This week, the U.S. Surgeon General announced he would seek congressional approval to require warning labels be placed on social media platforms, “stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.”
Sound crazy? Maybe.
But those of us of certain ages may remember the fights to get warning labels placed on tobacco and alcohol products, and those messages now are commonplace.
I’m all for it because, frankly, our phones are just another in a long line of things that we have idolized, and the effects to society -- and especially our youth -- are staggering. Surely, you have your own example that you can recall, but the other night when I was walking our dogs, there was a young man about a half block in front of me also walking a dog. But every half block or so, he’d stop so that he could pull his phone out of his pocket and scroll his latest posts. He couldn’t make it 100 feet without having to see his phone!
Surveys tell us that teens spend more than 4.8 hours per day on social media platforms, and what has that wrought? Research shows that since the ubiquitous rise in smartphones in the early 2000s, kids who spend more than three hours a day on their phones suffer significantly higher mental health issues and struggle with negative feelings about their bodies.
Yes, the research is inconclusive that all of this damage is directly attributed to social media use, but even if it’s only anecdotal at this point, we can all point to how our phones are depersonalizing our relationships and becoming substitutes for connections with other living beings.
I’m not naive; I know the placement of a warning label on social media would likely be more lampooned than it would be helpful. But the same arguments were made about placing warnings on other dangerous products, and over time the increased awareness of danger did alter behavior. Just look at the sharp decrease in the number of U.S. smokers, for example.
I’m not a doctor, of course, and so I can’t speak to this issue from a medical standpoint. I’ll leave that to the surgeon general.
But I do believe that there is a spiritual component to this debate, and I am fairly comfortable in saying that social media platforms ironically have done little to further our relationships.
In spiritual terms, when something comes between us and God, we label that an idol. And so, given that we see God most clearly in others, when social media disrupts those relationships, I’d call increasing social media use more than just a troubling mental health problem.
I’d call it a spiritual crisis as well. Amen.
Devlyn Brooks is an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and serves Faith Lutheran Church in Wolverton, Minn. He blogs about faith at findingfaithin.com, and can be reached at [email protected].