What drives me up the wall is the message, "We are experiencing a larger number of calls than usual, … (translation = please fu*ck off and use the website, so we don’t have to provide a real person for you to talk to). It seems the wording is exactly the same for a whole range of different organisations. And whatever time one calls, they are “experiencing …”
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Thanks for that G! I’ll have a good read of it over the w/e.
Cheers! R.
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Our local group medical practice has a 90-second message before you ever get to the menus… mainly stuff about vaccination, the possibility that you ought to visit the NHS website, dial 999, etc, to dissuade the easily cowed. Or those who pay per minute. When you get past that and press the right number key you get to the “we’re terribly busy… you are number x in the queue”.
Thinking I was very clever I rang one week before a six-week medication review was due to (eventually) book an appointment for week 8 (ie three weeks hence). That was a telephone call. An in-person appointment would have been two further weeks.
The only positive outcome was realising I’m now eligible for free prescriptions.
Official Oldie, I guess 
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I know I’ve said this before, when I say that the take-up of smart phones over the last decade has been quite remarkable, from an anthropological point of view. I don’t think there’s been any comparison to it in history. Nowadays everywhere you go all you see are people engaging with the ‘black mirror’ in the palm of their hand. The black mirror, of course, does not impart any real information (beyond, buy, buy, buy). It’s only purpose is to use endorphins for control and propaganda. Then we have the godawful QR codes - the ‘mark of the Beast’ - which are now a plague (don’t you just love the Biblical language).
My qualification for this mini rant is that I don’t have a smart phone. I just observe what’s going on around me.
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That’s what it does for the user. However, for the GIC’s, they are an essential tool to identify, record voice and images, track movements and more. We are rapidly moving to a digital prison. Sadly, too many just don’t see it, choose to bury their heads, or believe some of us wear those hats made from aluminum (sold by a company that is owned by some of the owners of the world).
I’ll take me tin hat off now!
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“We are experiencing a larger number of calls than usual” Worse it’s clearly a lie if you’re hearing this message every-time you phone the company, institution or organisation concerned…
Pat? Did you read… https://forum.5filters.info/t/always-trying-to-influence-our-thoughts-reactions-and-responses-ever-intrusive-wifi-and-how-to-cope-remembrance-los-wifi-5g/3558?
R? Have you read: https://www.arafel.co.uk/2018/10/loss-of-signal-wifi.html & https://www.arafel.co.uk/2018/11/loss-of-signal-cont-wifi-ethernet-awfb.html?
#Weinswein #LoS
“God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay…!”
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Thanks @GKH I did read it but knowing nothing about crystals I’m still without any understanding of which crystals to use and what they do
I’ve bought myself a copper spiral necklace just recently…but clear quartz is sufficient to protect, amethyst (esp. purple), black tourmaline is very useful…you can buy these cut as pedants or buy a spiral “cage” (they are spring-like and so elastic), big enough to insert an uncut crystal (see thread re: “vibrational harmonisation” -purification-), and wear it around your neck…alternative just slip one in a pocket (I use my left-breast pocket for my tourmaline now, I carry a quartz elsewhere), …
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GKH, I was unable to open the link.
Have yourself a very merry 5G Christmas
I’m able to open the #Arafel links…Was it those you were referring too? When opening for the first time you should encounter a page informing you of adult content, that is all. Anyone else having difficulty?
No problem here, and I’m used to the alert thing from blogger by now.
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US is cancelling cellphone safety research. This is stunning news.
One thing that is for sure is that this decision was not because adverse health effects were not being found - rather it’s an attempt to draw a veil over what is already known, or what is emerging.
Those in the know have long been aware that cellphone radiation has demonstrable biological effects, thereby rendering safety guidelines irrelevant. These guidelines only ever protected peope from, severe, sudden effects like electric shocks and heating. Long term effects, like cancer, were specifically exlcuded. For decades the propaganda has been that the safety guidelines protect against cancer and other effects. As the story indicates, these guidelines should have been brought ‘up to date’ decades ago. (‘Up to date’ in quotes, because they were always fraudulent.)
People should look into this very carefully before getting rid of their landlines, as there are indications that these may even disappear.
ED
Cellphone Radiation Research Was Halted After Worrisome Findings, Expert Questions Why
Federal agencies are cancelling research, differing significantly from Europe’s more precautionary approach to cellphones.
Decades of animal research point to serious health risks from cellphone radiation exposure, but examining a possible link stops now.
