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Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

(arstechnica.com)
372 points pseudolus | 8 comments | 17 Dec 24 23:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.404s | source | bottom
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vouaobrasil ◴[20 Dec 24 19:19 UTC] No.42474017[source]▶
I wonder if the new drug of choice is actually technology. In some ways I think that the addiction to technology has some similar mellowing effects as drugs. Some research indicates that smartphone addiction is also related to low self-esteem and avoidant attachment [1] and that smartphones can become an object of attachment [2]. The replacement of drugs by technology is not surprising as it significantly strengthens technological development especially as it is already well past the point of diminishing returns for improving every day life.

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07475...

2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07475...

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Spooky23 ◴[21 Dec 24 13:31 UTC] No.42479553[source]▶
I think it’s not technology as a thing people are hooked to - it’s taken over social life. My 13 year old and his buddies socialize online, period. In person stuff is mostly organized. That is helped by school policy that got rid of the idea of a neighborhood school.

Additionally, the social activities that coalesced around things like alcohol are out of reach of many teens. I live in a city that had a very active college bar scene. It’s dead and gone. Crackdowns on underage serving and cost drives it away. Happy hour special at a place that other day was $12 for 4 coors lights in a bucket. In 1998, I’d pay $15 for a dozen wings and all you can drink swill for 3 hours.

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cluckindan ◴[21 Dec 24 13:39 UTC] No.42479602[source]▶
”My 13 year old and his buddies socialize online, period.”

Nothing new under the sun. Me and my friends were like that 30 something years ago.

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vouaobrasil ◴[21 Dec 24 13:54 UTC] No.42479685[source]▶
> Nothing new under the sun. Me and my friends were like that 30 something years ago.

(1) When I was growing up, nobody had any online presence. I remember life without the internet.

(2) The fact that it is not new does not mean it has not changed in magnitude and addictiveness.

(3) The fact that it is not new does not mean that it is not a problem. It is a growing problem. Especially because societies these days do nothing about their problems except through more technology at them, which rarely solves the underlying issue.

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ghaff ◴[21 Dec 24 14:10 UTC] No.42479783[source]▶
Aside from BBSs from about the mid-80s, followed by some Usenet and related later, there was very little online presence until getting well into the mid-90s or so. Certainly my social friends who weren't part of the local BBS scene had no online presence until maybe the dot-coms really took off.
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1. cluckindan ◴[21 Dec 24 15:36 UTC] No.42480231[source]▶
Mid-90s were 30 something years ago. Perhaps the US was a little slow to develop in this front compared to Europe.
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2. ghaff ◴[21 Dec 24 16:19 UTC] No.42480479[source]▶
Maybe, though that would surprise me a bit. My first personal webpage was probably around 1996 or 1997--and I assume that was fairly early for that sort of thing. As I said, I had been using BBSs for a while and also accessed usenet and FTP sites somewhat later. (I would have only had access from work to the Internet for quite a while.)

For most people, it probably wasn't until MySpace and the like and the popularization of blogging in maybe the early 2000s that an "online presence" was really a thing although people increasingly had access to email etc.

(My dates may be a bit off but not by a lot.)

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3. iteria ◴[21 Dec 24 17:50 UTC] No.42481058[source]▶
AOL. In the late 90s, I was in the chat rooms, by the early 00s me and my friends would swap between AIM and text messaging depending when texts were free. Kids definitely had an online presence, but it wasn't like the mid-00s and after when social media rose up.
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4. ghaff ◴[21 Dec 24 18:15 UTC] No.42481204{3}[source]▶
I wasn't in instant messaging until I was an analyst in the 2000s. Never had an AOL account outside of being IM I used for some subset of mostly journalists. So, yeah, didn't really communicate with social contacts with email/IM until the 2000s for the most part.
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5. iteria ◴[22 Dec 24 10:00 UTC] No.42485429{4}[source]▶
I guess it might be an age thing. My teens were the start of proto-social media. Forums and IMs were big. Neopets and livejournal was a core memory of my youth. These were social spaces even if they were be nothing like when Facebook rose up in the late 00s and changed everything
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6. pixl97 ◴[22 Dec 24 15:02 UTC] No.42486728[source]▶
It wasn't the internet that was the problem exactly. 90s internet was still a haven for nerds because you had to choose to be there over somewhere else. You weren't carrying the net around.

2008ish was really probably the most massive change in this. About every cellphone turned into a web device at that point and social media started it's mega boom as a phone app.

Even when you were out in public everyone was on the net.

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7. ghaff ◴[22 Dec 24 15:19 UTC] No.42486856[source]▶
Maybe a couple years later. The iPhone came out in 2007 but it was probably around 2010 before it really exploded. I was doing email with an earlier smartphone before that but 2010 or so is when mobile web really exploded and everything associated with that.

And, yeah, the 90s weren't really a mobile era for most people overall. I got a laptop at work in the latter part of the decade because I sort of begged and pleaded but it was mostly unconnected. Even when I became an analyst in 1999, I had to buy my own laptop for travel as I was just given a PC. (And WiFi at conferences was still an adventure.)

8. ghaff ◴[22 Dec 24 15:21 UTC] No.42486871{5}[source]▶
There were various sea changes over fairly short time horizons. When I went to grad school in the mid-80s, few people had their own PCs and mine wasn't a portable much less a laptop. At my job afterwards, we still used terminals and were ahead of the curve in that we made heavy use of internal-only email.