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antiporn-activist · 2 months

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I thought y'all should read this

I have a free trial to News+ so I copy-pasted it for you here. I don't think Jonathan Haidt would object to more people having this info.

Tumblr wouldn't let me post it until i removed all the links to Haidt's sources. You'll have to take my word that everything is sourced.

End the Phone-Based Childhood Now

The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.

By Jonathan Haidt

Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.

The problem was not limited to the U.S.: Similar patterns emerged around the same time in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, the Nordic countries, and beyond. By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.

The decline in mental health is just one of many signs that something went awry. Loneliness and friendlessness among American teens began to surge around 2012. Academic achievement went down, too. According to “The Nation’s Report Card,” scores in reading and math began to decline for U.S. students after 2012, reversing decades of slow but generally steady increase. PISA, the major international measure of educational trends, shows that declines in math, reading, and science happened globally, also beginning in the early 2010s.

As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likelyto live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z.

Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley’s preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. “Something has really gone wrong,” Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

Generations are not monolithic, of course. Many young people are flourishing. Taken as a whole, however, Gen Z is in poor mental health and is lagging behind previous generations on many important metrics. And if a generation is doing poorly––if it is more anxious and depressed and is starting families, careers, and important companies at a substantially lower rate than previous generations––then the sociological and economic consequences will be profound for the entire society.

What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theories abound, but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.

I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents’ smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.

As a social psychologist who has long studied social and moral development, I have been involved in debates about the effects of digital technology for years. Typically, the scientific questions have been framed somewhat narrowly, to make them easier to address with data. For example, do adolescents who consume more social media have higher levels of depression? Does using a smartphone just before bedtime interfere with sleep? The answer to these questions is usually found to be yes, although the size of the relationship is often statistically small, which has led some researchers to conclude that these new technologies are not responsible for the gigantic increases in mental illness that began in the early 2010s.

But before we can evaluate the evidence on any one potential avenue of harm, we need to step back and ask a broader question: What is childhood––including adolescence––and how did it change when smartphones moved to the center of it? If we take a more holistic view of what childhood is and what young children, tweens, and teens need to do to mature into competent adults, the picture becomes much clearer. Smartphone-based life, it turns out, alters or interferes with a great number of developmental processes.

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world.

My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.

1. The Decline of Play and Independence

Human brains are extraordinarily large compared with those of other primates, and human childhoods are extraordinarily long, too, to give those large brains time to wire up within a particular culture. A child’s brain is already 90 percent of its adult size by about age 6. The next 10 or 15 years are about learning norms and mastering skills—physical, analytical, creative, and social. As children and adolescents seek out experiences and practice a wide variety of behaviors, the synapses and neurons that are used frequently are retained while those that are used less often disappear. Neurons that fire together wire together, as brain researchers say.

Brain development is sometimes said to be “experience-expectant,” because specific parts of the brain show increased plasticity during periods of life when an animal’s brain can “expect” to have certain kinds of experiences. You can see this with baby geese, who will imprint on whatever mother-sized object moves in their vicinity just after they hatch. You can see it with human children, who are able to learn languages quickly and take on the local accent, but only through early puberty; after that, it’s hard to learn a language and sound like a native speaker. There is also some evidence of a sensitive period for cultural learning more generally. Japanese children who spent a few years in California in the 1970s came to feel “American” in their identity and ways of interacting only if they attended American schools for a few years between ages 9 and 15. If they left before age 9, there was no lasting impact. If they didn’t arrive until they were 15, it was too late; they didn’t come to feel American.

Human childhood is an extended cultural apprenticeship with different tasks at different ages all the way through puberty. Once we see it this way, we can identify factors that promote or impede the right kinds of learning at each age. For children of all ages, one of the most powerful drivers of learning is the strong motivation to play. Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: to wire up their brains by playing vigorously and often, practicing the moves and skills they’ll need as adults. Kittens will play-pounce on anything that looks like a mouse tail. Human children will play games such as tag and sharks and minnows, which let them practice both their predator skills and their escaping-from-predator skills. Adolescents will play sports with greater intensity, and will incorporate playfulness into their social interactions—flirting, teasing, and developing inside jokes that bond friends together. Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play.

One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail—often—in environments in which failure is not very costly. This is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate in order to take on larger challenges later. The ever-present possibility of getting hurt while running around, exploring, play-fighting, or getting into a real conflict with another group adds an element of thrill, and thrilling play appears to be the most effective kind for overcoming childhood anxieties and building social, emotional, and physical competence. The desire for risk and thrill increases in the teen years, when failure might carry more serious consequences. Children of all ages need to choose the risk they are ready for at a given moment. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults.

Human childhood and adolescence evolved outdoors, in a physical world full of dangers and opportunities. Its central activities––play, exploration, and intense socializing––were largely unsupervised by adults, allowing children to make their own choices, resolve their own conflicts, and take care of one another. Shared adventures and shared adversity bound young people together into strong friendship clusters within which they mastered the social dynamics of small groups, which prepared them to master bigger challenges and larger groups later on.

And then we changed childhood.

The changes started slowly in the late 1970s and ’80s, before the arrival of the internet, as many parents in the U.S. grew fearful that their children would be harmed or abducted if left unsupervised. Such crimes have always been extremely rare, but they loomed larger in parents’ minds thanks in part to rising levels of street crime combined with the arrival of cable TV, which enabled round-the-clock coverage of missing-children cases. A general decline in social capital––the degree to which people knew and trusted their neighbors and institutions––exacerbated parental fears. Meanwhile, rising competition for college admissions encouraged more intensive forms of parenting. In the 1990s, American parents began pulling their children indoors or insisting that afternoons be spent in adult-run enrichment activities. Free play, independent exploration, and teen-hangout time declined.

In recent decades, seeing unchaperoned children outdoors has become so novel that when one is spotted in the wild, some adults feel it is their duty to call the police. In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that parents, on average, believed that children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in front of their house, and that kids should be 14 before being allowed to go unsupervised to a public park. Most of these same parents had enjoyed joyous and unsupervised outdoor play by the age of 7 or 8.

2. The Virtual World Arrives in Two Waves

The internet, which now dominates the lives of young people, arrived in two waves of linked technologies. The first one did little harm to Millennials. The second one swallowed Gen Z whole.

The first wave came ashore in the 1990s with the arrival of dial-up internet access, which made personal computers good for something beyond word processing and basic games. By 2003, 55 percent of American households had a computer with (slow) internet access. Rates of adolescent depression, loneliness, and other measures of poor mental health did not rise in this first wave. If anything, they went down a bit. Millennial teens (born 1981 through 1995), who were the first to go through puberty with access to the internet, were psychologically healthier and happier, on average, than their older siblings or parents in Generation X (born 1965 through 1980).

The second wave began to rise in the 2000s, though its full force didn’t hit until the early 2010s. It began rather innocently with the introduction of social-media platforms that helped people connect with their friends. Posting and sharing content became much easier with sites such as Friendster (launched in 2003), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2004).

Teens embraced social media soon after it came out, but the time they could spend on these sites was limited in those early years because the sites could only be accessed from a computer, often the family computer in the living room. Young people couldn’t access social media (and the rest of the internet) from the school bus, during class time, or while hanging out with friends outdoors. Many teens in the early-to-mid-2000s had cellphones, but these were basic phones (many of them flip phones) that had no internet access. Typing on them was difficult––they had only number keys. Basic phones were tools that helped Millennials meet up with one another in person or talk with each other one-on-one. I have seen no evidence to suggest that basic cellphones harmed the mental health of Millennials.

