Q2 IA - AP SEMINAR - PART B

Source  A - 

Gen Z Users Say Social Media Benefited Their Lives -- But Also Wish It Was Never Invented: Poll Many young adults wish 

                                         TikTok and X were "never invented" Maryam Khanum / The Latin Times 

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The generation known for their social media use appears to have mixed feelings about it's impact on their lives.

According to new research published by The Harris Poll, about half of Generation Z wish social media apps TikTok and X didn't exist.

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The Harris Poll conducted their research in collaboration with social psychologist and best-selling author Jonathan Haidt.

Haidt, who wrote the book The Anxious Generation, has long been researching the impacts of heightened communication, increased levels of technology and social media on children and childhood.

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According to findings, 47% of Gen Z wishes TikTok didn't exist, and 50% wish the same for X. This comes from a nationally representative poll of 1,006 Gen Z adults (aged 18-27).

52% of those sampled say social media has benefitted their lives in some way, but 29% reported that it has hurt them. The study found that members with marginalized identities are more likely to be harmed. 44% of women and 47% of LGBTQ respondents said social media negatively impacted their mental health.

Data also demonstrated social media usage patterns within these young adults. 47% of adult Gen Z social media users stated that they use social media for 2-4 hours daily. 60% spend at least 4 hours a day, and 22% said they spent seven or more hours each day.

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While TikTok and X got the most votes for individual platforms members of Gen Z wished "was never invented", other platforms followed not too far behind. Significant percentages of respondents wished apps such as Snapchat (43%), Facebook (37%) and Instagram (34%) had never been invented, either.

"We interpret these low numbers as indicating that Gen Z does not heavily regret the basic communication, storytelling and information-seeking functions of the internet," Haidt writes. "If smartphones merely let people text each other, watch movies and search for helpful information or interesting videos (without personalized recommendation algorithms intended to hook users), there would be far less regret and resentment."

Source B -

                                                                     Every Generation Is the Anxious Generation

                             The big problem faced by teens today is deeper—and much older than phones.

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Adolescents these days live in a time of prosperity. Around the globe, life expectancy is rising, education is widespread, homicide rates are dropping, and diseases are increasingly curable. If one is lucky enough to have been born in a high-income country, they’ve come of age at a time when risky teenage behaviors, such as sex, drug use, and crime, are in steady decline. Schools now provide increased social-emotional learning and mental health support. Yet contemporary teenagers are experiencing rates of anxiety at all-time highs.

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This has prompted social psychologist Jonathan Haidt to label Gen Z (and older Gen Alphas) “the anxious generation.” If you happen to be an educator or parent these days, you are probably familiar with the playground summary of his book: The current mental health crisis dovetails not-so-coincidentally with the rise of smartphones and social media, and parents should take steps to limit their use.

I’m a mindfulness director at a PK–8 school, and have two young kids of my own, so I’m very familiar with the doomsday discourse around devices. But I also have an additional perspective that I hope parents can consider before getting too wound up about the problem of phones.

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Haidt’s work brings to mind something that many of us think of when the latest innovation is held up as evidence of the downfall of civilization: We’ve been through this before. In the 1800s, medical journals were concerned about “railway madness” and trains traveling so fast they would make people go crazy. In the 1920s people railed against the radio as a vapid deliverer of ads and indistinguishable jazz. And the rise of teen car culture in the 20th century led to rabid fears about promiscuity, delinquency, and moral decline.

Each generation, it seems, believes that the unique conditions that it (or its progeny) encounters are the most challenging. And in a way, each generation is right. We may know intellectually that things were stressful in the past, but the present is the only time in which acute discontent can be felt. Our capacity for anxiety is not caused by the latest gadgets, it is innate; an evolutionarily advantageous trait that causes us to avoid danger and seek reward. Don’t knock it: It’s helped keep homo sapiens alive and nourished for the last 190,000 years or so.

