1 . Children as young as ten are becoming dependent on social media for their sense of self-worth, a major study warned.

It found many youngsters (少年) now measure their status by how much public approval they get online, often through “likes”. Some change their behavior in real life to improve their image on the web.

The report into youngsters aged from 8 to 12 was carried out by Children’s Commissioner (专员) Anne Longfield. She said social media firms were exposing children to major emotional risks, with some youngsters starting secondary school ill-equipped to cope with the tremendous pressure they faced online.

Some social apps were popular among the children even though they supposedly require users to be at least 13. The youngsters admitted planning trips around potential photo-opportunities and then messaging friends — and friends of friends — to demand “likes” for their online posts.

The report found that youngsters felt their friendships could be at risk if they did not respond to social media posts quickly, and around the clock.

Children aged 8 to 10 were “starting to feel happy” when others liked their posts. However, those in the 10 to 12 age group were “concerned with how many people like their posts”, suggesting a “need” for social recognition that gets stronger the older they become.

Miss Longfield warned that a generation of children risked growing up “worried about their appearance and image as a result of the unrealistic lifestyles they follow on platforms, and increasingly anxious about switching off due to the constant demands of social media”.

She said: “Children are using social media with family and friends and to play games when they are in primary school. But what starts as fun usage of apps turns into tremendous pressure in real social media interaction at secondary school.”

As their world expanded, she said, children compared themselves to others online in a way that was “hugely damaging in terms of their self-identity, in terms of their confidence, but also in terms of their ability to develop themselves”.

Miss Longfield added: “Then there is this push to connect — if you go offline, will you miss something, will you miss out, will you show that you don’t care about those people you are following, all of those come together in a huge way at once.”

“For children it is very, very difficult to cope with emotionally.” The Children’s Commissioner for England’s study — Life in Likes — found that children as young as 8 were using social media platforms largely for play.

However, the research — involving eight groups of 32 children aged 8 to 12 — suggested that as they headed toward their teens, they became increasingly anxious online.

By the time they started secondary school — at age 11 — children were already far more aware of their image online and felt under huge pressure to ensure their posts were popular, the report found.

However, they still did not know how to cope with mean-spirited jokes, or the sense of incompetence they might feel if they compared themselves to celebrities (名人) or more brilliant friends online. The report said they also faced pressure to respond to messages at all hours of the day — especially at secondary school when more youngsters have mobile phones.

The Children’s Commissioner said schools and parents must now do more to prepare children for the emotional minefield (雷区) they faced online. And she said social media companies must also “take more responsibility”.

They should either monitor their websites better so that children do not sign up too early, or they should adjust their websites to the needs of younger users.

Javed Khan, of children’s charity Barnardo’s, said: “It’s vital that new compulsory age-appropriate relationship and sex education lessons in England should help equip children to deal with the growing demands of social media.

“It’s also hugely important for parents to know which apps their children are using.”

3 . Who cares if people think wrongly that the Internet has had more important influences than the washing machine? Why does it matter that people are more impressed by the most recent changes?

It would not matter if these misjudgments were just a matter of people’s opinions. However, they have real impacts, as they result in misguided use of scarce resources.

The fascination with the ICT(Information and Communication Technology) revolution, represented by the Internet, has made some rich countries wrongly conclude that making things is so “yesterday” that they should try to live on ideas. This belief in “post-industrial society” has led those countries to neglect their manufacturing sector (制造业) with negative consequences for their economies.

Even more worryingly, the fascination with the Internet by people in rich countries has moved the international community to worry about the “digital divide” between the rich countries and the poor countries. This has led companies and individuals to donate money to developing countries to buy computer equipment and Internet facilities. The question, however, is whether this is what the developing countries need the most. Perhaps giving money for those less fashionable things such as digging wells, extending electricity networks and making more affordable washing machines would have improved people’s lives more than giving every child a laptop computer or setting up Internet centres in rural villages, I am not saying that those things are necessarily more important, but many donators have rushed into fancy programmes without carefully assessing the relative long-term costs and benefits of alternative uses of their money.

In yet another example, a fascination with the new has led people to believe that the recent changes in the technologies of communications and transportation are so revolutionary that now we live in a “borderless world”. As a result, in the last twenty years or so, many people have come to believe that whatever change is happening today is the result of great technological progress, going against which will be like trying to turn the clock back. Believing in such a world, many governments have put an end to some of the very necessary regulations on cross-border flows of capital, labour and goods, with poor results.