It was not until the introduction of the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and high-speed internet (which reached 50 percent of American homes in 2007)—and the corresponding pivot to mobile made by many providers of social media, video games, and porn—that it became possible for adolescents to spend nearly every waking moment online. The extraordinary synergy among these innovations was what powered the second technological wave. In 2011, only 23 percent of teens had a smartphone. By 2015, that number had risen to 73 percent, and a quarter of teens said they were online “almost constantly.” Their younger siblings in elementary school didn’t usually have their own smartphones, but after its release in 2010, the iPad quickly became a staple of young children’s daily lives. It was in this brief period, from 2010 to 2015, that childhood in America (and many other countries) was rewired into a form that was more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development.

3. Techno-optimism and the Birth of the Phone-Based Childhood

The phone-based childhood created by that second wave—including not just smartphones themselves, but all manner of internet-connected devices, such as tablets, laptops, video-game consoles, and smartwatches—arrived near the end of a period of enormous optimism about digital technology. The internet came into our lives in the mid-1990s, soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. By the end of that decade, it was widely thought that the web would be an ally of democracy and a slayer of tyrants. When people are connected to each other, and to all the information in the world, how could any dictator keep them down?

In the 2000s, Silicon Valley and its world-changing inventions were a source of pride and excitement in America. Smart and ambitious young people around the world wanted to move to the West Coast to be part of the digital revolution. Tech-company founders such as Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin were lauded as gods, or at least as modern Prometheans, bringing humans godlike powers. The Arab Spring bloomed in 2011 with the help of decentralized social platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. When pundits and entrepreneurs talked about the power of social media to transform society, it didn’t sound like a dark prophecy.

You have to put yourself back in this heady time to understand why adults acquiesced so readily to the rapid transformation of childhood. Many parents had concerns, even then, about what their children were doing online, especially because of the internet’s ability to put children in contact with strangers. But there was also a lot of excitement about the upsides of this new digital world. If computers and the internet were the vanguards of progress, and if young people––widely referred to as “digital natives”––were going to live their lives entwined with these technologies, then why not give them a head start? I remember how exciting it was to see my 2-year-old son master the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone in 2008. I thought I could see his neurons being woven together faster as a result of the stimulation it brought to his brain, compared to the passivity of watching television or the slowness of building a block tower. I thought I could see his future job prospects improving.

Touchscreen devices were also a godsend for harried parents. Many of us discovered that we could have peace at a restaurant, on a long car trip, or at home while making dinner or replying to emails if we just gave our children what they most wanted: our smartphones and tablets. We saw that everyone else was doing it and figured it must be okay.

It was the same for older children, desperate to join their friends on social-media platforms, where the minimum age to open an account was set by law to 13, even though no research had been done to establish the safety of these products for minors. Because the platforms did nothing (and still do nothing) to verify the stated age of new-account applicants, any 10-year-old could open multiple accounts without parental permission or knowledge, and many did. Facebook and later Instagram became places where many sixth and seventh graders were hanging out and socializing. If parents did find out about these accounts, it was too late. Nobody wanted their child to be isolated and alone, so parents rarely forced their children to shut down their accounts.

We had no idea what we were doing.

4. The High Cost of a Phone-Based Childhood

In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of … life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” It’s an elegant formulation of what economists would later call the opportunity cost of any choice—all of the things you can no longer do with your money and time once you’ve committed them to something else. So it’s important that we grasp just how much of a young person’s day is now taken up by their devices.

The numbers are hard to believe. The most recent Gallup data show that American teens spend about five hours a day just on social-media platforms (including watching videos on TikTok and YouTube). Add in all the other phone- and screen-based activities, and the number rises to somewhere between seven and nine hours a day, on average. The numbers are even higher in single-parent and low-income families, and among Black, Hispanic, and Native American families.

In Thoreau’s terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it. Everything else in an adolescent’s day must get squeezed down or eliminated entirely to make room for the vast amount of content that is consumed, and for the hundreds of “friends,” “followers,” and other network connections that must be serviced with texts, posts, comments, likes, snaps, and direct messages. I recently surveyed my students at NYU, and most of them reported that the very first thing they do when they open their eyes in the morning is check their texts, direct messages, and social-media feeds. It’s also the last thing they do before they close their eyes at night. And it’s a lot of what they do in between.

The amount of time that adolescents spend sleeping declined in the early 2010s, and many studies tie sleep loss directly to the use of devices around bedtime, particularly when they’re used to scroll through social media. Exercise declined, too, which is unfortunate because exercise, like sleep, improves both mental and physical health. Book reading has been declining for decades, pushed aside by digital alternatives, but the decline, like so much else, sped up in the early 2010s. With passive entertainment always available, adolescent minds likely wander less than they used to; contemplation and imagination might be placed on the list of things winnowed down or crowded out.

But perhaps the most devastating cost of the new phone-based childhood was the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face. A study of how Americans spend their time found that, before 2010, young people (ages 15 to 24) reported spending far more time with their friends (about two hours a day, on average, not counting time together at school) than did older people (who spent just 30 to 60 minutes with friends). Time with friends began decreasing for young people in the 2000s, but the drop accelerated in the 2010s, while it barely changed for older people. By 2019, young people’s time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day. It turns out that Gen Z had been socially distancing for many years and had mostly completed the project by the time COVID-19 struck.

You might question the importance of this decline. After all, isn’t much of this online time spent interacting with friends through texting, social media, and multiplayer video games? Isn’t that just as good?

Some of it surely is, and virtual interactions offer unique benefits too, especially for young people who are geographically or socially isolated. But in general, the virtual world lacks many of the features that make human interactions in the real world nutritious, as we might say, for physical, social, and emotional development. In particular, real-world relationships and social interactions are characterized by four features—typical for hundreds of thousands of years—that online interactions either distort or erase.

First, real-world interactions are embodied, meaning that we use our hands and facial expressions to communicate, and we learn to respond to the body language of others. Virtual interactions, in contrast, mostly rely on language alone. No matter how many emojis are offered as compensation, the elimination of communication channels for which we have eons of evolutionary programming is likely to produce adults who are less comfortable and less skilled at interacting in person.

Second, real-world interactions are synchronous; they happen at the same time. As a result, we learn subtle cues about timing and conversational turn taking. Synchronous interactions make us feel closer to the other person because that’s what getting “in sync” does. Texts, posts, and many other virtual interactions lack synchrony. There is less real laughter, more room for misinterpretation, and more stress after a comment that gets no immediate response.

Third, real-world interactions primarily involve one‐to‐one communication, or sometimes one-to-several. But many virtual communications are broadcast to a potentially huge audience. Online, each person can engage in dozens of asynchronous interactions in parallel, which interferes with the depth achieved in all of them. The sender’s motivations are different, too: With a large audience, one’s reputation is always on the line; an error or poor performance can damage social standing with large numbers of peers. These communications thus tend to be more performative and anxiety-inducing than one-to-one conversations.

Finally, real-world interactions usually take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen. But in many virtual networks, people can easily block others or quit when they are displeased. Relationships within such networks are usually more disposable.

These unsatisfying and anxiety-producing features of life online should be recognizable to most adults. Online interactions can bring out antisocial behavior that people would never display in their offline communities. But if life online takes a toll on adults, just imagine what it does to adolescents in the early years of puberty, when their “experience expectant” brains are rewiring based on feedback from their social interactions.

