New: Joe Rogan and Grammy Award-winning rapper LL Cool J go off on streamer culture and say that young people raised on the internet are becoming awkward in real life: LL COOL J: “If you’ve been living on the internet and then you get in real life you’re awkward. You can’t interact with people.” ROGAN: “A lot of these young streamer kids look at that as an avenue for life where you’re not creating anything really. You’re not becoming better at anything really. There’s no art.” CONTEXT: LL’s “instant validation” point may be the most interesting part of the entire conversation. Because online social approval is not metaphorical. Platforms literally convert it into numbers: likes views followers shares comments And adolescents appear to be unusually sensitive to that feedback. Researchers analyzing more than 1.6 million Instagram posts from 16,613 users found that adolescents were more sensitive to social feedback than adults. In a separate experiment, teenagers’ moods were affected more strongly when the number of likes they received suddenly dropped. Brain-imaging experiments have found something similar. When young people see posts receiving lots of likes, regions involved in reward processing become more active and participants themselves become more likely to endorse posts that already appear popular. Real life does not have a visible approval counter. You can’t refresh a conversation until somebody likes you. You can’t edit the awkward sentence you just said. You can’t block every person who disagrees with you. And most importantly, another human being is not an algorithm optimized to keep you engaged. There’s also experimental evidence that the amount of life happening through a phone can matter. In a randomized 2025 study, researchers blocked mobile internet on participants’ smartphones for two weeks while still allowing calls and texts. The result: mental health improved, subjective well-being improved, and objectively measured sustained attention improved. 91% of participants improved on at least one of those outcomes. And one of the mechanisms was especially relevant to LL’s argument: when people lost constant mobile internet access, they spent more time socializing face-to-face, exercising, sleeping and being outside. That doesn’t prove phones make people socially incompetent. But it shows something extremely simple: time online is also time that cannot be spent doing something else. And social ability is partly a skill. You get better at reading faces, handling silence, resolving disagreements, telling when a joke didn’t land and recovering from embarrassment by actually doing those things. The loneliness data are interesting too. A 2026 meta-analysis covering 81,344 adolescents and young adults found that problematic social-media use had a moderate association with greater loneliness. Raw time spent on social media had a much smaller relationship. That distinction matters. The problem may not simply be “internet = bad.” It may be the kind of relationship somebody develops with it. And there’s a useful counterpoint to Rogan and LL’s argument: social media does not universally destroy social ability. A separate 2026 meta-analysis involving more than 10,000 adolescents actually found a tiny positive association between social-media use and overall empathy. The researchers concluded that online interaction can strengthen connection for some young people and harm it for others depending on how the platforms are being used and who is using them.