Does the internet make people happier or less happy? On the one hand, having a Twitter or Bluesky account seems to have turned some people who were once mellow into angry, radical trolls. And many teenage girls on Instagram seem unhappy, anxious, and maladjusted.
On the other hand, many other people find community and happiness using the internet. A recent study indicates that is common. The Guardian reports:
Published in the journal Technology, Mind and Behaviour, the study describes how Przybylski and Dr Matti Vuorre, of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, analysed data collected through interviews involving about 1,000 people each year from 168 countries as part of the Gallup World Poll.
Participants were asked about their internet access and use as well as eight different measures of wellbeing, such as life satisfaction, social life, purpose in life and feelings of community well-being.
The team analysed data from 2006 to 2021, encompassing about 2.4 million participants aged 15 and above.
The researchers employed more than 33,000 statistical models, allowing them to explore various possible associations while taking into account factors that could influence them, such as income, education, health problems and relationship status.
The results reveal that internet access, mobile internet access and use generally predicted higher measures of the different aspects of wellbeing, with 84.9% of associations between internet connectivity and wellbeing positive, 0.4% negative and 14.7% not statistically significant.
The study was mostly of adults — people “aged 15 and above.” But the opposite result might be true for teens’ use of smartphones and Instagram. Jonathan Haidt is a “social psychologist who believes that your child’s smartphone is a threat to mental well-being. His new book, ‘The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,’ which hit the No. 1 spot on the New York Times’ hardcover nonfiction best-seller list, has struck a chord with parents who have watched their kids sit slack-jawed and stock still for hours, lost in a welter of TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch, Facebook, and more. Haidt blames the spike in teen-age depression and anxiety on the rise of smartphones and social media, and he offers a set of prescriptions: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age sixteen,” reports The New Yorker.
