How to gauge the impact of social media?
A quantum leap in communications? A tectonic paradigm shift in human interaction? An unprecedented sea change in access to information?
Or — to consider shadier implications — a hindrance to learning, a gateway to false and misleading data, dangerous exposure to youthful vulnerability, a portal to personal despair and isolation and, in the view of some, even mass shootings?
Paradoxically, the descriptors seem both inadequate and exaggerated, suggesting that 21st century culture doesn’t yet fully understand the human implications of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Twitter and assorted other platforms which, in only a couple of decades, seem to have turned the world on its head.
At least one thing seems certain, to Jews as well as everybody else: Civilization will never again return to the pre-internet, pre-digital era, and it has little choice but to adapt to the new reality of virtually instantaneous global connectivity and access to seemingly infinite streams of information, both good and bad.
Precisely how civilization will handle that transition is far less clear.
The Intermountain Jewish News spoke recently with four active members of the regional Jewish community, each of whose personal approaches to social media reflect different personal and professional perspectives.
While none of these thoughtful individuals even attempted to pass any final or absolute judgment on social media’s potential blessings or curses, their reflections provide food for thought as humanity grapples with an issue the likes of which it has never before known.
Psychiatry
Boulder-based psychiatrist Dr. Harrison Levine specializes in youths and young adults who, he says, are the most prolific users of social media, and also those most likely to be affected by it.
He begins by stressing that social media can be a positive force for young people.
“With some kids, it’s the only way they make friends,” he says. “They feel connected this way, they have people who are like them. It’s a way to share things.”
But Levine is well aware of the potential risks. He has treated many of them in his own practice and has read many of the studies detailing a plethora of psychological and social maladies afflicting youths who use social media.
Mainstream media, too, are all over the story, describing a Pandora’s Box that includes depression, anxiety, social isolation, suicidal ideation, poor self-esteem, not to mention potential exposure to cyber-bullying and sexual victimization by online predators.
“It’s especially tough for kids because they don’t understand the risks the same way adults do,” Levine says.
“They don’t get that anything you do online is collected, that someone can use your information for other things. There’s cyber-bullying. There are obsessions with likes and retweets, which a lot of kids succumb to. It drives everything. They get depressed because something happens and where did it happen? It happened online.”
The psychiatrist says that in his practice he has seen virtually all of the negative side effects of social media use in his youthful patients.
Depression, he says, “is definitely going on.”
So is anxiety.
“Kids pay enormous attention to likes, shares and retweets, all as indicators of their own popularity. Young people are obsessed with these numbers — how many likes you have, how many friends you have, where in reality maybe you have none.”
In other words, he says, online or virtual “friends” are very different from actual ones, and the differences are important.
“Kids don’t talk to kids anymore,” Levine says. “Kids used to have to force themselves to be social with other kids. They don’t have to anymore. I don’t know how many patients I have who spend hours each day with headsets on, playing online video games with people around the world.”
Such social isolation — spending much of one’s life in the privacy of a bedroom or basement — can lead to depression and anxiety as well as physical issues like obesity, Levine warns. In rare cases, it can even lead to suicidal thoughts, although he says that such ideation usually has deeper causes than just social media use.
“I see a lot of kids who are suicidal — that’s why they come to see me. It’s hard to get them to talk about this at all, let alone ask if this is because of social media. They don’t tell me that. It’s almost as if the kids have this knowledge and it’s a secret.”
Levine, educated at Ben Gurion University, classifies himself as born on the borderline between the Baby Boom and Generation X. He insists that the social media issues facing young people today are quantitatively and qualitatively different from the media issues (television, for example, or certain forms of rock music) that he faced in his own youth.
“We all say, you know, ‘when I was a kid…,’ but I really think there’s a difference here. When we were kids there wasn’t social media. You had to go to the library to look anything up; you couldn’t just do it on your desktop. There’s always been bullying, but this is a new form of bullying.”
Self-esteem issues have always been a part of adolescence, but Levine feels that the cyber-culture of likes and dislikes, shares and retweets, is far more pernicious than the schoolyard cliques of bygone years.
Parents, he says, can play a critical role in ameliorating such negative impacts, so long as they handle it cautiously and with a measure of tolerance.
Forbidding the use of social media usually doesn’t work, he advises. It leads to parent-child fights and antagonism more often than it helps.
