2022 Year in Review

The good, the bad, and the wiggly

Did you enjoy reading Techno Sapiens this year? If so, please consider sharing this newsletter with a friend. Thanks for your support!

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Happy holidays, techno sapiens!

It’s that time of year again: when we look back on what we accomplished, reflect on the ways we’ve grown and changed, and, of course, turn to social media to judge our peers’ music preferences.

That’s right. It’s Spotify Wrapped season.

Each year, Spotify takes all the data they’ve collected on us over the past year and packages it into a short video with insights into our listening habits. We, in turn, take this information and share it to social media, providing a nice litmus test for our friends’ social status.

Some—the cool ones—have spent 5,000 minutes listening to indie folk bands you’ve never heard of. Their top song this year was by a solo female funk guitarist who (they’ll caption their post) they also saw live, and she was amazing. Others—these are grown adults, remember—were in the top 0.01% of worldwide Justin Bieber listeners this year, or played some viral TikTok hit on repeat non-ironically.

Anyway, want to know what happened on my Spotify Wrapped?

You couldn’t stop listening to Hot Potato. 

I’m ready for 2023.

Techno Sapiens 2022 Wrapped

And so, without further ado, let’s talk about our year here at Techno Sapiens.

Your most liked post

The post with the most likes this year was How to discipline kids effectively, a deep dive on evidence-based discipline for toddlers to teens. In it, you’ll also find a brief history of behaviorism in psychology, and stories from a chaotic parenting clinic I worked in as a graduate student therapist. And I quote:

There was also—how shall I put this?—total chaos. There were kids stripping down naked. Kids scaling the cinder block walls. Kids peeing on floors, turning off lights, knocking over tables, and—in one instance—gleefully running out the front door of the building and beelining for a nearby park. A child once pulled so hard on my shirt that it ripped. Another picked their nose and stuffed the offending finger into a fellow therapist’s mouth. In a fit of anger, a child once looked at me, dead-eyed, and spat out “You smell like cashews.”

Your most shared post

The post with the most shares (tied for first) this year was Screen time for toddlers, my interview with Dr. Cara Goodwin from Parenting Translator. Lots of great, research-backed info in here. For example: 

The research suggests that the quality [of screen time] really does matter more than the quantity…[In a randomized controlled trial] they encouraged parents to choose shows with more prosocial messages, which means messages encouraging children to be kind (what we’d think of as a good takeaway message from a show) and more educationally-based. Some examples they gave in the paper of these shows were Sesame Street, Dora the Explorer, and Super WHY! The research found that when parents were encouraged to change the content that their kids watched—even though they were watching for the same amount of time—the kids showed improved social skills and fewer behavioral problems.

Your most opened email

The post Should I be on my phone near my kid? was one of your all-time favorites. In addition to tying for first place in “most shares,” it was the most viewed and had the highest email open rate (83%, compared to the average of about 65%). It’s got it all: an in-depth look at the research, musings on parent guilt, and—most importantly—videos of adorable babies. 

Parenting can be hard, and when our phones—with their promises of entertainment, work productivity, and conversation with other adults—are just a few inches away, it’s hard to resist the temptation. So, should we feel bad about using our phones around our kids?...Does it lead to negative outcomes? Should we feel guilty about it? I began this investigation—born out of both professional and personal interest—secretly hoping to find full exoneration. No negative effects! No more guilt! [Our kids’] Chubby, grabby fingers are a sign of burgeoning genius! (Or something). Instead, as we always do, I found something more complicated.

Your most commented-on post

You all had a lot of thoughts (as did I) on Can TikTok diagnose your anxiety?, which provides an overview of psychology’s Barnum Effect, plus thoughts on mental health TikTok. 

On social media, the Barnum effect is the bread and butter of shareable content. How do you take a video directed simultaneously at hundreds of thousands of people, and make it feel as though it applies specifically to each of them? Universal truths, packaged as individual experiences…The desire to know ourselves, to label ourselves, is fundamental to who we are. This is especially true for young people, whose identities are still largely in flux. The allure of a “symptom” that seems to fit us so perfectly, to capture our experience so well, is strong—no matter how vague or universally true that “symptom” may be. 

Your most clicked link

There are a lot of links in Techno Sapiens posts. Mostly academic studies, journal articles, the occasional news story or Wikipedia page, you know. But by far the most clicked link that has ever been embedded in a Techno Sapiens post was (drum roll) this photo of Justin Bieber in a blue hat.

For context: it was linked in a footnote of the post My child’s asleep. Why am I looking at photos of him?. I wrote that when my child was born, I sent a photo of him wearing a hospital-issue blue hat to my brother, and my brother responded (accurately) with the Bieber photo. Techno Sapiens! We are Beliebers! (Maybe even in the top 0.01% of listeners?)

See you next year

A total of 55 posts and roughly 150,000 words later, we’ve come to the end of 2022. Thanks for inviting me into your inbox every week, techno sapiens. 

See you in 2023.