:00:10.720 | I have recently got a job as a secondary school teacher and I am responsible for a group of 15

00:00:17.360 | years old. They have told me that they use their phones a lot and a lot means eight hours, the days

00:00:26.000 | they don't have to go to school or four hours, the days they have to go to school and they are

00:00:31.360 | basically on TikTok, WhatsApp and Instagram, right? They also think that they are not good at studying

00:00:38.720 | and obviously I have connected the dots, right? And my question is how do I make them connect the dots

00:00:47.760 | from the perspective, from the point of view of a teacher which I think I'm someone they don't

00:00:55.120 | really trust like a parent and I would like to make them at least question what they do with

00:01:02.880 | their time. So if you have any advice I will be very grateful because it's my first job as a

00:01:08.880 | teacher. Thank you very much. Bye. Well, you know, it is a universal problem. I think teenagers and

00:01:18.560 | their usage of these phones is extreme. You know, they do use them all the time. Now there's an

00:01:24.400 | interesting question here before we get to a solution is, okay, what's new about this and

00:01:28.080 | what's not? I mean, I think it's certainly true that if we went back to the 1980s or the 1990s,

00:01:35.040 | you know, what you would probably see is that teenagers used to watch a lot of TV.

00:01:38.400 | So they probably were watching as much TV as they could instead of using their phone. So

00:01:44.000 | it's not like they were before social media, we should be clear about that, like before social

00:01:50.000 | media, they would come home from school and be like, all right, mommy dear, I shall be in the

00:01:56.800 | library. I shall be in the library studying. Perhaps I will get a spot of tea in the conservatory as I

00:02:03.280 | take notes in my notebook. But if you need me, I will be thinking deeply. And then when social

00:02:10.800 | media came along, they were gone. Okay. It wasn't like that. But we have to first ask this question,

00:02:18.240 | TV versus what's happening with social media. Is it worse? Is it the same? Is it better?

00:02:23.600 | That's the place I want to start. I have my thoughts. Jesse, you and I grew up in a time

00:02:29.040 | when it would have been TV at this age. What do you think? More stupefying, but better worse than

00:02:36.960 | four hours of TikTok? Definitely worse. There we go. Yeah. Why does that mean? TV, you would sit

00:02:42.000 | down and be dedicated, then you could go outside or something. Now they're always bringing the

00:02:46.240 | phone with them. That's true. And TV was bad. It's not that entertaining. Compare ALF, which was on

00:02:54.480 | when we were kids, to algorithmically optimized TikTok videos that have been selected based off of

00:03:01.520 | a 1,200-point data vector that has been analyzed with recurrent neural networks to figure out

00:03:07.520 | exactly what to show you that is going to make you want to watch that through to the end. Compare

00:03:11.600 | that watching ALF to, "There is a complicated, distressing social dynamic happening at my school

00:03:18.720 | unfolding in these comments on Instagram posts, and people are talking about me, and my standing

00:03:24.240 | is shifting. I'm going to look the hell out of that. I'm going to be on that phone and seeing

00:03:28.320 | what's going on." All of that is much more compelling than ALF. And as you're saying,

00:03:32.480 | it can come with you everywhere. It comes with you in the car, it's on the bus,

00:03:36.000 | wherever you go, you can be looking at it. So I think I agree. We have ramped up the invasiveness

00:03:42.960 | and the addictiveness of the tools. What can this teacher do? A couple optimistic things to say.

00:03:49.760 | When I was on the road selling my book, Digital Minimalism, I was surprised by the positive

00:03:57.840 | response from teenagers. So the thing about teenagers is there is an emerging counterculture

00:04:06.400 | where the countercultural behavior is to not use these tools. And we actually should not be

00:04:12.000 | surprised by the rise of this counterculture because we've seen this be successful before.

00:04:17.040 | Jesse, do you remember from when we were younger, the anti-smoking commercials that were sponsored

00:04:24.400 | by was called "The Truth"? Somewhat, vaguely, yeah.

00:04:28.000 | Basically what happened is, if I remember this correctly, is in the '90s, the Ad Council,

00:04:32.800 | which is a federally funded organization that puts out television advertising for

00:04:40.080 | positive purposes, they hired a super fancy ad agency and said, "Okay, we want to figure out

00:04:47.120 | how to do ads to get basically young Jesse and young Cal to not smoke." And so they brought in

00:04:53.440 | real good ad people. And basically what they figured out was, focus in on the degree to which

00:05:00.000 | the tobacco companies are exploiting young people and manipulating them. And they're these old guys

00:05:06.960 | in suits that are trying to trick you into smoking. And that was really effective. They did

00:05:13.600 | a lot of faux hidden camera work with blurred faces, but it was really effective because

00:05:17.680 | teenagers hate this idea of being co-opted or exploited or manipulated by some 60-year-old guy

00:05:24.160 | in a suit. That was very powerful. And smoking rates, teen smoking rates, are much lower here

00:05:29.040 | in the countries. And that was partly to do with it. A similar dynamic, I believe, is fueling

00:05:35.200 | the anti-social media emergent counterculture among teenagers today is that, as they get more aware,

00:05:41.040 | now it's not old guys in suits, it's 37-year-olds in t-shirts, but they're exploiting them.