The truth is that we are hardwired for dissatisfaction, considering our ancestors who sat contentedly on their laurels tended not to pass on their genes. Today, some humans face genuinely dire straits. Extreme tragedy and hardship certainly exist. We face a major threat as a species: climate change. But even in the best of circumstances, most of us spend our day-to-day yearning for more, despite the general lack of predators and the abundance of supermarkets. It’s a phenomenon the Buddha identified 2,600 years ago as the first noble truth: Life is suffering.

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There is something very unique about angst today—and it’s not the phones. I think of an anecdote in sociologist Liah Greenfeld’s prescient 2005 paper, “When the Sky Is the Limit: Busyness in Contemporary American Society.” She is aghast when her teenage son dyes his hair blue, yet he counters that he never approved of her dyeing her gray hair. When she points out that she is dyeing her hair a natural color, he states, “You wished to pass for somebody you are not, while I am just trying to see who I am.”

For most of human history, identity was ascribed at birth: pauper, peasant, preacher, princess. Of course, inequities could cause suffering. But social position was a period, not a question mark. Today, modern teenagers are more engaged in the process of trying to see who they are than any other generation that has come before. This is not about identity politics but ennui: Even minuscule choices, like what socks to wear, are part of a larger cultural self-definition and viral conversation. Getting dressed in this context is certainly preferable to fleeing a saber-toothed tiger—but it’s not without its edge.

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Today’s teens face a yawning chasm of potentiality. “The natural limitations of human existence are the only limitations life imposes on contemporary Americans,” wrote Greenfeld. “In comparison to other societies, our sphere of freedom, and choice, is greatly extended.” It’s not just about the freedom to pick (or avoid) a religion, and whether or not to have kids. It’s the choice of where to live, what to buy (there are so many choices about what to buy), what to decorate your walls with—everything down to how to groom the hairs on your head. Teens today are taught they can be whatever they dream.

This is no less anxiety-inducing than being in an environment of scarcity. In an infamous study on purchasing jam, consumers were attracted to the display with more choices, but ended up purchasing a jar much less frequently than consumers who had stopped at a smaller display. “The presence of choice might be appealing as a theory,” one of the researchers has said. “But in reality, people might find more and more choice to actually be debilitating.” As Greenfeld put it: “Lifting limits from our desires, paradoxically, places very heavy burdens on our shoulders.”

Though I don’t think this generation is unique in its sense of anxiety, I don’t disagree with Haidt on the fact that devices can play a role in the modern teen’s sense of unease. Smartphones can act as anxiety incubators, amplifying the sense of abundant possibility like a prism refracting light. The solution to this anxiety, though, is the same as it ever was. The Buddha suggests that we work with the fundamental dissatisfaction we feel by releasing craving, and attuning to the sensory richness of the present moment. As a seminal Harvard study showed, people are least happy when their mind is wandering, and happiest when their mind is focused on the activity they are engaging in. In other words, being a scrollbot stokes anxiety. Meditating or drawing or hiking or dancing might help mitigate it.

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But we’d also do well to remember that suffering is not abnormal—it’s human. Rather than pathologizing the valid feelings of the current generation, it might be wiser to normalize them. Your teen might feel dissatisfied because they spend a lot of time on their phone. But also, they might feel dissatisfied because that’s what it means to be a teen.

Source C -

                                                                                          Sometimes by Mary Oliver

4.

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Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

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5.

Two or three times in my life I discovered love.

Each time it seemed to solve everything.

Each time it solved a great many things

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    but not everything.

Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and

thoroughly, solved everything.

6.

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God, rest in my heart

and fortify me,

take away my hunger for answers,

let the hours play upon my body

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like the hands of my beloved.

Let the cathead appear again—

the smallest of your mysteries,

some wild cousin of my own blood probably—

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some cousin of my own wild blood probably,

in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

7.

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Death waits for me, I know it, around

    one corner or another.

This doesn’t amuse me.

Neither does it frighten me.

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After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.

It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.