The National Toxicology Program (NTP), tasked with studying potential toxins, recently announced it would no longer investigate evidence that cellphone radiation can harm animals or people. The move stunned scientists like Devra Davis, a former senior adviser to the assistant secretary for Health in the Department of Health and Human Services, who called the abrupt reversal scientifically unjustified.
There’s “no scientific explanation or justification for this sudden reversal,” Ms. Davis told The Epoch Times.
Unpublished NTP Research Undermines Decision to Halt Cellphone Radiation Studies
The NTP recently claimed that additional radiofrequency radiation (RFR) studies are not planned, stating the research was “technically challenging and more resource-intensive than expected.”
Ms. Davis criticized this decision, noting that technical challenges are not a reason to avoid studying something that appears to cause cancer in animals. “Everything that we know for sure causes cancer in people will produce it in animals when adequately studied,” she added.
Despite admitting to developing a novel small-scale RFR exposure system in 2019 to clarify earlier findings, the NTP canceled further investigations. This system only studied older 2G and 3G devices, not newer 4G or 5G technologies.
Ms. Davis, a former NTP advisor, said she helped recommend smaller test chambers. The agency takes years to plan studies, so scrapping this project is “beyond my comprehension at this point,” given millions of children’s daily exposure, she noted.
New Zealand Prepares for National Cell Phone Ban in Schools
Do Cell Phones Affect Cognitive Function?
In an emailed statement, the NTP confirmed that although work on the small-scale exposure system and accompanying research has been completed, the results will be publicly available and posted on the agency’s webpage only “when internal reviews are finished.” As of this writing, the 2019 research remains unpublished.
Court Finds FCC Illegally Ignored 5G Health Risks
The NTP published results in 2018 from two-year toxicology studies showing “clear evidence” of associations between 2G/3G cellphone radiation and tumors in male rats. Follow-up research in 2019 revealed DNA damage in the brains, livers, and blood cells of exposed rats and mice.
Despite originally requesting and overseeing these studies, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has since dismissed the NTP’s findings, Ms. Davis said.
In 2019, the Federal Communications Commission affirmed outdated 1996 radiation exposure standards for new 5G technologies, which did not even exist then. To justify this, the FDA anonymously produced an unreviewed document in 2020. The Environmental Health Trust (EHT) sued the FCC.
In 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled against the FCC. The court said the FCC acted improperly and illegally by keeping its 1996 wireless radiation exposure limits. The court found the FCC ignored evidence that radiation below its current limits can cause adverse health effects besides cancer, noting that the FCC also failed to respond to comments about the environmental harm caused by radiation.
The court ordered revised standards accounting for EHT’s records on risks to children and the environment.
FCC Let Carriers Abandon Landlines
Since 2019, France has mandated cellphones include warnings to keep such devices away from teens and pregnant women’s lower abdomens because of radiation risks. The European Union also funds extensive research on RFR hazards.
“So why are we ignoring animal study results showing harm?” Ms. Davis said. “There’s only one reason: because there’s so much money involved.”
Landlines offered an alternative to cellphones, but the FCC’s 2019 order let carriers abandon copper lines. Companies like Verizon have begun retiring landlines, leaving consumers with only wireless options.
People can still reduce RFR exposure by:
- Not carrying phones in pockets or bras
- Using speakerphone and holding phones away from the head/body
- Keeping devices away from reproductive organs
- Using wired over WiFi internet
Not sleeping near phones
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Hard on the heels of the above news…
This could be grim; yet won’t rise above the threshold of news noise.
ED
WHERE HAVE ALL THE INSECTS GONE?
Satellites are taking them, every one
The least noticed and greatest assault on Earthly life rains on us from the sky. Nature’s wires strung above us from horizon to horizon, carrying the electricity that helps power our bodies, and the information that informs our growth, healing, and daily lives, now carries dirty electricity — millions of frequencies and pulsations that confuse our cells and organs, and dim our nervous systems, be we humans, elephants, birds, insects, fish, or flowering plants.
The pulsations pollute the Earth beneath our feet, surround us in the air through which we fly, course through the oceans in which we swim, flow through our veins and our meridians, and enter us through our leaves and our roots. The planetary transformer that used to gentle the solar wind now agitates, inflames.
The lake pictured above is the United Kingdom’s largest. Located in Northern Ireland, Lough Neagh swarms so densely with flies every spring and summer that residents shut their windows against the living smoke. Clothes left out on a line are covered with them. So is any windshield on a vehicle traveling around the lough’s 90-mile shoreline. Until 2023.
