Welcome to a Bright Point, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

About a hundred years before the invention of television, Danish theologian and philosopher,

Soren Kierkegaard, wrote this, quote,

"'Suppose someone invented an instrument, a convenient little talking tube,

"'which, say, could be heard over the whole land.

I wonder if the police would not forbid it, fearing the whole country would become mentally deranged if it were used.

Well, his prescient comment was part of a criticism about the daily press,

specifically how the constant stream of news in his day inflated the importance

of momentary events in people's minds. Imagine what he might have said about the evening news on

television a hundred years later, once a literal tube, which Neil Postman also criticized for

making us all dumber. But still, in the end, it's not television, it's the smartphone, along with

social media platforms like TikTok, that has finally fulfilled Kierkegaard's nightmare. The ultimate

talking tube that goes everywhere with us, the smartphone, has proven to be particularly

detrimental, especially to young people. The connection between social media use and things

like depression, anxiety,

and other mental health problems is now well established for all the reasons that Kierkegaard

foresaw. And now, as it turns out, social media platforms are also effectively making users

less interested in having children. Recently, finished sociologist Anna Rotkirch published an

article in the Berlin Review that was entitled The TikTok Baby Bust. In it, she explained how the

introduction of the app coincided with a rise in antinatalist values and memes, worsening mental health,

especially for girls, and degrading social skills.

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