00:05:48.000 | They're like, "Do I really want to be Mark Zuckerberg's puppet, helping him be richer?"

00:05:54.880 | You know, they don't like these tech guys right now. They don't like these tech titans. And as

00:06:00.400 | they understand more, that this whole ecosystem is just designed to turn you into the cow in the

00:06:08.080 | milking machine in the barn. We're just sucking data out of your brain and selling it. And you're

00:06:15.600 | the thing we're selling. You're a tool for a hot $500 billion company that's trying to make a very

00:06:22.240 | small number of people who live in Northern California richer. Teenagers don't like that.

00:06:26.960 | And I began to pick up that thread when I was selling digital minimalism. I was on the road

00:06:31.760 | in 2019, and I would meet teenagers who were finding great comfort in being a part of this

00:06:36.640 | counterculture and great respect from their peer group where they say, "Yeah, I don't use this

00:06:40.320 | stuff." So this is what we have right now is a tension between this has been designed to be

00:06:45.920 | incredibly appealing and addictive toward exactly your developing teenage brain. But on the other

00:06:50.960 | hand, your teenage brain hates the people who make these. You hate being their pawns, and you might

00:06:55.760 | get some really good social street cred by being someone who doesn't use it. Both these things are

00:06:59.760 | happening at the same time. And so it's a matter of what is going to win. And I think the countercultural

00:07:05.920 | message is going to win. Teens love to be ahead of something, feel cool, feel authentic. And this

00:07:10.880 | is giving them exactly that capability. The actual logistical social interaction piece of social

00:07:18.000 | media, that's largely moving the chat tools and text threads. So it's not like you're going to be

00:07:22.960 | ostracized and not know what's going on if you're not on TikTok as a 15-year-old. It's not like if

00:07:27.920 | you're not on Snapchat as a 14-year-old, you're going to be cut out of social circles. Now,

00:07:32.160 | these non-social media text-based coordination, collaboration, alternatives like WhatsApp and

00:07:37.120 | just text threads and iMessage, those are taking over the logistical roles anyway,

00:07:42.080 | so it's much easier to step away. And that's what I think is going to happen.

00:07:46.000 | All we need, and this is John Haidt's theory, all we need to get a tipping point is not that

00:07:54.160 | most young people don't use social media, but that most people know someone who doesn't use

00:07:58.960 | social media. You just need a validation of that possibility in your immediate social sphere.

00:08:06.880 | In my class as a junior or whatever in the secondary school in Spain where Isabelle teaches,

00:08:13.360 | there's two kids who don't use social media. And they're kind of cool, I kind of like that. That's

00:08:17.920 | all you need. Now, if you're really feeling like you hate this and you're overwhelmed, and a lot

00:08:21.440 | of kids do feel that way, you have permission to leave because you're not doing something new,

00:08:25.600 | you're joining that group. And this is John Haidt's theory. You don't have to get an entire

00:08:29.840 | class to stop using social media before your kid will. You need two people in the class not to use

00:08:34.000 | social media before your kid thinks it's an option. So I'm optimistic about it. I've said

00:08:39.280 | this on the show a lot. I think these small number of monopoly, giant centralized social

00:08:45.440 | media companies dominating internet discourse is a moment that is coming to an end. We're going to

00:08:52.000 | look back at it as a 10-year period. The idea that 10 years from now, we're all going to be on

00:08:57.360 | two or three of these massive centralized social media platforms, I don't think it's going to be

00:09:00.960 | that way. Their moment has come, their moment is passing. And so, Isabelle, all of this should just

00:09:08.240 | be optimism that this will get better, maybe not in the next few months, but in the next few years,

00:09:14.720 | perhaps, it will get better. In the meantime, those are the two things to talk about. A,

00:09:21.040 | you're a product, you are being exploited. Update those truth anti-smoking ads to the

00:09:27.920 | world of teenage social media use. Hammer that point. You guys are plugged into the pods in the

00:09:33.280 | matrix, and Agent Smith is Mark Zuckerberg, right? Push that point. Two, talk about thinking is a

00:09:44.240 | skill that you have to practice. And if you're constantly looking at screens when you're out of

00:09:48.800 | school, your mind muscle is going to be weak, and there's a lot of advantages to having a strong

00:09:53.040 | mind muscle. It's not just you're going to do better in your schoolwork, which you will, and

00:09:56.960 | it'll take less time to study and you'll be happier, but you're going to understand the

00:09:59.600 | world better. You're going to take in more sophisticated information. You're going to be

00:10:02.560 | more impactful. You're going to grow into someone who can actually make a difference in a world

00:10:06.080 | where intellectual skill is the main skill that matters, where brawn is no longer that relevant

00:10:09.760 | anymore. This is a muscle that is hurt. If you're looking at a screen all the time, you're eating

00:10:15.280 | junk food as an athlete. I think that is also a really effective message for young people.