Last year, unbelievably, no flies were to be seen. Windshields and hanging clothes were bare of them. None flew into open windows. Other species that used to eat them were gone as well — ducks, frogs, fish, eels, and predatory insects. Fly larvae were not there to keep the lake bottom clean. Little was alive in the lough except an overgrowth of algae. “Has the ecosystem of the UK’s largest lake collapsed?” asked The Guardian in a February 19, 2024 article.
Has the ecosystem of the entire Earth collapsed? we ask, for the same is happening all over, according to reports I have been receiving for a year from almost everywhere on every continent.
56 Years of Global Vandalism
On June 13, 1968, the United States completed its launch of the world’s first constellation of military satellites. Twenty-eight of them, more than twice as many satellites as were in orbit around the Earth until then, were lofted to an altitude of 18,000 feet, in the heart of the outer Van Allen radiation belt. The “Hong Kong” flu pandemic began two weeks later and lasted for almost two years.
For the next three decades, the skies slowly filled up with hundreds of satellites, mostly for military purposes. Then in the late 1990s, cell phones became popular.
On May 17, 1998, a company named Iridium completed its launch of a fleet of 66 satellites into the ionosphere, at an altitude of only 485 miles, and began testing them. They were going to provide cell phone service to the general public from anywhere on earth. Each satellite aimed 48 separate beams at the earth’s surface, thus dividing the planet into 3,168 cells. Reports of insomnia came from throughout the world.
Iridium’s satellites began commercial service on September 23, 1998. The effect was devastating. I contacted 57 people in my network in 6 countries, plus two nurses, one physician, and a support group for patients. 86% of the people I interviewed, and the majority of patients and support group members, became ill on Wednesday, September 23 exactly, with headaches, dizziness, nausea, insomnia, nosebleeds, heart palpitations, asthma attacks, ringing in the ears, etc. One person said it felt like a knife went through the back of her head early Wednesday morning. Another had stabbing pains in the chest. Some, including me, were so sick we weren’t sure we were going to live. We were all acutely ill for up to three weeks. I suddenly lost my sense of smell on September 23, and did not recover it for six years. Mortality statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control revealed a 4% to 5% rise in the national death rate beginning the last week in September and lasting two weeks. Some people reported a reddish sky the night of September 23.
In early December 1998, I again received telephone calls from far and wide asking me what had changed. Orbcomm, providing data service to industries, had gone commercial on November 30 with 28 satellites orbiting 500 miles up.
On July 25, 1999, another company, Globalstar, achieved worldwide cell phone coverage with 32 satellites, 876 miles up, and began testing. I again received calls from people who were certain the earth felt different again.
On February 28, 2000, Globalstar completed its constellation of 48 satellites and went commercial. Nausea, headaches, leg pain, and respiratory problems were widespread, both among people who called themselves electrically sensitive and people who did not. The effects were felt starting on Friday, February 25, the previous business day.
Iridium, which had gone bankrupt in August 1999, resumed full commercial cell phone service worldwide on March 30, 2001 after signing a contract with the U.S. military. The night of March 30 was accompanied by an even more intense and widespread red sky than the one that had accompanied its initial launch of service two and a half years previously. A red aurora was seen in the northern hemisphere as far south as Mexico, as well as in the southern hemisphere. There was a catastrophic loss of Kentucky race horse foals in late April and early May, and since mares abort several weeks to a month after a viral infection or other triggering event, this put the triggering event at about the end of March. Similar foaling problems were reported at the same time from Ohio, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Maryland, Texas, northern Michigan, and Peru. Breeders also reported both newborn and older horses with unusual eye problems, and adult horses with pericarditis.
On June 5, 2001, Iridium added data to its voice service, including connection to the Internet. Hoarseness was a prominent complaint of many who contacted me during the next few weeks.
For the next two decades, Iridium and Globalstar were the only providers of satellite phones. Enter SpaceX in 2019.
In November 2019, SpaceX began regular launchings of 60 satellites at a time into even lower orbit, only 326 to 350 miles up, and I began to receive reports from people around the world of headaches, dizziness, insomnia, exhaustion, skin problems, feelings of oppression, and heart problems. Almost 200 people in my network reported heart palpitations, heart arrhythmias, or heart attacks.
In March 2021, the density of signals polluting the ionosphere increased significantly. SpaceX, which had already launched more than 1,000 Starlink satellites and was testing them on a limited number of customers, launched 60 satellites on March 4, 60 more on March 11, 60 more on March 14, and 60 more on March 24. A competitor, OneWeb, also launched 36 satellites on the night of March 24. More satellites were launched into space in that month and on that day than ever before. And on March 24, SpaceX dramatically increased the speed of its satellite internet connections to over 400 Mbps.
