Social media just removes the incentive of isolation, imo. It provides just enough social interaction that there's less reason to go out and see each other in person. I'm in my late 20's and I haven't seen some of my best friends in months, but we all chat in Discord and play games together frequently, almost daily. It's not the same as actually hanging out, but it's enough to make not hanging out less painful.
There’s also the fact that social media corporations are incentivized to keep you using their platform as long as possible. I saw a post pointing out that no social media app notifies friends when you happen to be nearby (presumably an opt-in system). They argued this shows where their priorities are. I’m not sure that specific feature would be so easy to implement, but it does seem like there are many ways social media is oriented away from building deep connections or socializing off their platform (including in person).
There is just no way I would be doing that in 2023 as a kid. It was fun at the time because the alternative was even more boring.
The malls are dead, gas is overpriced, helicopter parents don't let kids out of the house, and movies (sitting next to each other in the dark staring silently at something else) is barely social interaction anyway. That all assumes teens can afford to do anything anyway.
Give teens more freedom, give them places to hang out, give them more autonomy and trust when they're younger so they have more confidence, but they'll still be staring at their phones a lot of the time because there is a ton of pressure to respond to everything immediately. Phones are designed to encourage it and to pull our attention back to the screen every few minutes. Teens want the instant validation and some semblance of connection.
They don't have bunch of disposible income, so what's the economic incentive? I mean can you imagine the shit storm if a tax was levied to fund a space of teens to hang out? I can hear the whinging from parallel universes where it happened already.
Taxes pay for parks, libraries, nature preserves, swimming pools, schools (with after-school sports, musicals, various clubs), museums and galleries. Many local organizations receive grants from taxpayer money to provide services and activities for teens.
Within a 10-mile radius of where I'm sitting, a teenager could skateboard at a taxpayer-funded skate park, swim at a taxpayer-funded pool, read a magazine at a taxpayer-funded library, play basketball on a taxpayer-funded court, walk through a tax-payer funded art gallery, etc.
When I was in high school we got out at 1:50pm and had maybe 1-2 hours of homework, not that I did any of it, per night. There was a lot more free time during the week for social interaction outside of school.
On this point, I’d say the problem lies with the former becoming irrelevant. This is why I’m really interested in creating new types of IRL social spaces and shared experiences. There’s just not a lot of options really, and for The Kids, bars are out.
So not only can you not afford to drink at many bars as a teen, you can't talk to your friends there either.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1530-0277.2008...
About the only place to hang out that doesn't demand money is a library, assuming you can find one, and that's not exactly the right place for chattering and larking about.
I suggest we need to broaden our gaze - the recent decades of digital social revolution have greatly affected the behaviour of us all.
Almost like it's a shared hallucination experienced by multiple users. (We could call the concept...a SHMU.)