00:10:19.440 | Give them the positive. Don't be on the screen all the time exactly because you want to have

00:10:24.320 | a stronger brain. If you have a stronger brain, everything will be open to you. And if you don't,

00:10:28.800 | you're plugged into the matrix to help Agent Smith's bank account, and you're going to be

00:10:33.280 | worse at thinking, and it's going to, your life, your world, everything's going to be more

00:10:36.400 | constrained. Push those two points in the short term. I think that will help. More teenagers are

00:10:40.960 | more receptive to leaving social media than you think. And we are going to see more and more of

00:10:46.320 | that in the years ahead as this moment of social media monopoly hopefully comes to a pretty soon

00:10:52.640 | end. I don't know. I don't know if you buy that, Jesse. Everyone thinks I'm too optimistic about

00:10:56.640 | this, but I'm just not convinced that this moment of monopoly social media is somehow like a

00:11:02.400 | persistent state. One thing that does happen is a lot of teenage kids use Instagram messaging to

00:11:09.920 | communicate as opposed to WhatsApp and text message and stuff like that. So I think that

00:11:14.960 | goes into part of the problem where they're using that platform to message, but they're also using

00:11:20.000 | it to look at a lot of stuff. Well, Zuckerberg is smart, which is I caution, because I cover this

00:11:28.240 | space, I caution journalists. And I made a little bit of fun of him too about the metaverse, right?

00:11:33.040 | Because he put out this clunky video where he was trying to introduce people to the metaverse. He's

00:11:39.440 | not good on camera. And I did make fun of him in a New Yorker piece. I talked about how in this video

00:11:45.440 | introducing his vision of the metaverse, he looked like a cyborg running out of date software.

00:11:52.320 | Because he has this sort of like halting, weird delivery. But here's the thing, he's smart.

00:11:59.760 | There are no other that I can think of, founders from that era that were so young that are still

00:12:06.960 | in charge of a company of that size. You know how impossible that is to stay in charge of a company

00:12:11.040 | that's approaching a trillion dollar market cap when you started that company when you're 20 years

00:12:15.600 | old? He's a savvy guy. And this is what we see with Instagram. And they bought WhatsApp. He knows

00:12:21.520 | this, right? He knows Facebook is on its way out. They bought Instagram. He knows that's going to be

00:12:26.240 | taken down by TikTok. They bought WhatsApp because he knows it's actually going to be the unendormed

00:12:30.400 | conversation that matters. Instagram messaging is all about keeping people engaging in the Instagram

00:12:35.600 | ecosystem. Oh, as long as I'm here, I might as well look at these photos over here. He knows

00:12:39.360 | what he's doing. He knows what he's doing with the metaverse. There is an inevitable shift towards a

00:12:45.200 | world in which much more of what we see every day is going to be virtual. It's incredibly inefficient

00:12:52.240 | to actually have to manufacture all of these plastic things that have chips inside of them.

00:12:58.480 | And you have to build it at the Foxconn plant in China. And inevitably, the future is going to be,

00:13:04.400 | I have on a glass that can make any screen I want running any software I want anywhere I want in my

00:13:09.760 | physical space. Why would I have an iPad, a phone, a computer, and a big screen TV when I could just

00:13:15.440 | make any of those screens appear anywhere I wanted? And the only piece of silicon I have to own is the

00:13:19.760 | thing that runs these glass. Everything else is in the cloud. He knows that's coming. And he wants

00:13:24.240 | to be out ahead of it. The world is going to virtualize. So he's a smart guy, which is what

00:13:29.600 | I'm going to say. So he is an able foe. So his initial ploy-- I mean, this is like Commodore

00:13:35.760 | Vanderbilt, if you'll excuse some early American economic history. Think of Zuckerberg like

00:13:42.960 | Commodore Vanderbilt. Think about Facebook like Vanderbilt's fleet of ferries to get across from

00:13:49.520 | New Jersey to the Hudson to New York to Manhattan. This is where Vanderbilt began his fortune,

00:13:55.440 | was ferry boats. And then he moved to longer range steamships to go up and down the ply,

00:14:02.400 | the eastern seaboard. And then he got into railroads after that. He watched the technological

00:14:08.720 | landscape evolve in early industrial America and kept ahead of those trends. And he was ruthless

00:14:14.240 | and smart and built one of the world's largest fortunes out of it. That's how they'll think

00:14:18.480 | about Zuckerberg. You have to think about Facebook like those ferry boats. It made him his first

00:14:22.320 | couple of billion. But the railroads are coming, the steam shippers are coming, and they're going

00:14:27.840 | to be completely different technology. So I think he's going to be around. Keep an eye on him.

00:14:32.080 | But his first thing-- let's put all of our information into the screens and look at the--

00:14:37.920 | click on the phones and do social media back and forth. That's going to go away. So he's going to

00:14:43.440 | stay savvy guy. The technological landscape is going to evolve. So I know that's my techno

00:14:49.360 | prognostications. Don't sleep on Zuckerberg, but also don't overemphasize the importance of the

00:14:55.520 | existing social media platforms. I think that's a little bit-- it's a clunky technology. It's had

00:14:59.200 | its moment.

How Do I Convince My Students to Limit Social Media?

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