On March 24, 2021, a threshold was passed, and the deterioration of life on Earth accelerated tremendously. Some people reported not feeling well beginning on March 4 or March 11, but 1,000 people in 50 countries emailed or called me on or after March 24 confirming my own awareness that something terrible was happening to our planet. The reports came from people in New York City, Paris and London, and from people living in remote locations miles from the nearest cell tower. They came from people who used no wireless technology at all, and from people who had smart meters on their homes and 5G antennas outside who emailed me from their cell phones. They came from people young and old. It did not matter, they all had similar experiences. Everybody, whether they were previously ill or not, became suddenly and profoundly sicker on March 24 or March 25, depending on the time zone in which they lived, and most slept little or not at all the night of March 24.
People reported that not only they, but also their spouse, children, parents, neighbors, friends, coworkers, clients, and everyone else they knew were sick, exhausted and irritable on March 24 or 25 and had trouble sleeping. Some reported that their pets or farm animals were sick at the same time — cats, dogs, chickens, goats, cows.
The details were consistent. They could not sleep for one, two, three or more nights, beginning March 24 or 25. Some took melatonin or other sleeping aids and still could not sleep. They had pain and itching, either all over or in specific parts of their body, commonly their feet and legs. They had headaches. They had muscle spasms. They were weak and exhausted and could hardly stand or walk, and some tripped or fell. They had skin rashes. They were dizzy and nauseous, and had stomach aches and diarrhea. The ringing in their ears was suddenly more intense. Their eyes were red, or inflamed, or their vision suddenly worsened. They had heart palpitations, rapid or irregular heartbeat, or suddenly high or very low blood pressure. A few had nosebleeds, or coughed up blood, or their eyes popped a blood vessel. They were anxious, depressed or suicidal, and irritable.
Since then, SpaceX has been launching rockets carrying dozens of satellites at a time on a weekly or biweekly basis, filling the heavens with luminous objects that interfere with astronomy, spewing chemicals that are destroying our planet’s protective ozone layer, filling the upper layers of the atmosphere with water vapor that should not be there and that is increasing the current in the global electric circuit and the violence of thunderstorms, and cluttering up space with satellites that are nothing but solar arrays and computers that are continually failing, wearing out, and having to be replaced, and which are deorbited to burn up in the lower atmosphere, filling it with metals and toxic chemicals for everyone to breathe — and altering the electromagnetic environment of the Earth that had not changed in three billion years and that life below depends on for its vitality and survival.
Last Thursday morning, from Boca Chica, Texas, SpaceX successfully launched its Starship — the largest rocket ever built, the one it wants to ferry men and women to Mars with — into space for the first time. And on Friday it launched yet another 23 Starlink satellites to bring its total polluting the ionosphere up to more than 6,000, now not only for internet communication with rooftop dishes but for direct communication with handheld cell phones. The 6,000 satellites are also now communicating directly with one another, wrapping the Earth with pulsating lasers carrying 42 million gigabytes of data every single day.
Everyone I know has had trouble sleeping and been suffering since last Wednesday, the night Starship launched.
Since March 24, 2021, not only has human health deteriorated, but the biodiversity of the Earth, everywhere, has plummeted. People have not so much noticed the decline of the larger wildlife like wolves, bears, lions and tigers, which were already scarce, but they are shocked by the total disappearance of the smallest animals that were only recently so common you couldn’t open your windows without them flying in. They are shocked by the disappearance of all the frogs that used to swim in their ponds, the birds that used to nest in their trees, the worms that used to slither on the ground, the insects that used to fly through their windows and cover their clothes hanging on the line. My newsletters of March 29, June 21, September 20, October 17, and November 28, 2023 carried major stories about this from various parts of the world. My newsletters of December 5 and December 26, 2023, and January 9 and February 6, 2024 quoted from individuals all over the world who have emailed or called me, and I have a huge backlog of more such reports that you can read when I publish them in the future.
If we want to have a planet to live on, not only for our children but for ourselves, the radiation has to stop. Not only do the cell towers have to come down that are so ugly to look at, but also the cell phones that we hold in our hands and have become so dependent on, and the satellites that are squeezing all the life that remains out from under them. We are running out of time.