Kids going through puberty online are likely to experience far more social comparison, self-consciousness, public shaming, and chronic anxiety than adolescents in previous generations, which could potentially set developing brains into a habitual state of defensiveness. The brain contains systems that are specialized for approach (when opportunities beckon) and withdrawal (when threats appear or seem likely). People can be in what we might call “discover mode” or “defend mode” at any moment, but generally not both. The two systems together form a mechanism for quickly adapting to changing conditions, like a thermostat that can activate either a heating system or a cooling system as the temperature fluctuates. Some people’s internal thermostats are generally set to discover mode, and they flip into defend mode only when clear threats arise. These people tend to see the world as full of opportunities. They are happier and less anxious. Other people’s internal thermostats are generally set to defend mode, and they flip into discover mode only when they feel unusually safe. They tend to see the world as full of threats and are more prone to anxiety and depressive disorders.

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.” These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.

5. So Many Harms

The debate around adolescents’ use of smartphones and social media typically revolves around mental health, and understandably so. But the harms that have resulted from transforming childhood so suddenly and heedlessly go far beyondmental health. I’ve touched on some of them—social awkwardness, reduced self-confidence, and a more sedentary childhood. Here are three additional harms.

Fragmented Attention, Disrupted Learning

Staying on task while sitting at a computer is hard enough for an adult with a fully developed prefrontal cortex. It is far more difficult for adolescents in front of their laptop trying to do homework. They are probably less intrinsically motivated to stay on task. They’re certainly less able, given their undeveloped prefrontal cortex, and hence it’s easy for any company with an app to lure them away with an offer of social validation or entertainment. Their phones are pinging constantly—one study found that the typical adolescent now gets 237 notifications a day, roughly 15 every waking hour. Sustained attention is essential for doing almost anything big, creative, or valuable, yet young people find their attention chopped up into little bits by notifications offering the possibility of high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences.

It even happens in the classroom. Studies confirm that when students have access to their phones during class time, they use them, especially for texting and checking social media, and their grades and learning suffer. This might explain why benchmark test scores began to decline in the U.S. and around the world in the early 2010s—well before the pandemic hit.

Addiction and Social Withdrawal

The neural basis of behavioral addiction to social media or video games is not exactly the same as chemical addiction to cocaine or opioids. Nonetheless, they all involve abnormally heavy and sustained activation of dopamine neurons and reward pathways. Over time, the brain adapts to these high levels of dopamine; when the child is not engaged in digital activity, their brain doesn’t have enough dopamine, and the child experiences withdrawal symptoms. These generally include anxiety, insomnia, and intense irritability. Kids with these kinds of behavioral addictions often become surly and aggressive, and withdraw from their families into their bedrooms and devices.

Social-media and gaming platforms were designed to hook users. How successful are they? How many kids suffer from digital addictions?

The main addiction risks for boys seem to be video games and porn. “Internet gaming disorder,” which was added to the main diagnosis manual of psychiatry in 2013 as a condition for further study, describes “significant impairment or distress” in several aspects of life, along with many hallmarks of addiction, including an inability to reduce usage despite attempts to do so. Estimates for the prevalence of IGD range from 7 to 15 percent among adolescent boys and young men. As for porn, a nationally representative survey of American adults published in 2019 found that 7 percent of American men agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I am addicted to pornography”—and the rates were higher for the youngest men.

Girls have much lower rates of addiction to video games and porn, but they use social media more intensely than boys do. A study of teens in 29 nations found that between 5 and 15 percent of adolescents engage in what is called “problematic social media use,” which includes symptoms such as preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, neglect of other areas of life, and lying to parents and friends about time spent on social media. That study did not break down results by gender, but many others have found that rates of “problematic use” are higher for girls.

I don’t want to overstate the risks: Most teens do not become addicted to their phones and video games. But across multiple studies and across genders, rates of problematic use come out in the ballpark of 5 to 15 percent. Is there any other consumer product that parents would let their children use relatively freely if they knew that something like one in 10 kids would end up with a pattern of habitual and compulsive use that disrupted various domains of life and looked a lot like an addiction?

The Decay of Wisdom and the Loss of Meaning

During that crucial sensitive period for cultural learning, from roughly ages 9 through 15, we should be especially thoughtful about who is socializing our children for adulthood. Instead, that’s when most kids get their first smartphone and sign themselves up (with or without parental permission) to consume rivers of content from random strangers. Much of that content is produced by other adolescents, in blocks of a few minutes or a few seconds.

This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations and, to some extent, from the accumulated wisdom of humankind, including knowledge about how to live a flourishing life. Adolescents spend less time steeped in their local or national culture. They are coming of age in a confusing, placeless, ahistorical maelstrom of 30-second stories curated by algorithms designed to mesmerize them. Without solid knowledge of the past and the filtering of good ideas from bad––a process that plays out over many generations––young people will be more prone to believe whatever terrible ideas become popular around them, which might explain why videos showing young people reacting positively to Osama bin Laden’s thoughts about America were trending on TikTok last fall.

All this is made worse by the fact that so much of digital public life is an unending supply of micro dramas about somebody somewhere in our country of 340 million people who did something that can fuel an outrage cycle, only to be pushed aside by the next. It doesn’t add up to anything and leaves behind only a distorted sense of human nature and affairs.

When our public life becomes fragmented, ephemeral, and incomprehensible, it is a recipe for anomie, or normlessness. The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim showed long ago that a society that fails to bind its people together with some shared sense of sacredness and common respect for rules and norms is not a society of great individual freedom; it is, rather, a place where disoriented individuals have difficulty setting goals and exerting themselves to achieve them. Durkheim argued that anomie was a major driver of suicide rates in European countries. Modern scholars continue to draw on his work to understand suicide rates today.

Durkheim’s observations are crucial for understanding what happened in the early 2010s. A long-running survey of American teens found that, from 1990 to 2010, high-school seniors became slightly less likely to agree with statements such as “Life often feels meaningless.” But as soon as they adopted a phone-based life and many began to live in the whirlpool of social media, where no stability can be found, every measure of despair increased. From 2010 to 2019, the number who agreed that their lives felt “meaningless” increased by about 70 percent, to more than one in five.

6. Young People Don’t Like Their Phone-Based Lives

How can I be confident that the epidemic of adolescent mental illness was kicked off by the arrival of the phone-based childhood? Skeptics point to other events as possible culprits, including the 2008 global financial crisis, global warming, the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting and the subsequent active-shooter drills, rising academic pressures, and the opioid epidemic. But while these events might have been contributing factors in some countries, none can explain both the timing and international scope of the disaster.

An additional source of evidence comes from Gen Z itself. With all the talk of regulating social media, raising age limits, and getting phones out of schools, you might expect to find many members of Gen Z writing and speaking out in opposition. I’ve looked for such arguments and found hardly any. In contrast, many young adults tell stories of devastation.

Freya India, a 24-year-old British essayist who writes about girls, explains how social-media sites carry girls off to unhealthy places: “It seems like your child is simply watching some makeup tutorials, following some mental health influencers, or experimenting with their identity. But let me tell you: they are on a conveyor belt to someplace bad. Whatever insecurity or vulnerability they are struggling with, they will be pushed further and further into it.” She continues:

Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncontrolled global social experiment. We were the first to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us, all the time, before we had any sense of who we were. We didn’t just grow up with algorithms. They raised us. They rearranged our faces. Shaped our identities. Convinced us we were sick.

