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Last week, when Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat reported their latest quarterly earnings, all three social platforms noted a slowdown or drop in users. Facebook’s user numbers remained flat in North America and fell in Europe on a quarter-over-quarter basis, Twitter reported a slight downturn in monthly users, and Snap posted a decline in daily active users for the second quarter. CNBC floated the possibility that social-media growth has peaked, with no room to add significant numbers of new users—at least in the West. Facebook still hopes to use “lite” versions of its apps to secure gains in huge, virtually untapped markets such as India and Indonesia. And, of course, China, with its billions of potential users, remains closed for now to Facebook and other popular platforms. Facebook and Twitter both blamed the European Union’s new data privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, as a factor in their declines. However, Facebook’s monthly page visits have been falling sharply...

When doctors examine kids, especially adolescents, they often use a HEADSSS (home life, education, activities, drugs, sexual activity, safety, and suicide and/or depression) assessment to identify any potential mental health or alcohol or drug issues. Now, an editorial in the May 2018 journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics advocates that health-care providers add in queries about social media use, including sexting, cyberbullying, and the impact of social media on self-worth. While noting that social media does provide some positive benefits in terms of social connection and support, the researchers behind the article noted that teens who devote the most time to it are at higher risk of negative effects. “Aberrant and/or excessive social media usage may contribute to the development of mental health disturbance in at-risk teenagers, such as feelings of isolation, depressive symptoms, and anxiety,” the authors wrote. A study of 500 college undergrads who were active social media...

To communicate more effectively and increase your opportunities for advancement, you need to exercise your social brain network—regions of the cortex that are activated when we need to interpret the behavior, intentions, and appearance of other people. Studying interactions among both humans and primates has revealed that the structure of a person’s social brain network is strongly influenced by the shape of their social network. In some social networks, all the members know one another independently, while in others, certain people act as hubs indirectly connecting individuals and groups who otherwise wouldn’t know each other. Research has found that their exposure to more diverse perspectives confers a host of benefits to those in the hub position, labeled “information brokers.” They’re not only better at problem-solving but also more likely to accrue faster promotion and higher pay. In one 2017 study , teenagers’ brains were scanned as they made decisions about whether to recommend ...

Many grade- and high-school teachers remain hesitant to use social media as a learning tool. Just 16% of the 1,000 K-12 teachers who responded to a survey from the University of Phoenix said they use social media in the classroom, while 56% said they don’t use it at all and have no plans to start. Most teachers in the survey (83%) worry about conflicts from social media interaction and 35% said they had experienced issues with either students or their parents through social media. At the same time, some see the classroom as the right place to discuss social media. “In the classroom is the perfect opportunity to talk about how we behave, what is ethical inside and outside our classroom, and what that entails,” said Pam Roggeman, academic dean at the institution’s College of Education. “Its fun and it’s interesting, but it brings with it a large responsibility.” The survey also found that 63% of teachers said they use technology every day and another 25% use it at least once a week. At ...

Last week, the watchdog group Common Sense Media and the Center for Humane Technology —a nonprofit formed by several former Facebook and Google employees—launched a multiyear “Truth about Tech” campaign to increase awareness of the addictive nature of smartphones and other electronic devices and of social media. Beginning with ads targeting 55,000 public schools in the U.S., the campaign aims to engage educators, parents, kids, legislators, health officials, and tech manufacturers on the dangers of constant connection. The aim is not simply to warn but also to encourage changes in behavior and in how devices are designed and marketed. Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and a former design ethicist at Google, told CBS News , “The truth about what’s happening on the other side of the screen is that this is happening by design. There’s a whole bunch of techniques that are deliberately used to keep the auto-play watching on YouTube to keep you watching the next...

Cal Newport, an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, challenged readers of his Study Hacks blog (dedicated to exploring “how to perform productive, valuable, and meaningful work in an increasingly distracted digital age”) to cut out all digital interaction that wasn’t crucial to their job or personal/family life for the month of January. After that, they could gradually resume interactions that still seemed to have value. Of the almost 2,000 people who said they’d try the unplugging experiment, many reported exploring new hobbies, as well as discovering just how dependent they’d let themselves become on phone apps and websites. Newport’s challenge is part of a growing debate on the role social media and digital technology play in our lives and their impact on society. At the beginning of the year, the investment management firm Jana Partners LLC and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System sent a letter to Apple , asking the tech giant to consider...

Despite all the anxiety over Twitter’s impact on civil discourse and society in general, more and more educators are finding the social platform a valuable tool for sharing assignments, increasing student engagement, and archiving classroom resources. In intermediate and high-school grades, Twitter can be used to connect with students where they already are. One New Jersey high-school teacher found that students checked her classroom Twitter account more often than they read school emails. Some school systems or individual instructors may be dubious of Twitter’s value or uncertain about what sorts of content they should tweet. In a blog post , Steve Williams, co-founder of Campus Suite, a provider of cloud-based communications solutions for schools, set out four areas where Twitter can and should be used by educators: 1. Enhancing student engagement—Any additional channel for communicating with students is a plus. In addition to tweeting project due dates and reminders about quizzes a...

Recorded human communication began with cave paintings and then grew into murals and hieroglyphs before developing into written alphabets. In some ways, digital technologies and social platforms are taking communication back toward its visual origins. In a commentary in T.H.E. Journal earlier this year, Cathie Norris, a professor and chair in the School of Information at the University of North Texas, and Elliot Soloway, a professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan, noted that K-12 students spend far more time with text-based materials in school and far more time with image-based materials outside the classroom. With an average of about 2.5 billion daily Snaps on Snapchat, and more than 400 million daily users partaking of Instagram’s shared photos and videos, it’s no surprise that today’s digitally savvy students are gravitating toward “picting,” the use of images instead of words to convey information and ideas. Picting is an emergent form of literacy, bu...

Conventional wisdom suggests that Fortune 500 firms are on the cutting edge of social-media usage while higher education lags behind. In fact, higher-ed executives are 10% more likely to be using social media compared to their corporate counterparts , according to a report from the social-media monitoring firm Hootsuite. The Social Campus Report: 8 Opportunities for Higher Edin 2018 noted that student use of technology has institutions increasing their focus on social media to keep pace. It also found that 63% of campus administrators say they believe that social media is important to strategic planning and fulfilling their institution’s mission. Students are more likely to use social media regularly, making it an easier and more cost-efficient way to communicate with them. The report also found that many administrators view a robust social-media presence as a way to gain an advantage over other colleges and universities. “There’s this kind of vacuum of knowledge on social and how it ...