Limiting the number of hours a young person can be online can be helpful, Levine says, although this also runs a big risk of forcing confrontation and encouraging resistance.
“It often causes another fight with the kids,” he says. “I don’t think we appreciate that this is a different kind of warfare and it’s hard to fight against.”
He suggests that parents acknowledge to their children that social media can be a positive force, that Snapchat or Instagram can actually enlarge their circle of friends or that some video games can teach valuable skills.
Then, gently, discuss some of the perils and negative impacts of social media use or overuse.
Above all, parents should know what they’re talking about before they even approach their kids about the issue.
“Adults should understand the social media that they’re criticizing their kids about. If you’re on Snapchat and you want to criticize your kid about Snapchat, that’s different than just criticizing it when you have no idea what it is. Parents can be more helpful if they’re involved, if they understand.”
Jewish camp
The parameters of Shwayder Camp’s policy regarding social media use are direct and straightforward: Not allowed.
Every year, the venerable Jewish summer camp, located on the slopes of Mt. Evans in the Colorado Rockies, makes sure that its new crop of campers — and all of its staff members — know that cell phones, tablets and other social media devices are not only unwelcome but banned.
“We are electronics free,” says camp director Jodie Abrams. “They can have watches and digital cameras and flashlights — just about anything with a battery — but we’re totally screen-free. They can’t have a phone or mp3 players or anything like that.”
Banning social media is not a very difficult rule to enforce, Abrams says, since “we’re lucky” that the camp’s remote location means that there’s no cell service or wifi anyway.
“But campers and staff can’t bring in anything to play games or anything like that either,” the director points out.
There are very specific reasons for the policy, mainly that social media use works against one of the camp’s main objectives — to encourage social interaction.
“It’s so they can totally unplug and have stronger connections with the people in their cabin,” Abrams says.
“Social media is isolating. I really notice it most among the staff. After hours, when the staff is just hanging out and having face-to-face interactions, the relationships that they build are incredibly strong by the end of the summer. If everyone was just hanging out and playing games or texting their friends who aren’t here after hours, there’s no way that they could make the same connections.”
She’s referring mostly to “peer to peer” relationships: staff to staff and camper to camper.
“It’s the time where the kids are interacting with each other and the staff are interacting with each other that I think it has the biggest impact.”
Such socialization, Abrams believes, “is important really in any environment. We can do it up here without the pressures of parents. Parents are so afraid that their kids aren’t going to have fun. One of the concerns that I hear a lot through the off-season when parents are signing their kids up is they’re worried that they’re not going to have friends.
“Camp is such a natural environment to build relationships. You’re cheering each other on in challenging situations if it’s a group course or team activities. We take away those barriers of cell phones or personal musical devices or anything that would get in the way of building those relationships.”
Another thing social media gets in the way of is concentration, she adds. In the summer camp environment, which is heavily activity-oriented, removing social media “is about having them focus on what they’re doing, doing one thing at a time.”
Campers generally seem to have no problem with the social media blackout at Shwayder, Abrams says, while staffers tend to give a little pushback, at least at first. After a few days, she says, even the staffers come to love the fact that they’re no longer plugged in.
“There’s always an adjustment period of not having your phone or connectivity all the time but give it a couple days and they love it.
“We do a survey at the end of every season, both with the campers’ families and with our staff and we happen to score really high on work environment and social environment. I attribute a lot of that to the fact that they’re just with each other. It does provide a really rich social environment.”
Abrams says that outside the camp environment, she has few qualms about young people using social media. In some ways, it even works in Shwayder Camp’s favor.
“The good thing for us is that’s how our campers keep in touch throughout the year,” she says.
“When you are together for one, two or three weeks at camp and you make these really close relationships, it’s great to stay connected throughout the year. We can also reach more people to spread the word about camp. So there definitely are positives about social media.”
But when summertime comes around and the campers arrive at Shwayder, “they’re really able to be together without those distractions,” Abrams says. “I’m really happy that we can provide the experience without it while they’re here.”
Education
After 15 years teaching Jewish studies at Florida Atlantic University, Dr. Rabbi Fred Greenspahn, a former and once-again Denverite, is confident that his policy of keeping social media out of his classrooms was a sound and sensible one.
