Twenty-four hours offline triggers panic and loneliness in young people worldwide.

Evidence

All grew so fast his life was overgrown, Till he forgot what all had once been made for: “I felt so lonely… I could not sleep well without sharing or connecting to others,” a Chinese girl recalled. “Emptiness,” an Argentine boy moaned. “Emptiness overwhelms me.” A Ugandan teenager muttered, “I felt like there was a problem with me,” and an American college student whimpered, “I went into absolute panic mode.” These are but a few of the lamentations plucked from one thousand student participants in an international study of media use that spanned ten countries and five continents. They had been asked to abstain from all digital media for a mere twenty-four hours, and the experience released a planet-wide gnashing of teeth and tearing of flesh that even the study’s directors found disquieting. Capping the collective cri de coeur, a Slovakian university student reflected, “Maybe it is unhealthy that I can’t be without knowing what people are saying and feeling, where they are, and what’s happening.” … The students’ accounts are a message in a bottle for the rest of us, narrating the mental and emotional milieu of life in an instrumentarian society with its architectures of behavioral control, social pressure, and asymmetrical power. Most significantly, our children are harbingers of the emotional toll of the viewpoint of the Other-One as young people find themselves immersed in a hive life, where the other is an “it” to me, and I experience myself as the “it” that others see. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1419

Categorization

• QUESTION: The one-thousand-student, ten-country study is unnamed here — worth chasing down the original for its design and findings.
• DEEPTHINKING: The pairing of adolescent testimony with the ‘Other-One/hive life’ analysis is a dense bridge from anecdote to structural theory.
• XREF: connects to: Young people’s sudden disconnection from networks produces clinically diagnosed addiction symptoms — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1422; Extreme near-total silence can trigger panic, disorientation, and physical illness — George Michelsen Foy, Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute…, 474; Overestimates of social media addiction are common and contribute to moral panic around social media use. — Overestimates of social media addiction are common but costly

Broader Connections

• Young people’s sudden disconnection from networks produces clinically diagnosed addiction symptoms #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1422
• Extreme near-total silence can trigger panic, disorientation, and physical illness #corroborates (0.75) — George Michelsen Foy, Zero Decibels, 474