Social indicators are tricky when they are turned from facts like inflation or crime rates into assessments of the state of society as happens nowadays when people say there is an epidemic of social media that is draining the young of their senses.
Every month, the government reports economic scorecards. These have created series data about changes in the economy for more than a hundred years. These include rates of inflation, unemployment, job creation and other measures of economic well being. Every month, professional economists will comment on these numbers whether to offer the platitude that a change in a number in one measure is not significant or that the economy is overheating or slowing down, which are metaphors that mean little, or may say that the nation is headed for an economic slowdown or even a recession or, on the other hand, a period of expansion. These comments are always guarded and qualified and seem more like reading tea leaves rather than conclusions based on the evidence put before the public. Indeed, of late, newscasters regularly report public opinion polls of what the public thinks of the economy because the public must know what it feels like if the cost of groceries are going up rather than relying on objective facts based on careful consistent measures of statistics and therefore presumably objective statements about the state of the economy. Nowadays, commentators will blame Biden and now Trump for having relied on statistics more than the guts of public opinion to decide the state of the economy. Economic measurement is in a bad way.
There are another set of measures that have to do with the health of the nation that are almost completely unrecognized. That is the state of the social agenda which measures features of non-economic social structures and institutions that tell how the nation is doing. Such serial measures are in fact available to the public but have not been publicized perhaps because in general economics has taken over the way to look at society rather than sociological factors. There was a time when there was a domestic social policy advisor to the president as there still is an economics advisor but the role of chief social advisor, such as was headed by Patrick Moynihan, has atrophied.
I would recommend that news outlets publicize at least a yearly report on key social indicators and allow experts to chime in on what they mean. The advantage of doing so is not only to shed light on different areas of American dynamics but indicators are so clearly meaningful that people can evaluate the results rather than rely on experts to do the job, which is what happens with economic indicators. Here are five available social indicators as my nominations for the yearly social weather reports. No additional development in research is required to produce them.
There are readily available crime statistics from all American jurisdictions. They cover the numbers of each one of the crimes that are recorded by the police from traffic offenses to murder. Those facts might unsettle some people who are ideologically committed to a point of view about crime, such as thinking that cities are hotbeds of crime when in fact large cities have low murder rates and that the murder capital of the nation is Louisiana. There are also available health records that show higher levels of infant and childbirth deaths among black women than white women, which suggests that there are racial discrepancies these many years since integration and that have to be dealt with whatever people may say about the age of racial equality having arrived. There are also differential statistics for asthma and other consequences of air and water pollution.
The social indicators that I have offered, however, can be considered as dealing with institutional issues such as law and medicine. What about measures concerning society at large? How is it faring? That turns out to be very difficult. De Tocqueville, the great student of American society, reduced it to its economic and further geographical roots, in that town hall democracy in New England was the result of small farms where glacial land had to be cleared of stones and the small stakeholders came to market and by the way dealt with public business, such as where to build a road. Southern states had a plantation system because land was cheap, the soil fertile and markets available and so the only shortage was of labor, which was satisfied by slavery. There is such a thing as public opinion, but that became an independent force in the late nineteenth century and subject to reliable measurement in the l940’s.
Moreover, attempts to access the qualities of American society as a whole were most successful when the authors thought that America was subject to a number of factors to understand how America worked.Lynd’s “Middletown” In assessing America in the nineteen twenties, saw the interaction of the anti-intellectual educational system, the enhancement of labor saving devices in the home. And the perhaps, related persistently increase of women in the work force as explaining what a small size American city was like. David Riesman’s portrait of America as a whole in “The Lonely Crowd”, an assessment of the Fifties, tied the strain of conformism against a strain of independence, each person having their own internal gyroscope, against the background of competitiveness and people finding hobbies as a way of expressing themselves, American culture not a unified thing as Margaret Mead assumed was the case of all societies, but in constant and permanent tension.
Other analysts of American society as a whole reduce America to a single factor, perhaps most successfully in David Potter’s “People of Plenty” which said in 1958 that America was characterized, which means measured, by its affluence, which means that its cornucopia of food and products, like cars and plumbing, explained why America was successful in so many other ways such as democracy and generosity. A correction of the same idea was exhibited in Galbraith’s “the Affluent Society” which claimed a few years afterwards that individual purchases such as cafes and groceries, were plentiful, but that collective goods, which were bought by government were weak, such as medical care and the condition of the poor, were underfinanced and people had to fall back on only one part of the economy, which is considered market oriented, neglecting that there are political decisions which make collective purchases so meagre.
Another one factor theory from the Nineties was Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone”, which also relied on De Tockeville’s insight that community is the basis of society when it complained that people did not engage in collective leisure or, in general, collective enterprises, but were isolated from one another practically and spiritually and to their consequent disadvantage, But that isn’t a true measure because it is a controversial evaluation about how America should be rather than what it is and is linked to the conservative tendency to think that collective cultures are better than communities managed through collective organizations where, for example, a city is not made up of a collective commonality, as if it was Babel before it descended into multiple languages, but was glued together by its institutional intersection of multiple organized ethnic groups, a transportation system, a commercial core, a medical system. An education system and so on.The organizations not the culture make a city tick, and the same could be said of a nation, such as America, where people are tied together by their allegiance to the constitution rather than their putative lineages.