Arthur Firstenberg
President, Cellular Phone Task Force
Author, The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life
P.O. Box 6216
Santa Fe, NM 87502
USA
arthur@cellphonetaskforce.org
+1 505-471-0129
March 20, 2024
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Donate to our work. CPTF is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
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I think I commented on the original article. I have noticed much less bug splatter on the car over the last few years. The exception is Northumbria, in the wider sense, and a friend said exactly the same. I was there earlier in the week and a few splats on the windscreen from about Darlington northward (on the A1 nearly all the way). The weather was unusually warm for the time of year.
If the bottom of the food chain is being wiped out we are in very deep trouble.
Off topic but noticed three deer killed on the road which seems unusually high. Maybe meaningless but they might be ranging over wider areas, oblivious to the risks, if there are thin pickings in usual areas. There has been quite a bit of alteration to roads especially M11 around Cambridge, at Darlington, Scotch Corner etc
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Thanks E…useful… https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12694341/Florida-school-district-cell-phone-ban.html
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"My sister, who works at a specialist college, was recently telling me that phones are the number one issue that she and her colleagues are struggling with. Students have them out at all times, clutched in their hands like shiny, black security blankets. Her class will message each other from across the room during lessons, or scroll social media, or listen to music; meanwhile, she’s desperately trying to claw their attention back and get them to engage with the real world.
Screens and teens: it’s a combination that’s become increasingly tricky to navigate over the last decade. The switch from what I think of as “analogue” phones – those with buttons but no internet – to smartphones, compounded by an upsurge in digital living during pandemic lockdowns, has resulted in 46 per cent of adolescents reporting they are online “almost constantly”. Some 97 per cent of children have a smartphone by the age of 12, according to Ofcom data.
In February, new battle lines were drawn in this ongoing war. Government ministers confirmed plans to ban them in schools in England, with the Department for Education (DfE) issuing guidance to help teachers with implementation. Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, said the DfE believed the guidance would “empower” headteachers to exorcise these digital demons, and “would send a clear message about consistency”.
“You go to school, you go to learn, you go to create those friendships, you go to speak to people and socialise and you go to get educated,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “You don’t go to sit on your mobile phone or to send messages while you could actually talk to somebody.”
Some 97 per cent of children have a smartphone by the age of 12
The reason this is so pressing isn’t simply that tweens and teens aren’t paying proper attention in class. It has a far more sinister impact on children and young people’s mental health, according to a new book, The Anxious Generation, written by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He presents the compelling argument that the uptick in time spent online has coincided with an alarming mental health crisis all over the world.
Between 2010 and 2015, suicide rates among 10 to 14-year-old girls and boys increased by 167 and 92 per cent respectively. Self-harm rates for teenage girls in the UK soared by 78 per cent. Anxiety diagnoses for those aged 18 to 25 jumped by 92 per cent. During this same five-year period, smartphones reached a majority of US households – they were adopted faster than any other communication technology in human history. There is a tangible link, too, between screentime and poor mental health, reveals Haidt: nearly 40 per cent of teenage girls who spend over five hours on social media a day have been diagnosed with clinical depression.
Childhood and adolescence have been “rewired”, claims Haidt. Referencing the shift that started at the turn of the millennium, when tech companies began creating a set of world-changing products based around exploiting the rapidly expanding capabilities of the internet, Haidt paints a deeply concerning picture.
“The companies had done little or no research on the mental health effects of their products on children and adolescents, and they shared no data with researchers studying the health effects. When faced with growing evidence that their products were harming young people, they mostly engaged in denial, obfuscation, and public relations campaigns,” he says.
Business models that relied on maximising engagement using psychological tricks were the “worst offenders”, he says, adding that they hooked children “during vulnerable developmental stages, while their brains were rapidly rewiring in response to incoming stimulation”. For girls, some of the greatest damage was inflicted by social media; for boys, video games and porn sites had the most chilling impacts.
“By designing a firehouse of addictive content that entered through kids’ eyes and ears, and by displacing physical play and in-person socialising, these companies have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale,” Haidt writes damningly. Companies are accused of behaving like the tobacco and vaping industries, designing highly addictive products and skirting laws in order to sell them to minors.
It makes for terrifying reading. Developmentally, children’s brains are not at all adapted to cope with all of the above. The reward-seeking parts of the brain mature earlier, but the frontal cortex, responsible for self-control and will-power, isn’t operating on all cylinders till our mid-twenties – creating a dangerously toxic cocktail when you throw in algorithms advanced enough to even hold adults’ attention hostage for hours at a time.