Understanding technological trends is very important for correctly designing economic policies, both at the national and the international levels, and for making the right career choices at the individual level. However, our fascination with the latest, and our under valuation of what has already become common, can, and has, led us in all sorts of wrong directions.

6 . “Regrets, I’ve had a few. But then again, too few to mention,” Frank Sinatra chanted in his 1969 hit “My Way”. The song’s idea is attractive: that anyone can just declare what’s done is done and move on. Some take the declaration a step further and claim they have no regrets at all. Whether a boast or an actual attitude, “no regrets” suggests that life can and should be lived without looking through the rear-view mirror.

Easier said than done, though. In 2020, author Daniel H. Pink launched the World Regret Survey, the largest ever survey on the topic. With his research team, Pink asked more than 15,000 people in 105 countries, “How often do you look back on your life and wish you had done things differently?” 82% said regret is at least an occasional part of their life; roughly 21% said they feel regret “all the time.” Only 1% said they never feel regret.

If you are of the “no regrets” type, you might think that all this regret is a recipe for unhappiness. But that isn’t the case. True, being overwhelmed(不知所措) by regret is indeed bad for you. But going to the other extreme may be even worse. To rid yourself of regrets doesn’t free you from shame or sorrow; it leads you to make the same mistakes again and again. To truly get over our guilt requires that we put regret in its proper place.

As uncomfortable as it is, regret is an amazing cognitive(认知的)achievement. If today your relationship with your partner has worsened, your regret might mentally take you back to last year. You would remember your being mean and sensitive, and then imagine yourself showing more patience, being kind instead of hurtful at key moments. Then you would fast-forward to today and see how your relationship could be progressing instead of languishing.

But regret doesn’t have to be left unmanaged. The trick is to acknowledge it and use it for learning and improvement. You can be honest with yourself about what went wrong and use that knowledge to enjoy better relationships in the future.

7 . We live in a world of countless reminders, and constant push notifications (通知). Every service seems to be competing for our attention all the time. As it turns out, all this distraction may come at a massive cost, but you don’t even realize it.

The findings from new research at Ohio State University were published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. Dozens of participants were given a simple-sounding task. Look at a screen of four colored squares. One will be outlined in white-pay attention to that one. After these squares flash on the screen for a mere tenth of a second, pick the color that you remember from a color wheel.

Despite the rapid speed of such work, the human brain excels (擅长) at this task. “People are quite good at this, surprisingly good!” says Julie Golumb, associate professor of psychology at Ohio State University.

They got quite good at it, to a point. Researchers threw a wrench by introducing an intentional distractor. Of the four squares, one would be outlined in white, but then another — the distractor — would be surrounded in white dots. Despite being instructed to ignore the distractor, subjects just couldn’t help it. Most of the time, they still recalled the color. But about20% to 30% of the time, they actually reported the distractor color as the correct one, unaware of the error.

As Golumb emphasizes, findings like these are a big deal. We’ve long known balancing too many tasks can slow down our thinking. But the fact that it can literally recolor our memories should give us pause, because there’s not a fundamental difference between colored squares and real versus fake news headlines on social media．

“If you’re trying to pay attention to multiple things, you’re not going to be as good at if it were one at a time,” she says. “We’ve known for a long-time multitasking might slow you down, but our research shows, it’s not just you might be slowed down; it might affect what you’re perceiving in the moment.”

Last August, Joe and Mary Mahoney began looking at colleges for their 17-year-old daughter, Maureen. With a checklist of criteria in hand, the Dallas family looked around the country visiting half a dozen schools. They sought a university that offered the teenager’s intended major, one located near a large city, and a campus where their daughter would be safe.

“The safety issue is a big one,” says Joe Mahoney, who quickly discovered he wasn’t alone in his worries. On campus tours other parents voiced similar concerns, and the same question was always asked: what about crime? But when college officials always gave the same answer- “That’s not a problem here,” --Mahoney began to feel uneasy.

“No crime whatsoever?” comments Mahoney today. “I just don’t buy it. ” Nor should he: in 1999 the U.S. Department of education had reports of nearly 400,000 serious crimes on or around our campuses. “Parents need to understand that times have changed since they went to college,” says David Nichols, author of Creating a Safe Campus. “Campus crime mirrors the rest of the nation."

But getting accurate information isn’t easy. Colleges must report crime statistics by law, but some hold back for fear of bad publicity, leaving the honest ones looking dangerous. “The truth may not always be serious,” warms S. Daniel Carter of Security on Campus, Inc., the nation’s leading campus safety watchdog group.