Rikki Schlott, a 23-year-old American journalist and co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind, writes,

"The day-to-day life of a typical teen or tween today would be unrecognizable to someone who came of age before the smartphone arrived. Zoomers are spending an average of 9 hours daily in this screen-time doom loop—desperate to forget the gaping holes they’re bleeding out of, even if just for … 9 hours a day. Uncomfortable silence could be time to ponder why they’re so miserable in the first place. Drowning it out with algorithmic white noise is far easier."

A 27-year-old man who spent his adolescent years addicted (his word) to video games and pornography sent me this reflection on what that did to him:

I missed out on a lot of stuff in life—a lot of socialization. I feel the effects now: meeting new people, talking to people. I feel that my interactions are not as smooth and fluid as I want. My knowledge of the world (geography, politics, etc.) is lacking. I didn’t spend time having conversations or learning about sports. I often feel like a hollow operating system.

Or consider what Facebook found in a research project involving focus groups of young people, revealed in 2021 by the whistleblower Frances Haugen: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens,” an internal document said. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

7. Collective-Action Problems

Social-media companies such as Meta, TikTok, and Snap are often compared to tobacco companies, but that’s not really fair to the tobacco industry. It’s true that companies in both industries marketed harmful products to children and tweaked their products for maximum customer retention (that is, addiction), but there’s a big difference: Teens could and did choose, in large numbers, not to smoke. Even at the peak of teen cigarette use, in 1997, nearly two-thirds of high-school students did not smoke.

Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on nonusers, at a much younger age and in a more insidious way. Once a few students in any middle school lie about their age and open accounts at age 11 or 12, they start posting photos and comments about themselves and other students. Drama ensues. The pressure on everyone else to join becomes intense. Even a girl who knows, consciously, that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the loop, clueless, and excluded. And indeed, if she resists while most of her classmates do not, she might, in fact, be marginalized, which puts her at risk for anxiety and depression, though via a different pathway than the one taken by those who use social media heavily. In this way, social media accomplishes a remarkable feat: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.

A recent study led by the University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn captured the dynamics of the social-media trap precisely. The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That’s a standard economist’s question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. On average, students said they’d need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.

Social media is all about network effects. Most students are only on it because everyone else is too. Most of them would prefer that nobody be on these platforms. Later in the study, students were asked directly, “Would you prefer to live in a world without Instagram [or TikTok]?” A majority of students said yes––58 percent for each app.

This is the textbook definition of what social scientists call a collective-action problem. It’s what happens when a group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but each actor is deterred from acting, because unless the others do the same, the personal cost outweighs the benefit. Fishermen considering limiting their catch to avoid wiping out the local fish population are caught in this same kind of trap. If no one else does it too, they just lose profit.

Cigarettes trapped individual smokers with a biological addiction. Social media has trapped an entire generation in a collective-action problem. Early app developers deliberately and knowingly exploited the psychological weaknesses and insecurities of young people to pressure them to consume a product that, upon reflection, many wish they could use less, or not at all.

8. Four Norms to Break Four Traps

Young people and their parents are stuck in at least four collective-action traps. Each is hard to escape for an individual family, but escape becomes much easier if families, schools, and communities coordinate and act together. Here are four norms that would roll back the phone-based childhood. I believe that any community that adopts all four will see substantial improvements in youth mental health within two years.

No smartphones before high school

The trap here is that each child thinks they need a smartphone because “everyone else” has one, and many parents give in because they don’t want their child to feel excluded. But if no one else had a smartphone—or even if, say, only half of the child’s sixth-grade class had one—parents would feel more comfortable providing a basic flip phone (or no phone at all). Delaying round-the-clock internet access until ninth grade (around age 14) as a national or community norm would help to protect adolescents during the very vulnerable first few years of puberty. According to a 2022 British study, these are the years when social-media use is most correlated with poor mental health. Family policies about tablets, laptops, and video-game consoles should be aligned with smartphone restrictions to prevent overuse of other screen activities.

No social media before 16

The trap here, as with smartphones, is that each adolescent feels a strong need to open accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms primarily because that’s where most of their peers are posting and gossiping. But if the majority of adolescents were not on these accounts until they were 16, families and adolescents could more easily resist the pressure to sign up. The delay would not mean that kids younger than 16 could never watch videos on TikTok or YouTube—only that they could not open accounts, give away their data, post their own content, and let algorithms get to know them and their preferences.

Phone‐free schools

Most schools claim that they ban phones, but this usually just means that students aren’t supposed to take their phone out of their pocket during class. Research shows that most students do use their phones during class time. They also use them during lunchtime, free periods, and breaks between classes––times when students could and should be interacting with their classmates face-to-face. The only way to get students’ minds off their phones during the school day is to require all students to put their phones (and other devices that can send or receive texts) into a phone locker or locked pouch at the start of the day. Schools that have gone phone-free always seem to report that it has improved the culture, making students more attentive in class and more interactive with one another. Published studies back them up.

More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

Many parents are afraid to give their children the level of independence and responsibility they themselves enjoyed when they were young, even though rates of homicide, drunk driving, and other physical threats to children are way down in recent decades. Part of the fear comes from the fact that parents look at each other to determine what is normal and therefore safe, and they see few examples of families acting as if a 9-year-old can be trusted to walk to a store without a chaperone. But if many parents started sending their children out to play or run errands, then the norms of what is safe and accepted would change quickly. So would ideas about what constitutes “good parenting.” And if more parents trusted their children with more responsibility––for example, by asking their kids to do more to help out, or to care for others––then the pervasive sense of uselessness now found in surveys of high-school students might begin to dissipate.

It would be a mistake to overlook this fourth norm. If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.

The main reason why the phone-based childhood is so harmful is because it pushes aside everything else. Smartphones are experience blockers. Our ultimate goal should not be to remove screens entirely, nor should it be to return childhood to exactly the way it was in 1960. Rather, it should be to create a version of childhood and adolescence that keeps young people anchored in the real world while flourishing in the digital age.

9. What Are We Waiting For?

An essential function of government is to solve collective-action problems. Congress could solve or help solve the ones I’ve highlighted—for instance, by raising the age of “internet adulthood” to 16 and requiring tech companies to keep underage children off their sites.

In recent decades, however, Congress has not been good at addressing public concerns when the solutions would displease a powerful and deep-pocketed industry. Governors and state legislators have been much more effective, and their successes might let us evaluate how well various reforms work. But the bottom line is that to change norms, we’re going to need to do most of the work ourselves, in neighborhood groups, schools, and other communities.

There are now hundreds of organizations––most of them started by mothers who saw what smartphones had done to their children––that are working to roll back the phone-based childhood or promote a more independent, real-world childhood. (I have assembled a list of many of them.) One that I co-founded, at LetGrow.org, suggests a variety of simple programs for parents or schools, such as play club (schools keep the playground open at least one day a week before or after school, and kids sign up for phone-free, mixed-age, unstructured play as a regular weekly activity) and the Let Grow Experience (a series of homework assignments in which students––with their parents’ consent––choose something to do on their own that they’ve never done before, such as walk the dog, climb a tree, walk to a store, or cook dinner).

Parents are fed up with what childhood has become. Many are tired of having daily arguments about technologies that were designed to grab hold of their children’s attention and not let go. But the phone-based childhood is not inevitable.

