Suffer the little children...

 '...don't they?', in the words of a monologue I co-wrote (in the days when this wasn't such an Old joke).

<autobiographical-note>
The naming of this monologue, which had a vicar delivering a sermon...

 'The Lord My God is a jealous god, and he coveteth 10% of the gross' ... 'For behold, I am with you, even though ye walk in the Balls Pond Road'.                

...marked my one and only collaboration with Douglas Adams: he was running the review where I hoped to deliver it, and suggested the title The Cross and the Switchblade. 

(Perhaps 'collaboration' is over-egging the pudding a little.)

</autobiographical-note>

The effect of social media on young people (on old people too, but especially on the young) has been of much current concern. In the light of the recent Independent article on young people's exposure to Internet porn, I thought a recent Medscape article  might be of interest. It wasn't.

The U.S. Surgeon General says 13 years old is too young to begin using social media. [HD – Gosh!]

Most social media platforms including TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook allow users to create accounts if they say they are at least 13 years old.

"I, personally, based on the data I’ve seen, believe that 13 is too early. … It’s a time where it’s really important for us to be thoughtful about what’s going into how they think about their own self-worth and their relationships and the skewed and often distorted environment of social media often does a disservice to many of those children," U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, MD, told CNN. [HD – I, personally, make a point of ignoring any sentence that starts 'I, personally, ...', unless it expresses a personal opinion rather than, say, a professional one. Who cares what he thinks as a private citizen?]

Research has shown that teens are susceptible to cyberbullying and serious mental health impacts from social media usage and online activity during an era when the influence of the internet has become everywhere for young people. [HD – Who writes this stuff? 'Research has shown...' {jeez} 'the influence... has become everywhere']

But there was some value  in the Medscape article: it linked to one that actually said something – an artiucle from Pew Research, with the title 

Teens, Social Media and Technology 2022

It leads with an interesting graphic that shows the relative popularity in this age-group of various social media apps (and for a definition of 'this age-group' read the small print; presumably a teenager [a word I still use, fuddy-duddy that I am] of 18 or 19 is not 'a teen'). And if you're looking for the start of the Tik-Tok line, it didn't exist at the time of the earlier survey.

But stand by for damned lies. The survey was done in the USA, where the winner of a local race is 'the world champion', and where 'the world series' is played between teams based in the USA. The findings are similarly skewed:

Since 2014-15, there has been a 22 percentage point rise in the share of teens who report having access to a smartphone (95% now and 73% then). While teens’ access to smartphones has increased over roughly the past eight years, their access to other digital technologies, such as desktop or laptop computers or gaming consoles, has remained statistically unchanged.

The survey shows there are differences in access to these digital devices for certain groups. For instance, teens ages 15 to 17 (98%) are more likely to have access to a smartphone than their 13- to 14-year-old counterparts (91%). In addition, teen boys are 21 points more likely to say they have access to gaming consoles than teen girls – a pattern that has been reported in prior Center research.

"95% of teens have access to smartphones." Oh yeah? What about those in sub-Saharan Africa? Another survey (2018) from the same source says

Majorities in sub-Saharan Africa own mobile phones, but smartphone adoption is modest

And the first graphic shows how uneven the coverage is: 1 in 2 adults in South Africa, but fewer than 1 in 7 in Tanzania:

And that's just the adults. So next bit of clickbait that screams 

95% of teens own a smartphone

...take it with a pinch of sa... no, make that a squirt of BBQ sauce.

b 

Update: 2023.02.07.16:55 – Added PS

When I first read that '95% of teens article' I thought 'Oh yeah? I bet the percentage is in single figures in Africa'. I was under-estimating the uptake of cell technology in Africa...

<parenthesis>
(in a way reminiscent of the racism reported in a recent Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry, which makes it easier for Western conspiracy theorists to believe that aliens built the pyramids than that Egyptians did it themselves [and without, pace my primary school history books, using slave labour])
</parenthesis>

... .  But I should have known better.

<autobiographical-note>
One of my last teaching jobs, in 2013 or 2014, was at the Newbury HQ of Vodaphone. The student I was working with was concerned with the marketing of mobile phones in Africa, and in one lesson I reviewed and commented on a presentation she was going to give to her department ('all part of the service, ma'am'), with lots of figures about market penetration there and projections for the future. I have no clear memory of the details, but at the time they were surprising; and with the advent of smartphones I might have guessed that sales there – nearly 10 years later – would be considerable. 

A World Bank collection of data, quoting figures from the ITU (International Tele-communications Union) gives an idea of the speed of this uptake: it is, as marketers would say, a hockey-stick curve. My Vodaphone lesson took place fairly early on, in the foothills of that near-vertical bit of the curve. As I had previously worked in the field of communications, and was used to marketing executives seeing such hockey-sticks round every corner, I was unconvinced at the time. But since that lesson the number of cellular subscriptions has more than doubled. 

</autobiographical-note>

Not all of these are smartphones though, and the spread of smartphones is very patchy.

That 2018 Pew Research article gives an idea of this patchiness:

In the lower three cases, in the two later years (and as the article was published in 2018 those two years are not bang-up-to-date) the rate of the increase was – at most  – 2% per year. In the top three cases the rate of increase was – at least – twice that; in the case of RSA, it's nearer 5%.