I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

Source D -  

                                         Writer Thoreau warned of brain rot in 1854. Now it's the Oxford Word of 2024

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It's not unusual for the words of influencers to gain popularity. But the influential philosopher Henry David Thoreau was born more than 200 years ago -- and now a term he's credited with introducing, "brain rot," is the Oxford University Press's word or phrase of 2024.

Brain rot was selected by thousands of online voters. But that doesn't necessarily mean they're well-versed in Thoreau's work, particularly his 1854 book Walden, or Life in the Woods, where he wrote about "brain-rot." It was the first recorded use of the term, according to Oxford University Press.

Today, brain rot reflects a worry that consuming the internet's endless waves of memes and video clips, especially on social media, might numb one's noggin.

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In Walden, Thoreau used the term as he railed against oversimplification.

He asked, "Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense?"

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Thoreau ended that paragraph with another question: "While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?"

                                                                        So, is the new rot the same as the old rot?

Oxford's language experts say brain rot gained traction on platforms such as TikTok this year, thanks to Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Frequency of the term's use grew by 230% from 2023 to 2024, according to the publisher's monitoring tools.

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At first glance, the connection to Thoreau may seem odd, but consider this: when Thoreau relocated to his cabin near Walden Pond to get back to basics in 1845, he was 27 years old -- the same age as the oldest Gen Z members.

To better get a sense of how Thoreau saw brain rot in the 1800s, NPR contacted Cristin Ellis, an authority on Thoreau who teaches literature at the University of Mississippi.

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"For Thoreau, 'brain-rot describes what happens to our minds and spirits when we suppress our innate instincts for curiosity and wonder," Ellis says, "and instead resign ourselves to the unreflective habits we observe all around us -- habits of fitting in, getting by, chasing profits, chatting about the latest news."

In today's usage, brain rot is seen as a bad thing, sort of a cautionary term for what might happen to us if we get too distracted.

"I think the definitions are related but Thoreau's sense of brain rot is way more extreme," Ellis says.

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"It's not just TikTok dance crazes but virtually our entire 24/7 media culture -- including the "serious" news of newspapers -- that Thoreau would accuse of trivializing our minds," she adds.

"Thoreau really values direct experience over our habits of consuming other peoples' ideas at second hand," Ellis says. "He wants us to go outside to feel and think something for ourselves; he wants us to get to know the places where we actually live."

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                                                                                Popularity hints at online anxieties

Words of the year often mark shifts in thought and concerns about where society is heading -- see "climate emergency" from 2019 and "vax" from 2021.

Compared to Oxford's recent words of the year, brain rot suggests a reflective mood, after the more indulgent vibes of "goblin mode" in 2022 and "rizz" in 2023.

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Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, said in a news release sent to NPR that he finds it fascinating that "brain rot" is being embraced by younger people. "It feels like a rightful next chapter in the cultural conversation about humanity and technology," he said.

"There's an anxiety coming through about striking the right balance between the online world and losing touch with the real world," Oxford Languages product director Katherine Martin said. "I think it's great that young people also use this term to refer to the type of language used by people who overindulge in online content, which is wonderfully recursive and self-referential."

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"Brain rot" beat out five other contenders: demure; dynamic pricing; romantasy; slop; and lore.

Demure became a sensation -- and is Dictionary.com's word of 2024 -- largely thanks to online content creator Jools Lebron's catchphrase, "very demure, very mindful."

                                                            Back to Thoreau -- how might he have seen our culture?

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"I think he might actually see us as in a more or less similar predicament as the society he lived in," Ellis says. "He had no time for the complaint that societies in the past were somehow better, nobler, smarter than the present day."

Shortly after Thoreau raises the specter of "brain rot" in Walden, he warns readers against being distracted by questions about the deterioration of society's collective intellect. He also returns to a central theme: people should aim for their own personal achievements.

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"His point here is that whether or not things are worse now than they were (and in general he's skeptical of that kind of nostalgia), our task at all times is the same: to try our hardest to commit ourselves to the things that matter most in our brief and miraculous lives," Ellis says.

"Devote your attention to what you know, in your heart of heart, really matters: meaning, beauty, love, wonder, and gratitude for this earth."