The four norms I have proposed cost almost nothing to implement, they cause no clear harm to anyone, and while they could be supported by new legislation, they can be instilled even without it. We can begin implementing all of them right away, this year, especially in communities with good cooperation between schools and parents. A single memo from a principal asking parents to delay smartphones and social media, in support of the school’s effort to improve mental health by going phone free, would catalyze collective action and reset the community’s norms.

We didn’t know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It’s time to end the phone-based childhood.

This article is adapted from Jonathan Haidt’s forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

#phones are bad #childhood

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phaedraismyusername · 8 months

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Happy International Lesbian Day! Here's some super brief book recs to celebrate

Books dealing with love, loss, longing and abandonment

This is How You Lose The Time War is a short but beautifully written epistolary novel between two agents on opposite sides of a time war as they slowly fall in love.

Our Wives Under the Sea is one of the most beautifully written debuts I've ever read about a woman whose wife comes home wrong after they thought she'd died at sea and how it feels to grieve the loss of someone who's still in your home.

Lucky Red is a western novel about a young girl working in a brothel who meets her first female gunslinger and falls head over heels for her, and the consequences that come with loving dangerous people.

Body horror galore

Camp Damascus is about a young woman living in a super conservative christian town built around the worlds most successful conversion camp and the horrors that are uncovered there when praying the gay away fails.

To Be Devoured is about a woman whose fascination with the local vultures turns into obsession and the urge to know what carrion tastes like overtakes her life and leads her down stranger and stranger paths.

Chlorine is about a girl whose entire life revolves around being a competitive swimmer, and how abuse, neglect, and obsession with being the best takes its toll on the young women caught up in these destructive cycles.

Flawed character studies

Big Swiss is about a woman who has a kitchen floor reset in her 40s, moves away and starts a new life as a transcriber for a sex therapist and becomes obsessed with one of his clients before inserting herself into this poor woman's life.

The Seep is a speculative sci-fi set in a future where there's been a quiet alien invasion that has given people the ability to make almost any changes to their own bodies and what that world feels like to someone who doesn't want to partake.

Milk Fed is about a woman in therapy who feels cut off from almost everything until she meets another woman who triggers in her a melding of sex, hunger, and religion and where that takes her. Huge trigger warnings for ED content. It gets tough, y'all.

Fantastical wlw books

Bitterthorn is an amalgamation of fairytales retold as a slow burn sapphic love story between a sad young girl from a cursed land and the evil witch who takes her as a companion in the latest of the generational sacrifices made to appease her.

All the Bad Apples may be set in contemporary Ireland but it is a fairytale following a young girl as she travels across the country looking for a sister she refuses to believe is dead and the people she meets along the way.

Gideon the Ninth needs no introduction on this site but for the sake of formatting - lesbian necromancers in space who find themselves in an isolated murder mystery plot. It's not a romance but it is a love story and this series will change your life if you let it.

Translated novels

Boulder is a short character study following a free spirited woman when she accidentally settles down with the woman she loves and how love and resentment can take up the same space in your chest when life doesn't turn out the way you hoped it would.

Notes of a Crocodile is a cult classic coming of age story about queer teens in Taipei in the 1980s. It was written in the 90s so please keep that in mind if you choose to read it.

Paradise Rot is about an international student studying in Australia and her growing obsession with her housemate as they share a space that allows no privacy. I've never read anything that feels stickier.

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 6 months

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https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/university-elite-caught-playing-selective-free-speech/news-story/32561dd0c41fd0a2df6f4e20298ea46d

University elite caught playing ‘selective free speech’

By: Claire Lehmann

Published: Dec 15, 2023

Three Ivy League presidents made international headlines when they told a recent congressional hearing that calls for the genocide of Jews would only contravene their bullying and harassment policies “depending on the context”.

In response to their testimony – which went viral – wealthy individuals cancelled donations in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and one of the presidents, Liz Magill, has since tendered her resignation letter. Another scandal has erupted over Harvard president Claudine Gay, as it has emerged that she has quoted other scholars without citation (also known as plagiarism) throughout her career.

The scandal has been a PR fiasco worthy of study at Harvard Business School. And it is a sign that the Ivies are losing their prestige. But the reasons are complicated and belie any simple analysis.

In short, over the course of a few short decades, the universities presided over by these presidents have undergone a transformation in moral culture. At one time, they recognised everyone’s equal human dignity and held the principle of free speech as sacrosanct. However, they have now shifted towards elevating victimhood as the highest virtue while encouraging hypersensitivity to perceived injustice.

According to sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, victimhood culture – colloquially known as “wokeness” – emerged from America’s Ivies first before spreading outwards into mainstream society.

Like a poison apple, victimhood culture looks perfectly fine from the outside, encased in euphemisms such as “diversity”, “equity” and “inclusion”. But it has a toxic core.

Its toxicity emerges when people are encouraged to see themselves as perpetual victims, and are rewarded for nurturing and prosecuting endless grievances. It was on these campuses that this ideology first spread (among some of the most privileged people in the world) and it was there that its maxims were first put into practice. Protected groups were given special status through affirmative action and other forms of positive discrimination, and students in the humanities were taught to weigh “lived experience” over objective truth.

As these ideas took hold, they manifested in tangible ways within university settings. It has culminated in the past decade in the widespread use of trigger warnings, safe spaces and microaggressions. Young adults came to behave like divas at luxury resorts, rather than students expected to study and learn. This poisonous culture seeped out into the rest of the world. Into media, corporations and Silicon Valley, and spreading all the way to Australia’s shores.

But this is where it gets complicated. Slogans such as “There is only one solution, intifada revolution” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are protected by the First Amendment – even though they are threatening to many people. And in an ideal world, universities should be trying to adhere to the First Amendment. Freedom of expression is a foundational principle of the university.

Nevertheless, universities must grapple with the fine line between protected speech and incitement to violence. Do such chants as “From the river to the sea” cross the line? Reasonable people may disagree. What is not OK is the physical intimidation and harassment experienced by Jewish students around the world since October 7. Students have been punched and spat on. And students around the world, including in Australia, report feeling scared.

It’s worth engaging in a thought experiment here. If neo-Nazis marched through Harvard under banners with swastikas emblazoned chanting “Heil Hitler”, would the president of Harvard remind us that such chants need to be understood in “context”? Would she defend the free speech of neo-Nazis’? A genuine commitment to the First Amendment would require it. In reality, neo-Nazis would more likely be escorted off campus by security or police.

The problem is that the culture that created the concept of “microaggression” is now blind to very real macroaggressions against students attending its institutions.

But it’s a complex moral conundrum, because victimhood culture should be repudiated. It is a road to nowhere except grievance and conflict.

And, despite the very real instances of intimidation and assault, it would be a mistake for Jewish students to adopt a hypersensitive approach that interprets ambiguous messages as hostility.

Balancing the rejection of victimhood culture with fair treatment for Jewish students is not easy. A responsible administration would ensure all students are free from intimidation and the threat of physical and verbal attacks, while reminding students that they should expect to be made to feel uncomfortable in the classroom. The job of colleges is to keep students physically safe, while challenging them intellectually.

At the same time, however, it is only natural for beleaguered Jewish students to want to be treated fairly. Other student groups at colleges have successfully had statues removed, buildings renamed, academic events cancelled and speakers deplatformed, because of distant connections to slavery that they find offensive. Is it too much to ask people to stop chanting genocidal slogans in the days and weeks after a genocidal terrorist attack?

Such demands for fairness raise important questions about the treatment of different groups on campuses. If universities had consistently upheld the principles of free speech over the past two decades, scholars who investigate controversial questions related to sex and race differences would not have faced marginalisation.

