🎈More Than Robots #63 March 2023
“Some guns were fired to give notice that the departure of the balloon was near...” Benjamin Franklin
The way balloons and bots have floated through our news feeds is a handy reminder that what goes up usually finds a way down. So here are a few things to help us keep the sky in mind.
📖 Research
State of the nation 2022: children and young people’s wellbeing
While rates of probable mental disorder among younger age groups have remained consistent in recent years, amongst 17- to 19-year-olds, the percentage had increased to one in four in 2022, up from 1 in 6 in 2021.
Gamified Inoculation Interventions
Certain games designed to improve people’s ability to spot online misinformation may be counterproductive, as they could increase distrust in legitimate information.
Digital Wellbeing Index Report
The positive effects of technology use for children aged 9-15 are less this year. Negative effects on social wellbeing are greater for girls aged 9-10
Reality Shifting
Reality shifting exploded during the pandemic – with a TikTok community known as ‘shifttok’ using the platform to share experiences, tips, and fictional locations. At the time of writing, the TikTok hashtag #realityshifting had 2.1B views.
Longitudinal touchscreen use across early development
The results presented suggest that long-term exposure to touchscreen media is associated with faster exogenous orienting, and concomitant reduced endogenous attention control (slower disengagement of attention)
🧰 Resources
Take It Down
A free service that can help remove or stop the online sharing of nude, partially nude, or sexually explicit images or videos taken of people when they were under 18 years old
Explain It Like I Am Five
Perhaps the most useful ChatGPT spin-out so far - ideal for policymakers
A toolkit for evaluating media literacy interventions
A series of how-to guides for planning and carrying out an evaluation of a media literacy intervention
The clinical implications of digital technology
A series of questions clinicians can use to explore technology use by children and young people
Digital well-being resources
Videos, books, and interviews created by care experienced young people about managing digital wellbeing
💡Inspiration and opinion
AI Attribution and Provenance
The challenge comes from the deeper integration of AI assistive tools into our creative methods, where layers of editing, tweaks, and rewriting occur and the target of citation becomes much fuzzier.
More than robots
AI systems can create opportunities for increasing education equity. But, if we are careless or unprepared, then we will create conditions that may reduce people to automatons
How social media affects teen mental health: a missing link
In many studies, the effects of using social media are averaged over a broad age range. This means that potential fluctuations in the impacts of social media as adolescents age might be missed.
A game is not a game without a special kind of conflict
How does conflict resist toxicity and remain productive, meaningful and joyful? It all comes down to the community that emerges when we play.