This is a wonderful article, but I don't think that social media doesn't still qualify as a "real" problem. It's not that the concept of being digitally connected is inherently bad, it's the capitalist nature of *only* being connected to each other via for-profit corporate social media networks that sustain by hooking people on consumerism (and the kind of narcissism and sense of inadequacy that arises from it) and perpetuating fake news.

When a company profits by feeding people content that keeps them scrolling -- whether by inducing a sense of desire, a sense of "not enoughness" or a sense of community/belonging based on superficial parameters (e.g. being influencers) -- and certainly when the main companies providing these networks have been charged with undermining democracies and conducting human experiments on how their algorithms affect human moods and behaviors, we should be concerned that they might be problematic.

Furthermore, this data seems skewed towards middle and upper-middle class families; many teens are in families where one or both parents didn't have the privilege to simply stop working, since they may have been working in service jobs or other "essential" positions. It'd be interesting to better understand how class and race are distributed across the sample.

Anyways, I love the bicycle metaphor and agree there is probably more panic around the nature of digital connection than there needs to be. But that doesn't mean that the panic around the oligopolies running the networks is unwarranted. I would argue there isn't nearly enough panic or scrutiny around how much power these corporations wield, and there probably won't ever be enough until Facebook is made into a public utility (or disbanded or something equally radical) and probably that Mark Zuckerberg should be in jail.