Conservatives and pro-life advocates would have the freedom to host seminars for students, and feminists who argue that men cannot become women would not face deplatforming. Many other speakers whose views may be considered offensive to “woke” sensibilities would also be welcomed on campus. However, this hasn’t been the case, and universities are only now realising the importance of free speech when they find themselves in need of it.

The Ivies’ current dilemma is a consequence of their own making. They want to reject victimhood culture in this particular instance where they have failed a minority group that has legitimate grievances. However, to do so, they are appealing to principles that they abandoned long ago. In 2023, Harvard received the worst-ever free speech ranking for an American college (as judged by FIRE, an American legal non-profit).

The Ivies need to understand the principle of free speech is not one that can be applied selectively. It applies to everyone, or it does not apply at all.

[ Via: https://archive.is/KoC6v ]

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mybeingthere · 10 months

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John Kelly has been described variously as an awkward bugger (Fergal Gaynor, 2007) and a free radical (Guangzhou Triennale, 2008), and whilst these observations are no doubt true his awkward radical behaviour leads to some interesting results.

John Kelly was born in 1965. His father, from Cork, and mother from Bristol, the family immigrated to Australia the same year. Due to his birth, heritage and circumstance John now holds three passports and therefore is an Englishman, an Australian and an Irishman. Kelly has lived in all three countries and for the past two decades has resided in west Cork, Ireland. His work has been collected into the Yale Center for British Art, USA, the National Gallery of Australia, the Crawford Gallery, Ireland and the Guangdong Museum in Guangzhou China, MONA, Tasmania, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of New South Wales, etc.

In 1985 Kelly obtained a Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts Painting) from RMIT University, Melbourne, where he also completed his Masters of Arts in 1995. As a winner of the 1995 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship, he travelled to London to study as an Affiliate Student at the Slade School of Art from 1996 to 1997.

As a painter, sculptor and printmaker Kelly engages across mediums and also writes, having written for Art Monthly (Australia & UK) and Circa magazine (Ireland), The Jackdaw (London) and Daily review (Australia). In 2017 he was nominated for a Walkley Award for Arts Journalism.

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moonmoonthecrabking · 1 year

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alright so i, in case you don’t know already, am an australian who finished high school last year. in australia, most year 12 students complete a statewide exam which, combined with their internal (in-school) marks, gives a selection rank students use to get into university (there are also early offers and adjustment points but that’s the main gist). students take 4-6 subjects with set texts (depending on how many people in the state are doing the course, there are set texts that can be chosen from). one of my subjects was latin. as in, the ancient language. not many people did this course. for continuers (not getting into that right now), one of our texts was selected lines from book 4 of virgil’s aeneid (some of you are starting to see where i’m going with this). for latin, this meant we had to translate those lines and understand the text well enough to analyse it.

cut to october, when all my exams were. now, i had not studied enough for reasons I Will Not Get Into. it was saturday night and i had my latin extension (different texts) test on monday. i had latin continuers on thursday and hardly knew my texts. at the time, electricity (karnak x virgil) was a big joke of the fandom.

before i get into this, i cannot emphasise just how fucked my mental state was. i had a rough year 12 experience and an even worse september. i look back and laugh, but like. it wasn’t great.

so, saturday night, i couldn’t sleep. i go to refill the toilet paper and i slipped because my brother left the bathroom floor wet. this was my breaking point.

you see, the plot of book 4 of the aeneid is that aeneas gets into a relationship with dido but leaves her to found italy and dido is a girlboss with no free will who did nothing wrong. since the author’s name is virgil i thought “you know what would be really fucking funny and a semi-valid way to review my translation?”

yeah. so i wrote an electricity fic that was mostly my school translation, but replacing karnak with dido and aeneas with virgil (since in the show virgil brings about karnak’s downfall and in the poem aeneas brings about dido’s. it’s also kinda an allusion to both virgil’s and aeneas’ dubious free will: virgil is a rat so he doesn’t have the level of consciousness to understand the consequences of his actions, but he’s still choosing to chew and chew, while aeneas is like “yeah no i know i have no choice to leave you, dido, but if i did i still would”. dick.)

the other characters mainly aren’t in there, with the exception of noel and ocean as venus and juno. i also put in @crying-pan420 as anna (dido’s sister who encourages her to get some trojan dick, even though dido is like “i don’t want to do this i have my beliefs and i believe it’s a sin”. dido is the victim of everyone in this book).

the title is arma muremque cano (i sing of arms and a rat) bc the first line of book 1 of the aeneid is “arma viremque cano” (i sing of arms and a man).

i could probably go into an analysis of the themes i continued and the similarities between both but no one wants that. i hope.

tl;dr - be nice to people doing their final high school exams and clean up after yourself.

and THAT is what you missed on glee.

#rtc #ride the cyclone #electricity rtc #rat fucker karnak #machine fucker virgil #long post

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7thskyedu · 1 year

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PTE and TOEFL are acceptable in Canada SDS Study Permit from August 2023

The four new test results will be accepted by IRCC from August 2023 for SDS applicants; these test results shall demonstrate the applicant’s speaking, reading, listening, and writing abilities.

The eligible tests are as follows:

CELPIP General

CAEL

PTE Academic

TOEFL iBT Test

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nintendont2502 · 2 years

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(Literally no one asked for this but I Do Not care <3)

Good Aussie Shit

Music:

Smith Street Band - rock/indie? - please for the love of God listen to them im genuinely obsessed. Playlist of my favourite songs and a concert they did with the Brisbane Symphony Orchestra

Hilltop Hoods - hiphop - iconic. If you listen to any song by them, make it The Nosebleed Section or Cosby Sweater, or basically any song from this playlist (Can't go wrong with basically anything from Drinking From The Sun/Walking Under Stars or the restrung versions)

Bliss N Eso - hiphop - like a more chill/hippie Hilltop Hoods. Might just be the nostalgia speaking but the entirety of Flying Colours or anything from this playlist are bangers

Talkshow Boy - I think a certain mutual would kill me if I didn't include them lmao. Haven't heard many of their songs (yet 👀) but I Cut Myself (or apparently any other song by them) goes hard

John Butler Trio - not sure how to describe it but the vibes are impeccable. Lots of guitar. Haven't listened to him in years but I remember really enjoying these songs

Music except I don't have specific recommendations

Alex the Astronaut - Not Worth Hiding made closeted baby gay me cry every time I heard it

Courtney Barnett - A Sea Of Split Peas is a great album and also the only one I know of hers

G-Flip - they're non-binary and a drummer and that's. All I know about them. Whenever I hear their music on Triple J it goes hard though

Baker Boy - rap - his music goes so hard - especially Marryuna. Also he raps in English + Yolngu Matha which is so cool

Aunty Donna's Big Old House Of Fun - surreal comedy/sketch show - it's on Netflix and it's great

Fisk - sitcom(?) - a lawyer who moves to a weird law firm in Melbourne. Kitty Flanagan is great in it (as she always is) - sadly it's only on ABC iView I think

Upper Middle Bogan - sitcom - a daughter of a rich middle/upper class woman finds out she's adopted, and begins connecting with her biological family, who are massive bogans. Great shit. On Netflix (in Australia at least)

Kath and Kim - sitcom - I don't know how to describe this but it's great. On Netflix (in Australia at least)

Ronny Chieng: International Student - sitcom - an international student studying law at a university in Australia. The whole thing is on YouTube for free

#i mainly made this so i could have everything i watch/listen to in one place lmao #will probably update later idk #anyway go listen to smith street band please for the love of god #masterpost #me.txt

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aaroverseas · 1 year

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Study Abroad Consultant in Delhi

The field of global education has brought the concept of overseas education to the doorstep of every student. We are the one-stop solution for all your international Study Abroad Consultants in Delhi has a command on education opportunities worldwide. Our strong national branch network enables us to cater to students at every corner in the country. To the same effect, we are eminent Study Abroad Consultants in Delhi that help you through your doubts. We represent over 850+ universities across 16 countries. We provide free counseling services for countries such as the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Ireland, France, Germany, Dubai, Switzerland, Malaysia, and many more such destinations.