Greenspahn, former spiritual leader of Littleton’s Beth Shalom and a professor at DU, adopted a policy similar to Shwayder Camp’s because he feels that social media works against the goals of good education, at least when in the classroom.
“I prohibited the students from using any electronic devices during class,” he says. “Cell phones, computers, any electronic device was to be turned off and not visible.” (The professor made exceptions when students needed to have their phone turned on for pressing personal or medical reasons.)
Prohibiting social media presence in collegiate classrooms is a growing trend, Greenspahn says.
“I am hardly the only professor with that policy. I had lots of colleagues there who did it and I suspect there are colleagues around the country who have the same position.”
His students seldom gave him any serious grief over the policy, Greenspahn says, “but there were some clearly who ignored it. They would keep their cell phones on and typically have them hidden so I couldn’t see them.”
He could usually tell if that were the case when a student was able to quickly come up with the answer to a particularly difficult or obscure question.
“They’d obviously looked it up on Wikipedia when I wasn’t looking.”
While that is not a terribly grievous offense — at least the students were staying on topic — the use of social media in the classrooms almost invariably results in distraction, a perennial enemy of a serious educator, he says.
“I wanted students to be paying attention, to me or to the material we were covering. If they had their devices on they would be distracted in one way or another.
“Secondly, I had been asked to observe another faculty member at one point, as part of a periodic review. I was sitting in the back of that person’s class watching and that person allowed the students, even encouraged them, I think, to use laptops.
“I could see what the students were doing on their laptops and it had nothing to do with what was going on in class. They were all over the internet, sending messages to friends, whatever it was. I wanted the students to be paying attention to me and paying attention, frankly, to each other, because a lot of what we did involved interaction among the students. I was very committed to the idea that when they’re in class they need to be focused on what’s going on.”
In his classes, Greenspahn adds, the discussion was most often about the Bible. He is convinced that using online sources for biblical research — like many other fields — is an inferior approach.
“I wanted them to use Bibles, specifically printed Bibles, for a variety of reasons. One is that when you look up a biblical passage on the internet you’re going to see one sentence and oftentimes I wanted them to see the sentence that was in the previous paragraph. I wanted them to learn their way around the Bible. None of that happens when you look up biblical passages online.”
Once his students left the classroom, Greenspahn had no problem with them heading to cyberspace to study.
“I did not prohibit them from using electronic devices to do research. Quite the contrary. It’s a wonderful tool. But when they were in class I wanted their attention. I wanted them to learn how to use a Bible. I wanted them to interact with other students who might be using different editions of the Bible. Those were my motivations and I think overall it was successful.”
A firm believer in many traditional pedagogic methods — including the use of printed books — Greenspahn doesn’t believe that online research teaches as well.
“There’s been research done on how people learn,” he says. “What they’ve shown is that people who use a written book actually retain more than people who read something online. That’s important and there are reasons for that. If my goal as a teacher is for my students to learn and retain, I don’t want them using a technology that undercuts that.
“On top of which, the students often can’t know which sources are more reliable and which are less reliable.”
Overall, Greenspahn is philosophical about the encroachment of communications technology into modern society.
“Every technology comes with its ups and its downs,” he says. “I would remind you that tens of thousands of people are killed in car accidents every year, which didn’t happen 150 years ago because we didn’t have cars.
“Technology has brought problems. All you have to do is go to a restaurant and watch the couple sitting at a table, both glued to their smartphones. And it’s not just millennials. In South Florida there’s a huge population of retirees. We would go to the movies and they all would be busy looking at their smartphones and not at the movie screen.”
Today’s anxieties about social media use, especially among the young, need to be taken in context, Greenspahn advises.
“There are problems with it and that’s true of every technology. Remember when television came in, and all these concerns were expressed over how much time our generation of Baby Boomers was spending in front of the TV set?
“Social media has its goods and its bads and we need to learn how to deal with that. I am worried about all the bad effects and how they need to be balanced with the value that it brings at the same time. We need to learn a way to navigate it.”
Youth
In much of the intense debate over social media, the usual subject of that debate — youth — is often left out of the conversation. Yet who better than the young themselves, the main drivers behind the surge in social media use and misuse, to discuss the topic?