Haidt tells the story of one Boston mother, representative of many of the parents he’s worked with, who said she felt she had “lost” her 14-year-old daughter, Emily. She recounted how she and her husband had tried to reduce the amount of time Emily spent on Instagram. “In one distressing episode, she got into her mother’s phone, disabled the monitoring software, and threatened to kill herself if her parents reinstalled it.”
Lest you think that the sudden deterioration in young people’s mental health is down to current events – for example, political crises, the rise of right-wing and populist movements, Brexit, Donald Trump and all the rest – Haidt compared a number of countries that were culturally similar enough but experienced different major news events over the same time period, including Canada, the UK and Nordic countries. All experienced a near-identical shift starting in the early 2010s.
There are four foundational “harms” triggered by the new “phone-based childhood”, puts forth Haidt: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation and addiction. The first is obvious. “Children need a lot of time to play with each other, face to face, to foster social development,” says Haidt. Teens who spend more time in-person with their peers have better mental health, according to research, while those who spend more time on social media are more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety. But the percentage of 17 to 18-year-olds in the US who said they hung out with their friends “almost every day” dropped dramatically from 2009 onwards. Time spent interacting with people online has replaced IRL equivalents – and adolescent mental health has taken a corresponding nosedive.
The second is less clear-cut, but an upsurge in sleep problems – that had levelled off in the early 2010s but continued on a steep upward trajectory in 2013 – has been linked to the phone-based childhood. There are “significant associations” between high social media use and poor sleep, according to a review of 36 correlational studies. One UK data set found that heavy use of screen media “was associated with shorter sleep duration, longer sleep latency and more mid-sleep awakenings”. Teenagers need more sleep than adults, particularly during puberty; those who are sleep-deprived don’t concentrate or retain information as well as those who have had eight hours a night.
Adults will be very familiar with number three: attention fragmentation. The double-digit tabs and the constant pinging of Slack and countless WhatsApp groups are hard enough to juggle as a fully-fledged grown-up. One study found that the average teenager gets 192 alerts or notifications per day from social media and communication apps – the equivalent of 11 per waking hour, or one every five minutes. “No matter how hard it is for an adult to stay committed to one mental road, it is far harder for an adolescent, who has an immature frontal cortex and therefore limited ability to say no to off-ramps,” writes Haidt. He argues that the never-ending stream of interruptions “takes a toll on young people’s ability to think and may leave permanent marks in their rapidly reconfiguring brains”.
And finally, addiction. This stems from app creators designing products that dispense variable “rewards”, triggering dopamine hits that make us feel good. They use “every trick in the psychologists’ tool kit to hook users as deeply as slot machines hook gamblers”. Adolescents are much more susceptible to these “tricks” than adults, due to the aforementioned frontal cortex, which isn’t mature until age 20 and beyond.
With all of this at work, is it any wonder that Generation Z and those that came after are in crisis? And is there any way of breaking this hugely detrimental pattern? Yes, according to Haidt – but it will take robust and collective action to delay the age at which children get smartphones and social media accounts, making the switch from a phone-based childhood back to a play-based one.
Voluntary coordination can be a useful tool here – for example, a group of parents at a school can collectively decide none of their children will be allowed phones until a certain age. This group decision means kids don’t feel left out in the same way – if you can reach critical mass, not having a phone even becomes the norm. Haidt also highlights technological solutions, such as the introduction of better “basic” phones to avoid giving children smartphones; lockable pouches for phones; and quick and easy age verification methods. Finally, governments need to step in. Laws such as requiring all social media companies to verify the ages of new users, and policies demanding schools enforce a “phones in lockers” rule during the school day, could have a big impact.
The main thing to stress is that it’s not too late to make a change, says Haidt: “When new consumer products are found to be dangerous, especially for children, we recall them and keep them off the market until the manufacturer corrects the design. In 2010, teens, parents, schools and even tech companies didn’t know that smartphones and social media had so many harmful effects. Now we do.”
‘The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness’ by Jonathan Haidt is published on 26 March by Allen Lane for £25": https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/smartphones-children-mental-health-teenagers-depression-b2517030.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-gb
Vids. https://twitter.com/Williamtheb/status/1724785688217092504 & https://twitter.com/Williamtheb/status/1741541137658122370
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This is pretty relevant to the above. I apologise as it’s from the Daily Hail.
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Schools should definitely follow this example and I’m sure some do. How’s about schools give pupils a Faraday pouch with the school logo when they register at the beginning of the year? £5 per pupil (?) is a small price for a massive reduction in the time wasted being classroom cops.
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