#education

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henneberghopper · 2 years

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We present coaching in Microsoft Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and Outlook in addition to a Microsoft Office diploma course. The use of technology is paramount to the efficiency and effectiveness of a business, and a total command of Microsoft’s universally accepted software is crucial. The free training course is really great but sadly it has some limitations. For this reason, we set up a directory on our web site with information about various coaching companies and freelancers that offer SAP training for a fee. Please feel welcome to browse the record of the training providers and discover the greatest option that fits your coaching necessities.

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With a variety of programs to select from, be it Business intelligence, database programming, networking, web and social media or application designing. Our course content is designed with licensed and experienced SAP consultants and goals to offer tailored and customised studying. We help your SAP on-line studying necessities from our workplaces in the US , UK , UAE, Australia, Singapore and India . A tailor-made course for college students looking for undeterred consideration from the tutor at all the occasions. Your new place The function is for a technical business analyst to assemble enterprise requirements from enterprise... A worldwide chief of their topic, the corporate develop and provide utilized sciences & specialist supplies used in an infinite amount of on a daily basis merchandise. Our group at ERP Certifications have developed a free SAP FI coaching course which is accessible online to everyone. The free course is a great option for those people who are not prepared to take a position into paid coaching. As a matter of truth, this course is probably the most effective free FI training available on the Internet right now because it offers theoretical knowledge and sensible expertise delivered through movies and written tutorials. At HOTT, we assure the standard of our programs with a full 100% money-back assure, and small class sizes. Our Microsoft programs will give you elevated satisfaction and will increase your earnings potential and enhance your career prospects in right now's aggressive job market. You will work at your individual tempo in our snug premises, helped by skilled tutors as required. sap bw course uk select your individual hours and hold the reference materials when the course is over. Activia Training is an IT Applications Training faculty with training centres accross the UK in West London, Heathrow, Birmingham, Slough, Aylesbury & more.

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gradstarglobal1 · 12 days

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Job Demand in Australia in 2024

Although options to study in Australia for free for international students are rare, that doesn’t mean an Australian degree isn’t a fantastic investment in your future. The most popular subjects in Australia also happen to be in the country’s biggest growth sectors. This is partly the case because Australia is very keen to integrate graduates with the skills they are looking for into high-demand sectors of relevant industries!

Let’s have a quick look at why the return on investment of studying in Australia – including your future career opportunities – makes the cost of studying abroad worth it.

Career Opportunities for International Students in Australia

While planning to study in Australia for free for international students may not be realistic, making a bang for your buck with your Australian degree totally is. Many of Australia’s biggest growth sectors correspond with the country’s most popular program fields. Better yet, many of these fields also correspond to the skill shortage areas Australia is eager to welcome international student graduates into.

In fact, in 2024, the Australian government changed the Genuine Temporary Entrant requirement for student visas to the Genuine Student requirement. Among other factors, the change intends to encourage students with the qualifications Australia is looking for in its labor force to pursue residency options.

Here are some of the highest-demand fields to study in Australia for your future career. Consider a course subject list in these fields to set you up for professional success!

Computer Science and Information Technology

Opportunities in this field will rapidly increase in the next several years, with the Australian government estimating that this sector’s growth will outpace all other sectors. 40% of overall work opportunities by 2026 are likely to constitute ICT security, database administration, and systems administration roles alone.

High-Demand Career Options:

· Analyst Programmer

· Computer and Network Systems Engineer

· Developer Programmer

· ICT Security Specialist

· Software and Applications Programmer

· Systems Analyst

Salary Ranges: AUD 97,964 per year (average)

Healthcare and Social Assistance

This sector is Australia’s biggest employer, with 15% of the full-time work force in healthcare or social assistance. Registered nurses are in particularly high demand. Although medical school may not make it possible to study in Australia for free for international students, the demand in this field also means you can look into some great scholarships. In the long run, the career and earning opportunities you access in the healthcare field also pay back for your degree many times over.

High-Demand Career Options:

· Registered Nurse

· Cardiologist

· Clinical Hematologist

· Dermatologist

· Emergency Medicine Specialist

· General Practitioner

Salary Ranges: AUD 113,296 per year (average)

Engineering and Technology

More than 80% of engineering graduates secure work within half a year of graduation, speaking to the high demand for engineering graduates in Australia. In just the tech sector alone, the Australian government expects to see more than 1 million workers within the next 5-6 years!

High-Demand Career Options:

· Aeronautical Engineer

· Agricultural Engineer

· Chemical Engineer

· Computer Network and Systems Engineer

· Electrical Engineer

· Engineering Manager

Salary Ranges: AUD 111,875 per salary (average)

Business Administration, Management, and Commerce

Over 30% of international students heading to study in Australia enroll in programs out of a course subject list in business and management fields. Australia has a booming entrepreneurial scene, and many global and local businesses have a thriving presence here. As one of the world’s economic, financial, and business hubs, there is ongoing demand for professionals in these fields.

High-Demand Career Options:

· Accountant

· Management Consultant

· Taxation Accountant

· Project Manager

· Actuary

· Internal Auditor

Salary Ranges: AUD 115,579 per year (average)

Can I Study Abroad in Australia on a Budget?

Realistically, options to study in Australia for free for international students are rare. But that does not mean you can’t find Australian degree options within your budget, especially if you score a scholarship!

“Affordability” is relative and depends on your circumstances. Nonetheless, tuition fees in Australia can range quite widely depending on:

· The size and prestige of the university – the bigger and more prestigious, the higher the tuition fees tend to be

· Whether the university is public or private – private university tuition fees tend to be higher than public university fees

· The location of the university – universities in cities with higher costs of living tend to be more expensive

· Your program – highly technical and resource-intensive programs tend to be more expensive

· Your study level – bachelor’s degrees overall can cost more than master’s degrees because of the longer duration

Scholarships to Study in Australia

A 100% scholarship allows you to study in Australia for free for international students. These are highly competitive though, so don’t limit yourself to just these award options. Australian universities offer plenty of generous scholarship options that can help reduce the financial pressure of a degree abroad, such as:

· Global Citizens Scholarship (International) – University of Adelaide

· International Vice-Chancellor’s Scholarship (100%) – Deakin University

· Global Excellence Scholarship – University of Western Australia

Rounding Up

While it may not be possible to study in Australia for free for international students, the payoff will be more than worth it. An Australian degree can open up a host of opportunities for your career in the country as well as globally. Australian universities stay highly responsive to industry needs, meaning employability is a core consideration in their curricula.