Seventeen-year-old Max Makovsky, a 2019 graduate of Denver Jewish Day School and a prospective student at Yeshivat Orayta in Jerusalem and Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., has no hesitation in tackling the subject.
Spending the summer as a 3rd-4th grade counselor at Ramah of the Rockies, Makovsky says that he normally uses social media for about two to three hours a day. His favorite platforms are Snapchat, Instagram, Whatsapp, VSCO and FaceTime.
He’s not sure how that compares with his peers.
“It can vary greatly depending on the person I have friends that have all but quit social media and friends that I feel like can only maintain conversations through their fingers.”
Asked what he finds most attractive about social media, his reply is straightforward: “Maintaining contact with people that I don’t get to see in person, keeping up with national, international and Israeli news, making plans to see people, general basic communication, boredom.”
His parents raised him with fairly strict guidelines on how much time he could spend online and what platforms he was allowed to visit.
He was not allowed to have a cell phone or other online device until seventh grade, when he got his first iPod Touch.
“At that age, however, I didn’t really have a use for social media as my social circle was rather confined to my then school, DAT. In eighth grade, when I got a laptop for school, I had time restrictions imposed on it. I was discouraged from getting Facebook until I was older, but upon breaking that rule I realized that Facebook wasn’t a social media platform that really enticed me.”
As he advanced through his teens, Makovsky says, his circle of friends increased, making social media a more attractive activity.
“Social media took a greater part in maintaining contact with these friends and, assuming such contact proved healthy for me, my parents did not discourage it.”
He is grateful, however, for the restrictions his parents maintained in his younger years.
“The guidance that was most helpful to me was the understanding that I had to be mindful about my usage,” Makovsky says.
“If something goes on the internet, it’s there to stay and that was the basis of the warning given to me as I matured. It was up to me to use such social media in a smart and mindful way, recognizing the amount of time I spent on it, the risks of strangers approaching me, and that which I myself put on to my personal social media.”
That awareness proved valuable, he says, when he felt himself affected by the powerful, and sometimes less than positive, pressures that social media exerted, particularly when it came to conformity.
“I have definitely felt external pressures to portray myself in such a way that might not totally accurately depict who I am as a person,” he says, “meaning I have felt pressure to look my best, filter pictures, post only a certain amount of times per month, and other external things that might make me seem to be more desirable on the internet.
“My self-esteem definitely took a hit around 10th grade as I and my high school peers were struggling to establish who we were in the world. I tried to fit in boxes I felt were desirable rather than focusing on who I was and what made me unique.”
Despite those pulls, Makovsky says he never allowed social media to take control of his life. Whatever anxiety or depression he may have experienced growing up he attributed to “other things that high school brings with it.”
While he’s anecdotally familiar with stories of the dangers of social media, he says he never saw serious side effects among his friends, even though some of them put more energy into online activity than he feels was necessary or wise.
For those young people who are having serious problems due to social media, he says the best advice he can offer is not to allow online activity to become a major or indispensible part of one’s life.
“Take a step back and prioritize,” he says. “How you look on social media means nothing if that’s not who you are in the real world. Personal, real interactions are more meaningful than those hidden behind a screen, and one should focus and prioritize how they can impact the world at large rather than a few hundred followers whom you may never meet more than a handful of times.”
Despite his focused awareness of the potential pitfalls of social media use, Makovsky feels that a sense of exaggeration, even of hysteria, hovers over the public debate over its effects.
Parents, and the media as well, should take a step back themselves.
“One of the most annoying things to be told is that my generation’s problems with increased depression, anxiety and mental illness are being solely or mostly caused by social media usage.
“In my personal experience, toxic cultures within high school, such as homophobia and exponentially increased pressures to achieve greater and greater things academically — test scores, AP classes, entrance to more prestigious colleges — cause significantly more stress than social media.”
Social media, he stresses, is far from all bad.
Taken in context, Makovsky says that social media has helped him maintain international and transnational contact, increased his global and national awareness and created opportunities to develop and deepen personal relationships.
“Social media creates a space in which new opportunities can be created and taken advantage of in a positive way,” he says. “Despite consequences such as cyber-bullying, it has been a healthy outlet for me to experiment with who I am and further develop my personality.”
Chris Leppek may be reached at IJNEWS@aol.com.
Copyright © 2019 by the Intermountain Jewish News