A one factor assessment or measure of a society that is simplistic, perverse and apocalyptic is one that says the young people in the popi;ation have been seduced or deluded or brainwashed generally considered to be addicted, in a way akin to heroin addiction, by becoming involved in the media, perhaps that plausible because new forms of communication change rapidly, in a decade or two, and people have become familiar with them, while being less familiar with the makeup of the Senate or fluctuations in levels of education. This attribution was already the case in the Fifties when critics claimed that comic books were debilitating the minds of the young, even though a generation later comics had become an art form and comic book art had become high art in Andy Warhol and Alex Katz.
The present moment suggests that social media are the culprit. Facebook and tiktok are addictive because children become obsessed with playing with their phones, neglecting their homework and not developing real life communications skills and those devices should be controlled or even abolished as has happened in Australia. THe same thigh happened fifty years ago when the Surgeon General of the United States showed a high relation between smoking and lung cancer and through a number of ventures short of Prohibition, such as barring smoking in business offices and restaurants, smoking use was significantly curtailed.
The trouble is that there is no scientific basis for thinking that social media are addictive. Heit offers correlational figures that show depressed and mentally ill people have greater usage of social media but that might mean the mental problems predate the high usage of social media rather than are caused by it. The report on smoking could rely on correlation because no one claimed that there was a genetic predilection to smoke and use cigarettes. The two were independent factors where smokers were four times more likely than nonsmokers to develop cancer. Point made.
The social media platforms in the past few weeks have been successfully sued as having created an addiction to young people, but that lawsuit did not provide statistical evidence to show that happened, only a plaintiff who was both a social media user and had mental difficulties. News reports rushed to conclude social media were the culprit as if that would explain everything that was going wrong, the fly in the American ointment. Those concerned with youngsters' addiction to social media claim that those addicted engage in constant scrolling, reacting to messaging long sessions of engaging the social media, and disrupting daily routines. That makes those behaviors similar to gambling addiction, where gamblers repetitively make and lose bets on slots and poker, leave a sense of time that is encouraged bt gambling casinos having no windows, and going on binges until having lost all their money. The problem is that it is not clear how much indulgence makes an addiction, given that there are only behavioral indications of social media addiction. Psychologists of gambling addiction regard it as just a bad habit that is “cured” by making people better gamblers who remember not to try to make back a bad run of luck or by placing a limit on the pot they have that can be lost and coming up for air once in a while.
Short stints of social media do not lead to addiction, as any person who follows You Tube as I do can attest. I keep inclined to continue to scroll jokes told while a visual shows a car going along a road, or fun facts about celebrities or comparisons of photos of celebrities young and old, though that last, as I have written, has some deeper moments, but I can divert from this amusement. Children can turn off their cellphones especially if they are told to by teachers and parents.
Moreover, social pressure from other aspects of social life will recalibrate and compensate for the attractions of social media. Schools can monitor social media platforms and require students to write essays in class. Other attractions, like playing ball or flirting with girls are more attractive than scrolling unless these people are particularly maladroit and in that case need the social media as a crutch until they develop social resources. Laws can sort out what is copyright property and what can be presented to the public as real, though that is difficult where a story or film said to be based on real life can mostly be lies. Society can muddle through as it did with girlie shows and radio, every teenager more agile at managing the internet and cellphone, these essentials of modern life,than I can.
Another way of thinking about social addiction is that it is the beginning of a new art form that has discovered that a short take of less than a minute can provide a satisfying story, such as a joke or a clip of film about blowing up buildings during a bombing or a clip of a politician saying something outrageous that makes the viewer fume or say”right on”. These are old, pre social media inventions that have become the rage and still insufficiently developed to convey deep gravity in emotions or thought, just as was the case in the first ten years of cinema where the invention of placing a camera to see a train arriving in a station was just a gimmick until it became filled with emotion and cleverness and meaning by Griffith and others. Remember that the Elizabethan play which replaced the Aristotelian idea of the unity of time and space was replaced by short takes where Shakespeare made sense of drama that way as early as in “Henry VI”. Art evolves and legitimizing the new experience and new forms of experience catches up.
That does not mean that social addiction is a fact about some people that need to become better understood. Perhaps there is a pathology here rather than a fad, even if it is overblown as an addiction. In that case, I would leave the matter to health professionals to deal with their patients just as I let physicians deal with the condition of gender dysphobia as best they can manage, knowing that there are no blood or genetic tests to show that condition is biologically real rather than a social fad.and so to be by some condemned rather than understood.
In general, social indicators are a series of some individual facts that can be interpreted in different ways as when I suggest that per capita crime rates may be low in major cities but that collective concentrations of criminals are the real culprit in explaining crime in big cities. When a single indicator or very few indicators are relied on to provide a portrait of a city or a nation, that makes it an interpretation rather than a fact and so is to be assessed for its theoretical soundness, which includes making comparisons between similar entities and providing a description or feel in abstract words for that entity. De Tocqueville feels right about America then but not about now. Social indicators are necessary but not sufficient.