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merideanoverseas2 · 2 years

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Australian Universities With No Application Fee For International Students

Overview

Australia is one of the most friendly and safest places to study. It is home to some of the best universities in the world. Most of the course in Australian Universities includes work experience, which makes the students industry-ready as soon as they graduate. Australia’s diverse culture, amazing experience, and incredible scenic beauty attract a huge number of international students from different parts of the world. The cost of living in Australia is comparatively lower than in other developed countries like UK and US. Apart from this, most Australian Universities do not charge application fees to international students. Some of the universities with free application fees for international students are mentioned below. Read more about the best universities in Australia and Australian universities fees for international students.

University of Sunshine Coast

The University of the Sunshine Coast is a public university founded in 1994. It is based in Southeast Queensland with five campuses. It is recognised as one of the best universities in Australia for its teaching quality. It is 2nd best public University in Australia for an overall educational experience. The University offers the best student experience and supports them in any possible way. It is a young university that believes that cultural experience is equally important as quality education. It is one of the fastest-growing universities in Australia due to its ground-breaking research and sustainability. The University had the vision to become Australia's premier regional University. Also, its mission is to enrich its regions by connecting with communities and offering opportunities to all. It offers equal opportunity and access to education for all students.

Moreover, the University provides hands-on learning and practical skills to all its students. A wide range of courses is available at the University, including Arts and International Studies, Business and Commerce, Communication, Creative Industries, Design, and Education. The fees for undergraduate courses at the University are between $22,900 to $30,000 per year. Whereas the fees for postgraduate programmes are between $13,900 to $30,200 per year. If you want to study in Australia for free, there are many scholarships that you can apply for.

James Cook University

James Cook University is a public university based in Northern Queensland. It is one of the oldest universities in Australia, founded in 1961. It is ranked 1st in Queensland for full-time employment and starting salary and 3rd in the world for Ecology and Evolution research. It is divided into four campuses: JCU Brisbane, JCU Cairns, JCU Singapore, and JCU Townsville. The University is committed to helping the world's tropical regions to prosper. Currently, the University has enrolled more than 20,000 students from different parts of the world.

Moreover, the University offers a diverse range of courses to international students, taught at six different colleges. It offers courses like Arts, Society and Education, Business, law and governance, Healthcare Sciences, Medicine and Dentistry, Public health, medical and veterinary sciences, and Science and Engineering. It is a comprehensive university, and its teaching is majorly focused on four things: Tropical Ecosystems and Environment, Industries and Economies in the Tropics, Peoples and Societies in the Tropics, and Tropical Health, Medicine and Biosecurity. The University's value is to work on its Excellence, Authenticity, Integrity, Sustainability, and Mutual Respect. Its strategic intent is to create a brighter future for people in the Tropics worldwide through discoveries that make a difference. The fees for international students at JCU range from $7,500 to $13,000 per semester.

Swinburne University

The Swinburne University of Technology is a research-intensive public university based in Melbourne. It was founded in 1908. It is one of the best Australian universities for MS. The University has various real-world industry connections, allowing it to offer industry visits to its students. The industry visits ultimately help the students gain the practical knowledge required to work in those big industries. It is a creative and innovative university that also enhances research facilities. They believe in connecting with people and technology and work on their research for a better world. It also believes in equality and diversity.

Read More -: Australian Universities With No Application..

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abroadstudyexperts · 2 years

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What Is Cost Of Studying For Indian Students In Germany?

Germany would undoubtedly rank at the top of any list of the most popular study locations in the world. Over time, the country has established itself as a hub for Indian students, providing unique possibilities to study and get a cultural experience.

Most German universities have made it to the top of international rankings. The globally recognized study programs, part-time employment opportunities, affordable tuition, and living costs attract a large number of Indian students. To begin, let us discuss the study cost in Germany for Indian students and the study visa.

Cost Of Studying For Indian Students In Germany

Overseas students can study for free at German public universities. They must, however, pay an enrollment, administration, and confirmation fee per semester. This varies depending on whether the university is private or public, as well as the course chosen.

It should be noted that only public colleges provide free education. Fluency in German is one of their entry requirements.

Tuition fees at private institutions vary depending on the course you desire to pursue. However, tuition fees in German institutions are often on the lower end of the scale. They are reasonable compared to other countries such as Canada, the United States, and Australia.

Study Program Average Tuition Fees in €

Undergraduate Bachelor Degree €500 -€20,000 yearly

Postgraduate Master’s Degree €5,000 – €30,000 yearly

Intakes In Germany

The application dates for universities in Germany vary. However, if you want to study in Germany, these two general periods are often applicable:

Intake 1: Summer Semester – The semester runs from March to August. Every year, the application must be submitted by January 15th.

Intake 2: Winter Semester – The semester runs from September to February or October to March. Every year, the application must be filed by July 15th.

Germany Study Visa Types And Basic Requirements

The German student visa is of three types.

· German Student Visa: This visa for overseas students who have been accepted into a full-time study program at a German university.

· German Student Applicant Visa: This visa is required in order to apply in person for a university course, but can't be used to study in Germany.

· German Language Course Visa: This visa is required if you intend to study German in Germany.

Basic Visa Requirements To Study In Germany

· Completed and signed visa application form

· Valid passport

· Two photocopies of your passport

· Your birth certificate of birth

· Your recent passport-size photos

· Proof of financial resources

For more inquiries, contact our Abroad education consultants by ringing at +91 8595338595 or mail us at [email protected].

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indorus123 · 2 years

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MBBS In Russia For Indian Students | Indorus mbbs

MBBS in Russia for Indian Students is a preferred choice for International students because of the highly subsidized fee by the Russian Ministry of Health & Education as compared to other western countries. High Quality of Education combined with this low cost is one of the main reasons for choosing top medical universities of Russia for MBBS for Indian Students. There are almost 57 medical universities in Russia. The student-to-teacher ratio is 7:1 in all Russian Medical Universities. About 12 of these universities provide MBBS in English Medium.

WHY Indian Students should Opt for MBBS STUDY IN RUSSIA?

The average MBBS fee in Russia is between 2.5 Lacks to 5 Lacks per year.

All Russian Medical Universities are listed in WHO and MCI so a student who gets an MBBS degree from Russia can practise anywhere in the world including India.

Students from all over the globe go to Russia for MBBS Study and all medical universities provide quality medical education and practical knowledge.

Students get a fully furnished hostel facility inside the university campus with fresh and quality food.

MBBS Students can get scholarships also if they fulfil the scholarship criteria.

All MBBS students in Russia get Medical Insurance for all courses and get full medical treatment when they need it.

BENEFITS OF MBBS IN RUSSIA FOR INDIAN STUDENTS BY INDORUS MBBS

No Entrance exam & No Donation.

Easy Admission Procedure

Low & Subsidized course fees.

Worldwide Recognition of the Degrees provided by Medical Universities of Russia.

European Standard of Living

Degrees Recognized Worldwide

Indian Canteen is Available in most of the Universities.

Excellent Result in MCI Screening Test (Only IndoRus MBBS provides MCI Coaching in Russian Medical Universities)

Reference Available of Students working in Leading Hospitals Across the World (our pass outs are working not only in India but in Australia, Canada, USA, UK and other major countries across the globe)

100% Visa Guarantee

All the universities are Government Universities in Russia For more information regarding MBBS in Russia for Indian Students, then please fill out the form on your right side or feel free to contact us at +91-7742485043

For more information regarding MBBS in Russia for Indian Students, then please fill out the form on your right side or feel free to contact us at +91-7742485043

#Students #universities #university #education #student #studystudystudy

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mybeingthere · 10 months

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