You’ve probably heard about how bad social media and other internet use is, but there is another side to that story. Experts share a more nuanced approach.
It has become a gospel truth among many that the internet and social media are bad for our mental health. That “fact” seems born out of some suspicious science and not-so-suspicious but limited research.
This research appears to say the opposite. What I find interesting is that it was based on two million subjects in over 160 countries. This isn’t just isolating teenage girls in the US or Western countries, but looking at the world overall and seeing a large positive impact that being online has on many people around the world.
For example:
Researchers analyzed data from nearly 2.5 million people across 168 countries using the annual Gallup World Poll, trying to answer the following question: Do individuals who have access and actively use the internet report greater or lower levels of well-being than those who do not?
“Because even such a simple question can be statistically answered in many different ways, we analyzed the data in tens of thousands of different ways,” he added.
Across all those ways of crunching the numbers, about 85% showed that those who have and use the internet report greater well-being that those who do not, according to the research.
But, even the researchers admit there may not be a causal relationship here. It may be that people with more money and more access to healthcare are more likely to be online than their poorer counterparts. This is what we’ve been saying about the studies related to online activity and mental health – people who were already depressed may spend more time online as opposed to people who spend more time online becoming more depressed. We don’t know.
These observational studies clearly tell us that being online could be both good and bad for us, and that may depend on what kind of shape we were in when we opened the browser today and what we chose to do while online.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/15/health/internet-greater-well-being-study-wellness/